She did dry up. Her breasts shrank and the memory of Lincoln remained as small as his wet, brown body had been, just a collection of gestures—the way he looked as if he was kissing someone in his sleep, how he sucked in his bottom lip, let it out, and in again, breathing through a single gill—her body as well as her mind was empty.

She knows it was Lincoln on the corner. It would be just her luck to give birth to a son who looks exactly like his dead father. His ghost had taken the only form available to it.

She doesn’t think she could stand a reunion. What would he say? What would she? The feelings they both have are so predictable. His anger. Her guilt. Their sadness. She knows what happened, had seen the shovel sledge into Lester’s face, had caught the look of subsiding rage, disbelief, and panic on Simon’s. She relinquished him to the police who were gentle, but who carried an air of judgment within their dismay.

Lincoln would want to know why. Simon was sad, ashamed, ruined, but Lincoln would want to know why Vera had taken the next step and given him up. What the connection was.

It made sense to her at the time and when it no longer seemed like the right thing, the only thing, to do, he was already two, then four years old, then six, nine, and it was too late. It was too late from the beginning, and no explanation could ever take the place of those years. It would weigh in like feathers against lead. She would have nothing to say to Lincoln, nothing to offer.

She would have wanted to say, I just did. It just happened. That, too, would have been less than enough, so she is glad that Lincoln didn’t step beyond the corner, that all she got was a glimpse, the whorl of his jacket in the city air like a disappearing bird.

She opens the door, her face and hands chilled, her feet cramped and sore from being spooned into her pumps and left there all day to rise like dough. There is no mail. The apartment is cold, and she kicks off her shoes and gets into bed.