Free Swimming Across the Hudson by Joshua Henkin Page A

miles away, but when he goes to the bathroom he does the same.”
    â€œSo what?”
    â€œTwo flushes. Tell me that’s a coincidence.” Her blouse hung open at her neck; freckles dotted her skin, brown and dense. “I gave birth to you. You can’t change that.”
    â€œI’m not trying to.” I didn’t know what she wanted from me. To acknowledge that without her I wouldn’t be alive?
    She rested her hands on the table. Her knee brushed against mine. I flinched.
    â€œWill you tell me about my birth father?” I asked.
    â€œHe was my high school boyfriend. I haven’t seen him in more than thirty years.”
    â€œWhat’s his name?”
    â€œWhat difference does it make?”
    We were quiet now. We had run out of things to say. How was that possible? We had whole lives to reconstruct. But an hour had passed, and already I didn’t know what else to talk about.
    Susan got up and walked to the register. She stood at the door, a shimmering figure in the early-afternoon light.
    When she came back, she was holding a rose. “For you,” she said. She stuck out her hand. The flower’s head was pink and bent; its petals were hunched like someone in prayer.
    Hesitantly, I reached out to take it. “Thank you.”
    For a moment she stood there gripping the stem, her fingers firmly wrapped around mine. For a moment I let her hold my hand.

    Â 
    W e stood outside the restaurant, watching students walk past. We didn’t know what to do. It had been a date. In a way it felt like a one-night stand. Inside, it had been as though no one else were with us; the other patrons had receded. But now, amid the cars and the wave of bookbags, we saw each other in the harsh light. There was a world staring back at us. Perhaps that was why we didn’t make plans to see each other again. Maybe we just panicked.
    I reached out to shake Susan’s hand. “It was good to meet you.”
    â€œIt was good to meet you too.”
    We walked in opposite directions. When I turned around a few seconds later, I wasn’t able to find her.
    There were so many questions I’d forgotten to ask her. How much longer would she be here? Was she staying at a hotel, or had she rented an apartment? I hadn’t even gotten her phone number. She’d offered to go out for Ethiopian food the next week, so the odds were good that I’d see her again. But I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to continue a relationship like this, Susan wishing to spend time with me and me resisting, all the while hoping she’d continue to call.
    I was exhausted when I got home. “I’m drained,” I told Jenny. “It feels as if I did a thousand push-ups.”
    â€œWhat was she like?”
    â€œShe was a lot of different things.” But I couldn’t come up witheven one way to describe her. The whole lunch was a haze; I had no idea who she was.
    I showed Jenny the photograph of us.
    She gasped.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œShe looks so young.”
    â€œShe’s only sixteen years older than I am. When my mother was her age I was still in high school.”
    â€œShe’s pretty,” Jenny said.
    â€œYou think so?”
    â€œVery.”
    I supposed she was. It hadn’t occurred to me to think of her as pretty or not pretty. She had component parts: green eyes, wide face, dark skin, straight nose; she was this, and I was that. But the whole of her, the full image, escaped me even now as I stared at her photograph.
    â€œDo you think I look like her?”
    â€œNot really,” Jenny said. “You’re pretty too, but you look different.”
    I was disappointed to hear Jenny say this. I’d been hoping she’d see something I hadn’t noticed.
    â€œDid you like her?” she asked.
    â€œMostly it felt like she was real. That’s the hardest thing—giving up your fantasies. I used to think my birth mother was an Arabian princess