It was one of those neighborhoods in suburban Ontario where rows of identical townhouses faced four-square on a central park, a nice one, well-outfitted with see-saws and a flying fox and tennis courts for the older kids. A kind of planned community type thing, where mothers stood chatting with babies in slings on their chests while the older kids ran and shouted and climbed on everything. Julia had never once thought she’d live in a place like this, or be a single mother, an American alone in Canada, with a baby in a sling on her chest, but things were what they were and here she was.

She was new and the mothers seemed to form formidable blocs everywhere. They were clustered on the path or by the benches in socially distanced groups. This was several months into the pandemic and people had gotten used to masks, mostly, or stayed outside. When she drew near she could hear them talking pleasantly about sleep training and breastfeeding and night terrors, the usual things. But they looked up at her as she passed with puzzlement or disdain, as if she didn’t belong there at all, even with the right uniform, the jean leggings and the hair in a frazzled-mother ponytail, the baby sleeping with her head turned sweetly, cheek to breastbone. She’d assumed once she became a mother that other mothers would become her easy friends. She’d exchange a secret nod with another woman pushing a stroller, and then she’d follow her to an underground cellar where the clandestine meetings were being held. She thought of motherhood as a ferocious state of inexhaustible energy and devotion. The nights when you were more tired than you had ever been in your life, but still you rose, you fed the baby, you held her steadily in your arms as you stumbled down the stairs. The outrageous things she had learned about how mothers were treated. The way she had become instantly invisible to men on the street, in shops, in a line of people waiting to be let in to the grocery store. She thought that the mothers must be quietly plotting the revolution. She thought all she would have to do was exchange looks with another and be ushered in.

But this had not turned out to be the case. Most days she did a few weary loops of the park, smiling hopefully at each Mom group she passed. The few conversations she had were dispiritingly empty — subtly competitive discussions of sleep training, the best brands of diaper and sippy cup, women announcing that breastfeeding was easy and natural. She smiled along with them, hoping that someone would raise a hand and say, Stop. Isn’t this ridiculous? Aren’t we ridiculous?

She absorbed the talk as long as she could until Hannah started fussing, and then she walked home and it was back to baby care – the bottles and snacks and rocking and shushing until bedtime. Now that Ben had left she could go days without speaking to another person in a normal voice, not the nonsense syllables she crooned to Hannah, la-la-la and boo-boo-boo. At night, exhausted, she mouthed the syllables of proper words, marveling at their strangeness. She picked up the extra doughy skin of her stomach that refused to melt away, pinching until it hurt.

This was untenable and she knew it.

The next Saturday she stood apart with Hannah in her sling and watched the Mom groups chatting on benches. So sure and self-satisfied. She felt a dangerous loathing for them rising, bilious, in her throat. She had to do something soon or risk hating them all.

One group of mothers always seemed to draw her eye. It was made up of a few women in wool peacoats who set fashionable-looking strollers somewhere nearby and then chatted without looking back at the strollers even once. The older children ran to the playground and played and the women chatted on without nervous, darting glances in their direction. One of the women even lit a cigarette from time to time. Julia didn’t smoke but she respected the bold, self-destructive way these women appeared to be living their lives, unchanged from whatever elegant people they were before the arrival of children.

She took a deep breath and walked determinedly close, within the sphere of their conversation. “Hello,” she said. “Do you live near here?”

The dark-haired woman with the straight-cut bangs and crossed legs looked over her sunglasses at her. “Of course we do,” she said. “That’s why we come to this park.”

There was a trace of an accent she couldn’t identify, which only made her seem more intriguing. She laughed nervously. “Right. Well – how old is yours?” This was the first thing parents always said to each other.

“She’s six months,” another woman answered, South Asian and with a beautiful printed muslin wrap holding her baby against her chest. “What do you do? What does your husband do?”

She made herself look straight at them without blinking as she said, “My husband and I are separated. In fact,” and here was her gambit, her risk that the truth was usually more interesting than bland lies, “He left me and the baby and ran off to California with his second cousin.”

No one said anything for a long moment. She watched the eyebrows climb up their smooth blemish-free foreheads. “Well,” said the first woman. “You’re having a time of it, aren’t you?”

Someone pushed out a stroller, making room in the half-circle for her to step closer.

She learned that the woman with the dark bangs and the cigarette was Elif, and she was from Turkey and taught mixed media at the university, and was an artist of some quiet renown in Europe, though this came later that night after some concerted Googling. The other women – Alisha, Darshana, Georgia – were all professionals in their field, new transplants to the suburbs, and dismissive of their new surroundings. They didn’t often welcome new mothers into their little social circle. After a few meetings she learned that Elif was not quite of their number, sitting a ways apart and coming and going in a different rhythm. They sat with their children and strollers in a circle-the-wagons formation most days, listening to her talk.

Elif seemed to have a  general contempt for most mothers, and the frumpy, smiling toothlessness so many of them seemed to acquire. Elif said, “Most women become stupid and uninteresting. It is not always their fault. But I promised myself I would not let myself forget who I was.”

These mothers were different. They talked about politics and philosophy, the cultural divide between America and the rest of the world. “American women love to sacrifice themselves on an altar,” she said coolly. “Their bodies, their lives, their abilities to think adult thoughts and hold adult conversations. But they are the swords they fall upon.”

“It’s the culture that forces them to do that,” Julia protested. She recognized the conversation straying into a kind of self-loathing, a sneering misogyny.

“No one is forcing anything!” Elif sputtered with genuine anger, her cigarette jittering wildly. “They only think this, or this is the story they tell themselves. There is always a choice. All life is a war, a series of tiny battles over your soul. Mothers are not special in this. You either are strong enough to withstand the – what is the saying? – slings and arrows, or you are not.”

She had a European but also a masculine impatience for feelings, for processing things, for trauma. There was no room for these tedious American cliches in her lexicon. Temptation, willpower, postpartum depression; these things meant nothing to her. She was infuriating and absolute and utterly thrilling. Julia found herself thinking about Elif after she had put Hannah down for the night, wondering what she was wearing right then, if she changed into pj pants and a t-shirt for bed or continued wearing her slim silk trousers until late into the night. If she was in her studio painting, or smoking a cigarette out a window somewhere like an elegant alley cat or a femme fatale, beautiful and ripe with sin.

Ben kept calling from California. “I would come,” he said. “I’d help. You know I would. It’s the pandemic. We could have resolved this better, if it weren’t the pandemic.”

Pregnant, they’d moved to this house in the suburbs near Ben’s new job. The plan was for her to resume her master’s program in Sociology once the baby was born. She’d be one of those working student-parents. She imagined bringing her baby on the train to the university, holding her in some kind of sling while she sat in lecture halls. In these pre-partum visions, the baby always slept sweetly and never screamed. She lay beached on the couch in her third trimester, imagining her active mom-life full of wonderful things. And a return to the quiet house at night with the good playground, a safe neighborhood to raise a child.

Then the pandemic hit, and two months later, Ben was sitting in the kitchen in the middle of the night when he should have been getting his meager sleep between feedings, his head in his hands. He spoke tearfully between his hands as he told her he’d thought he could do it, he thought he could forget Franny, stop loving her, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t.

“When all this is over, I want to be there,” he said on the phone. “You know. A presence. In Hannah’s life.”

Julia stayed silent for long periods on these phone calls and let him talk himself through, until the excuses wore themselves thin and frayed and spiraled out into the dark house where she sat with no lights on after Hannah went to sleep.

“I’m not abandoning anyone,” he said. “I know you think that but I’m not. People have joint custody arrangements all the time.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” she said, and he hung up.

She went to the park every day, hoping to see Elif on the bench by the swings. Her heart always rose a little out of its damp cave when she saw her sitting there. The way she nodded her head to Julia, unsmilingly, with no other indication of friendship or welcome. The other women with their hooded expressions, listening mostly as Elif held forth on the latest infuriating discovery she had made about Canadian culture. The false friendliness. The way people said “No problem” instead of “You’re welcome.” The anti-mask protests. The way people smiled to your face and then complained about you behind your back. It was better than America, but not by much. And at least America had that sense of wildness. A willingness to engage in chaos with the chance of something great somewhere in the maelstrom. You would never find that here, Elif insisted. There was this thing Canadians talked about called “tall poppy syndrome.” In a stable, orderly society, anyone who stood out, who was taller and stranger than the rest, was knocked back. The risk of de-stabilization was too great.

Julia was supposed to be re-enrolling in her classes, getting back into the life of a student, but the enrollment deadline for the semester came and went. She told herself she’d enroll next semester. Let Ben’s support payments keep coming through, take the pandemic family support payments the Canadian government was providing, and muddle on.

She thought she understood the imperatives of love. How sometimes it felt like you would die if you could not be together. What she didn’t understand was how it could come suddenly upon her husband, after a lifetime of knowing this distant relation of his and seeing her at family gatherings, playing poker in their bathing suits during hot summer nights at the lake with all the cousins. She didn’t understand how that intimate sloppy family knowledge could translate to romantic love. It was a little horrifying. The only thing that had changed in his life recently was this move to this small town, the birth of his daughter.

She could only see it as a deep-seated cowardice.

She told Elif all this, when it was just the two of them at the park one day before the others arrived. Hannah was sitting in the sandbox and Elif’s baby boy was asleep in his stroller as always, the clean cotton blanket drawn up so Julia couldn’t see him.  “He’s so quiet,” she remarked, which was a form of praise, she had learned, among other mothers, and Elif had scoffed disdainfully, “He is asleep. Are you not quiet when you are asleep?”

Elif listened to the humiliating story without complaint. “It’s interesting, the situation you have,” she agreed. “But this is not a man to be keeping in your life.”

“But for Hannah’s sake. She needs to have time with her father. She deserves that relationship.”

“When she is grown, let her seek him out, if he still has an interest. Probably by then he will have started his own family and she will only be an uncomfortable reminder of his first mistakes.” This was harsh, even for her. She said, her voice a little kinder, “You are not the mistake. But to him, you are his mistake life. The road he tried to take to avoid the thing in him he could not deny. This is not a reflection on you. You should disentangle yourself from that as soon as possible.”

“I can’t. We used to love each other, you know. That wasn’t all fake. I can’t think it was all made up. And when you love someone, you agree to make compromises. You — dig in. Weave your lives together. I can’t forget that.” Julia was horrified to hear a sob at the ragged end of her speech. She gulped and swallowed. Elif looked away, a small kindness.

“You interest me,” Elif said, in her frank voice. “Maybe because you are desperate. Ha, ha.” She was the only person she had ever heard say “ha.”

“I used to be an interesting person,” Julia said. Though she knew it was only half true. She was not the kind of person who would have attracted Elif, even before having a baby. She liked libraries after dark and long novels, found tea more pleasurable to drink than alcohol, watched too much television and enjoyed adult coloring books. She was not the kind of person who would have been found arguing about Kant in a cafe at four in the morning, which was surely the kind of person Elif had been once.

Elif just inclined her head, her long silky blow-dried hair sliding in front of her aristocratic, jutting jaw.

When Elif made these declarations, it seemed so easy to see the world in the hard, female certainties that she possessed. They sat their requisite two meters apart on two benches, their masks down around their chins in the cold breezy air. Soon it would be winter and these outdoor meetups would become harder and harder. They would all have to retreat into their little suburban homes and hunker down for the long winter. What a strange world they were living in that year. She was storing away the experience for Hannah, who would remember none of it. She’d have to tell her, When you were a baby, the entire world was very lonely. In her imaginings of this future date, Hannah was a little girl with a serious face, with tangled wisps of mousy hair and a way of looking down her chin at things. In these imaginings, she always assumed the world was better, and the pandemic was over, a curious footnote of history with an outsized death toll, and she always imagined herself as happy. She didn’t know how she would get to that place, that self. But it was something her own mother had taught her – that given enough time, everyone returned to their baseline, and so she would be happy again, though she couldn’t see how.

“Before the weather gets too cold,” Elif said. “You will come to dinner with us. We will keep all the doors and windows open. Bring Hannah, we will have a sitter and be able to enjoy ourselves like adults.”

It was the only socializing she had considered in months. She had been so good. The danger was limited, all the precautions were being taken.

Elif rose and put on her mask, then walked over and clasped her shoulders. “I will not say those silly things like ‘you deserve a break.’ How do I know what you deserve? What I do know is, you have your own intrigue. You shouldn’t doubt it so much.” She air kissed her on either side of her face, lingering for a moment before walking away. She smelled like caramel, something burnt and sweet.

The weather was warm and Hannah seemed to be enjoying herself, cupping her hands in the sand and letting it fall through her fingers over and over, so she stayed a while longer, soaking up the watery November sun like a cat. Eventually two of the other women, Darshana and Alisha, came by and sat with her. “You missed Elif,” she said.

They nodded. “That’s all right. Sometimes Elif can be a lot,” Alisha said.

“Always with her advice and her declarations. As though she knows everything,” Darshana agreed.

Julia hadn’t known they found Elif irritating. She’d assumed they were a tight bloc as all the other mother groups appeared to be, strong and supportive and impregnable. “Oh, so it’s not just me,” she said, and instantly regretted it, as though she had taken a side against her.

They both laughed. “Always with the prescriptions for our lives,” Darshana said. “She told me to divorce my husband after we scarcely knew each other. It’s easy for her to say. It’s always easy to see the problems in someone else’s marriage. People in glass houses.” She didn’t finish it.

“She has problems? In her marriage?” she hadn’t expected to get such gossip today. She felt a squirming discomfort. But she didn’t turn away or change the subject.

The two women looked at each other, though, and paused, as though they’d said too much. “Of course, everyone has their tragedies,” Alisha said. “It’s always more complicated than you think.”

Darshana pushed on. “It’s difficult to be her friend. You have to be interesting all the time. God forbid if you bore her. There’s no greater sin.”

“If you do interest her, though – then comes the invitation.”

“The invitation? You mean to dinner?”

Again that small look that passed between them. “You’ve been invited,” Alisha said slowly. “Haven’t you?”

“Well – yes.” In Alisha’s mouth, the invitation did not sound like the small, elite prize she had felt it to be.

“Honey-” this was Darshana. “Don’t go. Make an excuse. COVID will do. Say you’re not comfortable.”

“Why?”

“It’s better not to entertain her more than you have to. We listen to her stories, we sit with her in the park. You have to show a little kindness. But that’s enough.”

She wanted to ask more. But another woman came up to them, with a wailing child and a request for some bandaids or wipes, other mothers were always willing to help each other out if there was a genuine need, and in the flurry of assisting the child, they never got back to why. Alisha and Darshana were shortly on their way, with cool warning smiles.

*

For the next few days, Hannah kept up a steady, nasal whine during her waking hours. When she worked her finger into the wet mouth, Julia could feel the hard little deposit of the erupting tooth underneath the gum bed, working its way toward the surface. She gave Hannah cool rags and teething toys to chew on, but nothing seemed to stop the persistent high-pitched whine, never quite escalating into a cry. Julia went to sleep with her ears ringing, her thoughts wrapped in gauze. When she began fantasizing about giving Hannah Nyquil until she slept the day away, she knew she had to divert her thoughts somewhere else.

And naturally, as smooth as a silk sleeve, Elif slipped into her mind. Elif. Smoking on the little matching balcony of her townhouse, letting her baby play somewhere in the house. Elif, effortlessly tossing together olives and rice and grape leaves into an exquisite meal. Elif, fucking her husband, hiking some sort of black silk nightie over her hips, doing it standing up, against a wall, her face bored and ferocious.

She had never fantasized about a woman before. Never felt that easy, open curiosity some of her girlfriends did when they were younger and gave each other hickies in the dark room of their high school’s photo lab. Her attraction to men had come late, too. She’d been too busy living the life of the mind through most of college, happily self-contained and up in her imagination, dreaming the worlds of the books she was reading. She wasn’t sure when she looked up from her book and realized that men existed, that their bodies, the firm way they scooped an arm around your waist or shepherded you through an open door, the scratch of their stubble, the warm animal smell of them, was attractive to her. Only a small handful of bookish, arrogant men, and then there was Ben, who was kind and made her laugh, who ducked his head bashfully and hooked his large hands under her armpits and lifted her slowly in the air until her toes just brushed the ground, like she was hovering—and then he was gone.

Now, it was only Elif she thought about when folding laundry or shushing Hannah to sleep. The knife-edge cut of her nose, the silky black sheets of hair. The sophisticated, expensive-looking clothes. Her absolute refusal to indulge or mirror other women the way so many American women did. She suspected Elif’s interest in her was fleeting, and only because of the isolated lives they were leading these days. But in these lean times, it seemed like enough. A small meal, the promise of something more fulfilling, more exciting than the life she was in the process of losing.

When Elif called her, she was in the middle of changing a diaper. She tapped the speaker phone with a knuckle, her hands busy wrestling Hannah’s little cotton pants back on her legs. The unknown number she was thinking would be Ben, now that they’d finally severed their cell phone contract.

“This is Julia?”

“Yes – who’s this?”

“This is Elif.” The voice is surprised. Surprised that she would not be instantly recognized.

“Elif! Of course!” She didn’t even know how Elif had gotten her number. One of the other mothers, perhaps.

“I am calling about the dinner. The dinner with myself and my husband. You will come?”

“Oh – gosh.” The advice from the other mothers flicked through her mind. Something ominous in their smiling words of caution. But perhaps this was just the way some women were, scolding you for having too much fun, for any indulgence that didn’t put your children first. She’d heard women calling themselves “bad” for getting a coffee on their own, for not doing their children’s homework for them, for forgetting whether the playdate was on Saturday or Sunday. An irritation with motherhood, with all of its bullshit, rose in her and crested.

“Yes,” she said. “I’d love to.”

*

She dressed Hannah in her best little baby outfit, the one with the frilly dress and the white tights, even though it took another fifteen minutes to wrestle her into the tights and left her with no time to dress herself. Ultimately she grabbed a stretchy black dress, the only thing she could still fit into in her wardrobe, and hustled out the door, forgetting extra diapers or Hannah’s favorite rattle, anything that a mother should remember.

The house was down a side alley in the neighborhood complex, looking more secluded in its cul-de-sac than any other house. It stood alone at the end of its road, tall and narrow and Victorian, with three floors and a closed-off, peering look to it, with lights on in the ground floor windows and a little one on in the attic. She stood shivering on the stoop for a long time after ringing the doorbell, Hannah momentarily quiet on her hip, looking around her with a docile curiosity. “We’ll only stay if we feel safe,” she whispered into her hair. She meant about the COVID restrictions, but the words seemed to grow in power in the chill air, filling the air like smoke, like her visible breath.

The door opened. Elif stood in the warm halo of light, her hair down and floating around her shoulders, dressed in a flowing satin garment of some kind, like a patterned kimono or robe, looking impossibly chic. “Ah, here you are,” she said. There was no trace of pleasure or welcome in her voice, but this was to be expected; there never was.

She stepped slightly aside to let Julia pass.

Inside, the living room was filled with ornate-looking pieces: dark African wood furniture and Persian or Middle Eastern art on the walls, partial mosaics with splashes of Moroccan blue tile. From her searches online, she knew the tiled paintings with heat-distressed blue paint were Elif’s. A man was standing by the credenza, admiring the black and white photographs as if they weren’t his own. “I’m the husband,” he said, coming forward with his hand out too early and for too long, navigating the entire living room before they could make contact. “I’m Peter. They say touching is okay. It’s the air you’ve got to worry about.”

Peter was tall and broad-shouldered, with a large beakish nose and pale cheeks pinched with red, as though he’d just come in from the cold. He looked, and sounded, unmistakably Canadian.

“Did you meet here in Canada, then?” she asked.

“What makes you say that?” he asked, and guffawed. He was the first person she had ever heard actually guffaw. He patted Elif’s thin shoulder beside him, and the gesture seemed clumsy. Elif tolerated it with a quiet disdain. “Come, Julia. You can put Hannah in the nursery with the babysitter.”

She led her to a tall winding staircase and Julia followed her up it, huffing a little as they passed the second floor with no signs of stopping. “So you met your husband here?” she asked. “When did you-”

“Yes, we met here,” Elif said, not turning around. “I was a student. He was the teacher.”

“The-”

“A teacher. He was a teacher.”

Elif did not pause in her steady climb. “You know the story. Naive girl meets mature older man with good brain. The first thinker she’s ever met. Peter is very good to me,” she added, turning on the stair. “There are things that annoy me about this life, but I try to keep him happy. The happiness of the man of the house matters for everyone’s happiness. Once you decide you will stay, this becomes your job, your mission.” She half-smiled, then pushed open a bedroom door. “Maria, here is the baby to watch,” she said.

A slim girl wearing a mask rose from a stool in a cluttered playroom, pocketing her phone. “Hello,” she said. “Hello, hello.” She had a bright, cheerful voice, and after a moment of her pulling down her mask to stick out her tongue, Hannah smiled. Julia handed her over.

“Maria is an excellent sitter,” Elif said. “You can rest easy. We will bring down the monitor for the room so you can check on her.”

“Let me just tell Maria-” there was so much to tell her, about Hannah’s preferences and moods, the way she liked to be held. With no babysitter during a pandemic, she hadn’t tried to explain all the things she knew to a strange caregiver before. “She likes–”

But Elif shook her head, looking displeased. “American mothers,” she said. “Always thinking about the baby, even when she is someone else’s responsibility. You have your own life to live as a woman. You remember that, you are a woman, right? Tonight, you will do things my way. You will forget your child for an hour or two.”

She blushed. What Elif was asking was impossible. But other women did it all the time, and their children were fine, and they were better women for it. “Okay. I’ll try.”

On the stairs she asked, “Where’s your baby? What is his name again? I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten.”

“He is asleep,” Elif said briefly. “Now come, we will have dinner.” She reached out and stroked Hannah’s cheek. “It’s nice, having another baby in the house. That is why I asked you to bring her.”

Hannah gazed at her calmly. Then Elif leaned close and rubbed her cheek on Hannah’s. Julia didn’t blame her; there was no end to how often she could touch her, press her cheek to her own, drink in her powdery baby smell. She felt strangely breathless. This first softening of Elif, an acknowledgment of tenderness. Perhaps this was only a side of herself she showed her friends.

They descended the stairs, and it was true; with each step, with Hannah’s voice laughing at something behind her but growing more faint, she began to feel lighter, as though she were descending in time, going back to the person she was before Hannah was born. Returning to that shy laughing girl. Returning to that place she was in before she met Ben, when all men were not closed doors but seemed to represent some open sense of intrigue and possibility. Peter was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up at them, and he had a glass of wine that he placed in her hand. “All right then?” he said. “The grown-up hour.”

They spoke lightly at first, about the neighborhood and how they all were liking it, and the usual commiserations about the pandemic and the social isolation, avoiding any talk of childcare. She could see the way they skirted around it, and she tried to follow their example. This was what truly sophisticated couples did, she imagined; they didn’t bring their children into adult conversation, there was little of interest in talking about nipple pads and object permanence, all the lingo she’d had to learn on her own. They asked her when she would resume her studies and she waved her hand the way she did whenever it came up in conversation. “Oh, how can I, now?”

Elif was watching her with a crooked little smile on her face. “That is how it starts,” she said. “The drifting away.”

“Drifting away of what?”

“Your self. Your life.”

Then they were somehow on to their love lives, and then, inevitably, Ben. “Tell us about the dog who abandoned you,” Elif demanded. Peter had been listening with warm attention all night, coming and going with the bottle of wine, a board of cheeses. She realized she had no sense of how much she had drunk, with him topping up her glass to its belly button each time it crept lower. She felt flushed and warm, but steady, nothing whirling the way being drunk had felt the few times in her life before. She took another sip. “I like nice men,” she said slowly. “I like sweetness. I always have. I thought sweetness was the way men these days could be gallant. Sweetness is far more important to me than being dashing or mysterious. Maybe you can coast by on sweetness. You can get away with so much.”

“The bar is low,” Elif declared. “With some women, a smile goes so far. A little kindness. Are you one of those girls who is like a puppy, grateful for every scrap tossed to you?”

It sounded harsh, but she was used to Elif’s directness by now. “Maybe,” she said. Her own mother had warned her to store up what you needed inside yourself, because you couldn’t depend on others to give you what you wanted. But she’d wanted, she’d asked things of Ben, made demands. Look where that gets you.

“Men are always seeking,” Elif said. “They have no sense of what happiness is, what enough means. They want more and more and more. There is no stopping their appetite.” She drained her glass, ignoring her husband smiling beside her. She was so willing to speak her mind, to make these bold unforgiving declarations about the world, no matter who was listening.

Julia listened, spinning her wine glass around and around. “After Hannah was born, he was texting that woman a week later,” she said. “A week.”

“He is a pig,” Elif said simply. “Rooting around in the earth for the next mushroom.”

Then she did something very strange. She looked at her husband, who had been nodding and smiling along with the conversation. “She is interesting, yes?” she asked him, as though Julia weren’t there at all. “She is suitable?”

He nodded. “Yes. She’ll do.”

She drained her glass, slowly, in a silence that Julia felt no desire to fill. Her husband rose and said, “I’ll just clear these plates.” He went to the kitchen, leaving Elif and Julia in the dimly lit dining room, the harsh lights from the overheard chandelier unkind on their faces.

“What did you mean–” Julia began to ask, but Elif interrupted. “Peter, you like him?” she asked.

“He seems very nice.”

She shook her head, spinning her wine glass around and around on its stem. “Nice is not enough. You have to start expecting more than niceness. What I mean to say is, does he attract you?”

“What?”

She was lighting a cigarette, one of her unbranded kinds that smelled of cloves and something else, something sweet. Even with all the windows open and the cold air sweeping in, the whole house smelled of it, she realized now. She had thought it was some kind of perfume but it must have been Elif’s cigarettes stinking up the place. “He likes you,” she said. “He would fuck you. You are lonely. It would be good for you. We could make it a regular thing, if it goes well. Come now, be my friend.” She purred the last word, sending her voice spiraling around her, twining with the smoke in the air.

Julia waited for Elif to smirk, for the pretense or the dark joke to drop. But Elif’s face was humorless, her eyes on her hands as she twisted them in the light, examining her nails, restlessly taking her cigarette out of her mouth and putting it back. She looked like she was uneasy in her body, trying hard not to be in it at that moment, the way Julia had learned to shuffle free of herself during pelvic exams or as a girl, when she stood against the wall at dances and watched boys’ eyes slide over her. “It is not a trick,” she said. “It is an arrangement my husband and I have. He is allowed, as long as I find them for him.”

Her mouth was dry. “Find what?”

“Suitable women.”

“I’m sorry, I–”

“Blah, blah, blah.” Elif waved a hand, dispelling Julia’s stammerings like smoke. “You are not interesting when you fall back into your politeness,” she said. “This Protestant whatever. You have a choice, it is very simple. No one is forcing you. My husband is upstairs, in the bedroom on the second floor. He is waiting for you.”

She took a breath and looked around her. She had drunk too much wine, her tolerance after months of breastfeeding was gone. The room was hazy with Elif’s smoke. She sensed Elif would not say anything more. She got up and had to hold on to the chair for balance for a moment. Then she headed for the stairs, climbing slowly.

She stopped on the second floor landing and looked awhile. There was a door to a bedroom here, and a hallway lost in darkness. She listened for the sound of a man’s breath. Let herself remember the way it felt not to be alone, full of promise, bright and desired. Let the thought hang there for a while, lingering like water droplets in the air.

She went on to the third floor and opened the playroom door. Hannah was sleeping in a pack and play on the floor, her thumb in her mouth, while the girl scrolled through her phone.

 “Where does the other baby sleep?” she asked.

The girl looked up at her. “Other baby?”

“Oh,” Julia said. “Of course.”

She picked up Hannah, trying not to jostle her too roughly as she got her little coat on and hurried down the stairs. From the landing, she could hear Elif had turned some music on: loud and determined eighties ballads, someone wailing, heavy on drums. She caught sight of her drifting from the living room to the kitchen, cigarette in one trailing hand. The front door was flung wide open and the music was spilling out into the quiet suburban street, decorous and wild.

Julia didn’t stop to say goodbye. She pressed Hannah to her chest and slipped through the door, and turned the knob slowly to shut it, so it wouldn’t click too loudly on her way out.

*

In the days that followed, she didn’t go to the park, even though Hannah became restless and cranky without fresh air, and started wailing by six pm. She didn’t answer the phone when Ben called. You have to start expecting more than niceness.

She watched nothing television, mostly, or sat curled in a chair by Hannah’s playpen, watching her roll and reach for things, her face a study in determination. She wanted to become so badly, it was clear. There was so much learning to do, and among that learning there would be painful surprises.

She wanted to know what had happened to the baby who was lost, but mostly she wanted to know why the other women hadn’t said anything, why they continued to smile their secret smiles when Elif showed up on the park bench with her stroller. There were so many mysteries about what people chose to do. Perhaps it was a kindness. What business was it of theirs, anyway, the way people chose to grieve. She wondered if Elif bore some responsibility for the loss, or thought she did, and this bargain with her husband was her penance.

Ultimately she knew Hannah needed more than this – this mother curled into her own wonderings like a nautilus growing back into its shell. She put her in the carrier and headed out for a walk, all wrapped up against the cold. Instead of walking straight to the park, with its paved walking trails and neat lines of bare winter trees, she went toward the woods. There was a wild patch of ungroomed land near here that had all sorts of warning signs and slash marks through images of bikes and strollers. The path soon shrank into a leaf-covered nothing, and her flat shoes were covered in cold mud. Hannah kept swiveling her head back to look at her, as if asking, Are you sure? But she didn’t stop. She kept walking on into the uncertain wood.