Free Swimming Across the Hudson by Joshua Henkin

in San Francisco want to sell your work. You must be good at that.”
    â€œBut important things.”
    â€œThat’s an important thing.”
    â€œIs your work important to you?”
    â€œSure it is.” I told her I was a schoolteacher.
    She seemed about to say she knew this as well.
    â€œWhat happened after I was born?” I asked.
    â€œI was sad for a long time. I was in eleventh grade when I got pregnant with you, and when I started to show I dropped out of school. You almost had to then. Times were different.”
    â€œAnd afterward? Did you go back?”
    â€œI got my GED. I’d always planned to graduate from college, butthings didn’t work out that way. I spent a year in junior college and a year in secretarial school. Then I met my husband, and we moved to Indiana for his work. He’s a manager at a bank, and he got me a job there. I’ve been able to save some money.”
    She got up, as if she’d seen someone she knew. But then her gaze dropped and she simply stood still. She began to search through her pocketbook. “Ben, I want to have a picture of us.” She removed a Polaroid camera from her pocketbook.
    My school was on the other side of town. That was why I’d met Susan on Telegraph Avenue—so I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. I’m a private person, but it was more than that. It was as if I didn’t want there to be a record; I could pretend that this lunch hadn’t taken place. No one cared about our reunion. Our pictures wouldn’t show up in the National Enquirer . Still, I worried. Meeting my birth mother and not meeting her. This was the story of my life. One foot in and one foot out, never able to commit myself.
    But before I had a chance to object, Susan had approached the man at the next table and asked him to take our picture. We stood behind my seat; Susan had her arm around me. Aside from our handshake, this was the first time we’d touched.
    â€œSmile,” the man said. He pressed the shutter button, and the photograph shot out. He pressed the button again.
    We watched the photographs develop. Susan handed me one and kept the other. I felt tears in my eyes. Seeing that picture of Susan and me, I was overcome by grief for everything I’d lost, for all that hadn’t happened between us.
    I turned away from her and wiped my face.
    When I turned back, she was staring at the photo. “Ben.” Her voice had grown softer. A line of mascara dripped down her cheek. “Do you think we look alike?”
    â€œThe two of us? We have the same color hair.” I grabbed a lock of mine as if to demonstrate, as if I were speaking a foreign language.“Other than that, I don’t think we do.” All my life, I’d imagined that I looked like other people, that I had siblings and parents, carbon copies of myself somewhere on this earth, if only I could find them. I simply didn’t think I looked like Susan. I would have told her if I did.
    â€œWell, I think we do. What about genetics? Don’t you ever wonder how much in life is determined?”
    â€œIn college I wrote a paper about the paradox of free will.”
    â€œI’m not talking about that. We share the same blood.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œHalf your genes come from me.”
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œThank me what?”
    â€œThank you for giving them to me.”
    I wanted more than anything to be patient with her, to treat her without malice or irony. But I wasn’t responding well to her pressure. I wished I lived thousands of years ago, a man in a loincloth roaming the fields who did nothing more complicated than pray for rain.
    â€œThey’ve done these studies of identical twins,” she said. “The babies are separated at birth and raised in different homes, but they grow up to be extremely similar. One twin goes to the bathroom and flushes the toilet twice. The other twin lives hundreds of