Sarah’s eyes bore down on mine. “Now I’m going to tell you something I didn’t tell you before. I never phoned the references you listed on your résumé. I hired you because you seemed angelic to me. You gave off an aura. I didn’t phone one person on your list. Or, well, I phoned one person, but they weren’t home. I didn’t care what any of them said. I was a snob about you. I trusted my own instincts completely.”
I didn’t know what to tell her. Like everyone, I felt I was a good person. How could I tell her she should have phoned the references? How could I tell her, Why would you place your child in the hands of someone whose references you never checked out?
“I can see that you love Emmie, and I know she loves you. She says your name when she wakes up from naps. You are, sometimes, the first person she asks for. I don’t mean to sound suspicious of your friend, but I don’t want him taking pictures of Emmie. When you go for walks with her, go someplace else, not to his place, not with him.” She put her hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Love is a fever,” she said. “And when you come out of it you’ll discover whether you’ve been lucky or — not.”
I was silent and so was she.
“I am concerned for you just as I would be for anyone,” she added strangely.
I went into what my mother called okey-dokey mode. I grabbed for the midwestern girl’s shielding send-off. “Sounds good,” I said.
I began to find back routes to Reynaldo’s. One did not have to go down the most obvious streets. If I took the alleys, past the flowering bushes and the refuse and recycling bins, I could travel unseen, with Mary-Emma and her kick-ass American stroller bumping along the pebbles and potholes all the way to Reynaldo’s. There we would nuzzle and chat and he would make pepper water or early-morning curry, which I then believed to be Brazilian cuisine, and we would eat. Mary-Emma would play, and the pictures Reynaldo took — for his photography class — he no longer gave me, just showed me, and they were mostly taken from behind her as she studied something in her hands, an ashtray or a clock. She could have been anyone’s child in the world. He would play soccer with her and teach her phrases and songs. He always said “Ciao” when we left, and Mary-Emma had begun to repeat it, and wave. “Ciao, Airnaldo!”
When I brought her back home she was often dozing from the stroller ride and I would take her directly upstairs to the attic nursery, where she promptly woke up. I could hear Sarah on the phone: “… roasted figs, braised wild boar with dried Death’s Door cherries, uh-huh, veal sweetbreads with chestnuts — this is very Sheriff of Nottingham! I mean, it’s springtime. Where is the spring? Where are the new potatoes, asparagus, ramps and fiddleheads, vinaigrettes and roux? How about that lemon sorbet with the chopped basil on top?”
Dementedly, and because Mary-Emma would not take a nap now, I made a clapping song out of “ramps and fiddleheads / vinaigrettes and roux,” and after Sarah got off the phone Mary-Emma and I went downstairs and performed it for her, risking that Sarah might feel mocked, but she didn’t — I hoped.
“Like our song, Mama?” asked Mary-Emma. Sarah seemed both amused and embarrassed, and her laughter contained the slightly hysterical, undulating edge of each.
“Oh, thank you for this, I guess,” she said, and Mary-Emma ran to her and threw her arms around one of her legs, pressed her cheek against her thigh. Sarah petted her head. “I feel like this restaurant is driving me mad!” she said absently. “Someone just accused me of raping the forest floor. Because of the fiddlehead ferns. And because of the veal, one of the waiters is going around the kitchen bleating ‘Mommy, Mommy!’ ”
“Mommy!” Mary-Emma repeated happily, and Sarah smiled.
“It’s sort of funny,” I said, shrugging. “Though sad, too.”
“It’s only once a week that we change the menu — why should it be so hard? And then the absenteeism! of the sous-chef alone — not to mention the waitstaff. I’m going to keep all the messages from my voice mail and make a CD of excuses I get from employees: Can’t come in; I’m coughing blood … and I’m going to play it full volume at the end-of-the-year holiday party.”
“Mama,” said Mary-Emma, cooing — wanting, perhaps, Sarah’s leg to go slack.
Sarah continued to pet Mary-Emma’s head, but at the same time she rolled her own neck around. “When I roll my neck around like this,” she said, sort of smiling and sort of not, “I hear the scariest sorts of crunching sounds.”
“That happens to me,” I said.
“Ach,” said Sarah, with her eyes closed. “Every year we do too much with venison and ground cherries. It’s like stuff you’d scrape off your car.”
Once I brought Mary-Emma back from a walk and found Edward there at home, alone, laughing with someone on the phone. When he hung up, he was still in a good mood. “Papa,” Mary-Emma said mirthlessly, but she lifted her arms and he swooped her up into his.
“How’d your day go?” he said to me rather than to her.
“Fine,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. She began unzipping her own jacket. I walked over to help her take it off since Edward was holding her. This caused us to have to maneuver together.
“Things well with you?” Edward said to me warmly.
“Oh, I think so.”
“Lot on your mind?” I didn’t know where this interest in me was coming from. Did I seem gloomy and preoccupied? Out of reach of his charms?
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s classes, of course.” And lest he think I was complaining that work and school were too difficult in combination, I hastened to add, “Plus, my brother’s thinking of joining the military.”
“Oh.”
“I’m hoping he doesn’t”—this was true—“and it’s been on my mind, I guess.” This last was not strictly so, but it should have been. Why wasn’t it?
“It’ll toughen him up, show him one or two things about the world,” said Edward. “What does not kill him will make him stronger,” he added prosaically, needlepoint Nietzsche.
“Yes, but what if it does kill him?”
And here between us passed a look of pale apprehension, some past, some future, the details of which I couldn’t yet know, but each blasting into the room and meeting there, draining the blood from our faces. Only the voice of Mary-Emma—“Papa! Oag cool!”—returned us to the warm crumbs of the present.
“Nietzschean philosophy doesn’t get its hands dirty with that,” he said, making his way to the freezer. He was suddenly a scientist again. “And neither should you. Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after. But really: Let me tell you something. Don’t be your brother’s keeper. Don’t worry about brothers. Take it from someone who has a sister. Worry about yourself. The brothers? They’re not really worried about you.”
Schoolwork was alternately tedious and mesmerizing. I took the notes my professors wanted me to. In the library, in the margins of my books, I wrote “nature equals disorder.” I wrote “fate versus free will.” I wrote “modernism as argument against the modern.” I listened endlessly to the music from Schindler’s List. Then The Bridge on the River Kwai. Mostly, however, I was alone in my room with Rumi. Murph continued to stay away, although once she sent me an e-mail that described a long fight she had had with her boyfriend and then the kissing and other acts of contrition that had pasted them back together. Another e-mail I got was from my brother. Dear Sis, it began. Only you could perhaps talk me out of this, if you wanted to, but only if you wanted to, because I’m not sensing anyone having any strong desire with regards to my future except myself and it is this: to do something real. I don’t care what part of the world I end up in as long as it isn’t Delton County.