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He released a breath that Alice knew meant he was trying to hold his temper. “If you could just walk me through it,” Oliver asked. “Reservations or not, it’s still the middle of one of the coldest winters in who knows. If I’m a freshwater crab swimming in the vicinity of the East Coast, I’ve got to be freezing my balls off.”

“Actually,” Alice answered, “I think those are the blue crabs.”

There wasn’t time to enjoy the right corner of Oliver’s mouth rising, his grudging smirk. Perched in her lap, Doe had become fascinated with the string and fabric of Alice’s mask. Her dimpled mitts grabbed. Alice began the delicate task of distracting her before those elastic bands hurtled, with extra momentum, back into her face. “Okay. Very good, sweetie. That’s right.”

Oliver had been up late, she knew,
entering Lynx into the UNIX,
which could mean entering code, or secretly masturbating, just enjoying some male alone time. Alice didn’t begrudge him. She’d been asleep long before he’d come to bed. It was only when the Blueberry needed formula that Alice had stirred, enough to watch her husband clomp in from his work space. Seeing that she already had a bottle prepared, Oliver had been more than happy to get back to work.

Presently, Alice admired her husband’s perfect nose; she appreciated him having shaven during the night, was impressed by the egg-blue silk scarf he’d chosen, surprised at how well it matched with the deeper blue of his cashmere topcoat. Usually Oliver displayed a willful disregard for his looks. He often wore the swag she got him through his four-day programming benders, unchanged. Alice suspected he actually
enjoyed
fine garments—not so much wearing them, but putting them through the wringer. As if he wanted to show they weren’t so special. Not today. Today, he was immaculate. Groomed and ready to make nice.

Still, his eyes were puffy. He didn’t just seem worn out, or preoccupied in his usual way, enmeshed in some logic loop or technical quandary. This was different. Since hitting this stretch of traffic, he’d avoided any sustained eye contact, and instead had sat hunched over his splayed legs, looking out the near window. Alice knew he was itching to tell her they should’ve taken the FDR instead of going up First. She also knew that he knew that, if he opened his mouth, she’d remind him about Beth calling from Whitman, chirpily informing Oliver the slides had been found, all crises averted.

Oliver checked his watch yet again.

“It’s going to be fine,” Alice said.

From her leather shoulder bag she coaxed an oversize plastic key ring, prompting a high squeak from Doe, who bounced in place and quickly occupied herself with the task of devouring the toy. Each landing of compact weight on Alice’s thighs brought white pain. Alice winced, and followed her husband’s line of sight out the window, for a time gazing at the fugue: a bus stop advertisement featuring a muscled white hip-hop star in sexy briefs; small red neon Hebrew letters blinking from a glatt kosher diner.

“Late or not, we have an appointment. It’s not like they’re going to
refuse
to see me.”

“Oh,
that
?” he answered. “I forgot all about that. I’m still stuck on, if there’s no way crabs are in season, how can that place be having mondo crab nights?”

She could have screamed. What did he expect her to do? She hadn’t found the right nanny yet, and Monday morning was a nuclear waste zone for sitters, and his parents sure weren’t about to hightail it across the country from Bakersfield to help. Which meant there wasn’t any choice but to bring the infant, was there? Since they didn’t have a baby car seat, she’d asked the driver to go slow. Was it her fault he made a beeline for the far right lane, or idled behind each double-parked delivery truck, every fourth dry cleaning van? Yes, blame her because progress up First Avenue no longer seemed the result of an engine, wheels, and unleaded gasoline. Osmosis was more like it. Magnets, maybe.

“My sweet lummox,” Alice said. “The reason Crab Fest is a sensation is
because
nobody can figure out how the restaurant can be getting fresh crabs off the East Coast during the third week of January. They’ve had inspectors, government regulators.
New York
magazine literally staked out the restaurant. One shift of reporters in a van with a telephoto lens focused on the delivery dock. Another crew watching the front entrance through a telescope from a ninth-floor office across the street—”

“
New York
magazine doesn’t have anything better to do?”

“
Nobody
has anything better to do.” She laughed. “It’s turned into this whole
thing.
I’m telling you, every know-it-all in the tristate area wants to partake in these magical mystery crab boils. Apparently people are
crammed
into these long public tables covered in newspapers. All kinds of hoi polloi and celebrities are in with you, cracking shells with their hands and thwapping claws with little hammers. Shards and crab goo flying hither and yon, the only thing anybody’s talking about is whether they’re all being played for fools.”

Oliver’s grunt suggested a grudging curiosity, even bemusement. “I bet they just flew them in from Australia.”

—

Between Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth, the west side of York was nothing but sandstone, limestone, and marble. Remnants of the building’s previous incarnation were apparent: Gothic stained-glass windows, a central cathedral, a rectory spire, parallel statues of the Virgin Mary with her arms out, accepting all in need. Where turrets guarded each building corner, however, the baroque ended, gleaming steel and glass blocking out the dishwater sky.

Alice reminded herself to breathe. So long as she kept breathing, the time would pass, she would get through this. Every day brought more humblings, she told herself. It was up to her to accept them.

She patted the sprouts of hair atop Doe’s skull. The follicles were silky on her fingertips. Pressing lightly, Alice made an effort to absorb each single sensation. Appreciate each stroke. In the puffy pink winter coat Oliver’s mother had bought, the little girl was a living doll. Alice kissed the center point on Doe’s crown. She raised the miniature hood and its pink fringe over the child’s head, and did not rush in passing her girl to Oliver, who was already out of the cab, waiting with the shoulder bag.

On the curb now, reeling from a blast of wind from off the East River, Alice burrowed into her own coat, watched her exhaled breath vanish.
Keep doing the simple things,
she reminded herself
.
She made sure to plant her feet, took steady steps toward the back of the cab, where the driver was lifting the stroller out of the trunk. Alice thanked him, saying, “I can use all the help I can get.” His eyes returned a kindness that shocked her; she wasn’t prepared for such dazzling pity. The wind whistled, truly
foul,
blue tendrils of Alice’s wig swirling into her line of sight. Alice knelt, busying herself with the collapsed metal bars. Two well-placed yanks and the carriage came alive, straightening, its alacrity almost justifying the ridiculous price. Instinct told Alice to grab her daughter back, but Oliver was already setting Doe into the buggy. Watching her husband’s ministrations—at once unskilled and suffused with care—relaxed Alice, a bit. “Settle up with the cabbie,” she said. “I didn’t bring any cash.”

Leaving his answer behind, she commandeered the buggy’s driving position—it was selfish, fine, and she’d need all her energy today. Still, Alice began pushing toward the sliding doors. She was halfway beyond a mulling cluster of doctors on their cigarette breaks. A security guard came out—to offer a wheelchair?

“I just love seeing moms work them baby contraptions,” he said. Hands jerked, kung fu motions. “BAM BAM.”

The foundry stone carved with
SANTA MARIA RECTORY 1896
;
the ornate marble archway with small carved nun; the large letters of modernist font and industrial steel, appearing without any context, spelling out
WALT WHITMAN MEMORIAL
. Marble walls yellowed by age appeared that much more decrepit thanks to institutional lighting. With them came the warmth ubiquitous to certain types of lobbies, large rooms open and busy as the waiting area of a train station. A man and woman were inside the entranceway, guiding a dowager so old as to be mummified, all three visitors searching for the location of a certain bank of elevators. People in scrubs zipped past, carrying their morning bagels and coffees. Near the escalator row, scattered commuters paused long enough to grab one of the morning tabloids from the nearby blind guy, make change from out of his Knicks cap.

Alice noticed, near one of the saggy ferns, the man in light blue jammies—he was expectant, tracking comings and goings from the front entrance. He had no lower jaw. Instead of staring at his deformity, she forced her attention elsewhere, to the nearby gentleman wearing that season’s nattiest three-piece suit, who was pushing a little boy in a wheelchair. The boy’s hair was piecemeal, patchy, almost like Alice’s had been before Oliver had plugged in those shears.

Her grip around the baby carriage handles tightened. Memories assaulted her now, visceral and consuming: the pungent, liquid-plastic odor of surgical gloves; the sensation of ice chips rattling around inside her mouth—a recollection so strong she could almost feel the ice against her teeth. In her mind’s eye she saw the postcard with the ballerina that Oliver had taped onto the wall across from her bed. She remembered feeling so weak that the act of lying in bed was a chore, so weak that keeping her eyes open was itself exhausting, but also staring for what felt like long stretches, centering her thoughts on that gorgeous ballerina, her poise, her strength. Now Alice remembered the middle of the afternoon when she woke from a nap, and her eyes focused, and inside that hospital room in New Hampshire, she saw Tilda, and her mother, and Doe, each of them peaceful and asleep, slouched in a chair or lying on the foldout bed. Alice remembered thinking that she had to watch them sleep, she had to appreciate the sight of these three astounding women, she had to stay in this moment and soak in this experience, because she had no idea how many more times she might have it, or if it would come her way again.

There were other memories: yanking on the plug of her IV tower battery, pushing the tower toward the bathroom and yanking down her mesh hospital underwear; squatting just in time and releasing yet another diarrhea blast into the little plastic hat they kept over the toilet and feeling relief, she’d made it, she wouldn’t be shitting herself this time, and feeling emptied out, too, because nothing was left inside, and she felt herself bleeding from her vagina, and bleeding from her behind, and then, her body unclenched once more, shitting out another burst.

Inconceivable. It was starting up again. She was back in this.

“It’s just a get-to-know-you visit,” Oliver said.

Alice nodded. “We’re just going to get on the same page.”

“No reason to worry about anything except what’s right in front of us.”

Her hand was clutching his. She welled up, swallowed, and said:
“Tu esta mi favorito.”

“Tu esta mi favorito,”
he said.

And in this way, they kept going, following the directions Alice had written in her to-do notebook, muddling through the lobby, their hands together on that stroller, the sick woman in the blue wig, and her dapper, stubble-headed husband, and their baby, too, a small, quiet family, shrinking, moving forward.

Yes, Everything Was Moving Forward

T
HE LIGHT HUE
commonly associated with Creole heritage. Tiny and pretty, dark hair pulled back and away from her face, further highlighting bone structure that was delicate as a bird skeleton’s, placing attention on eyes that were small and brown and entirely empty. She had the faint makings of a mustache. She took in Alice’s wig and smiled in a manner that was either polite or perfunctory. Introducing herself, she asked, boy or girl, and how old Doe was, and the whole time reminded Alice of a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.

Alice had to make sure her hands did not tremble, but she managed to write a legible
Culpepper
in her notepad. Small letters followed:
“intern?”
Without fuss, Miss Culpepper led the family beyond the registration desk, into a short corridor. On the walls were framed, yellowing pictures from bygone eras—wimpled nuns tending to immigrants, beehived nurses aiding the bedridden. An obese woman stood just inside the hallway and was using a rolling chair as her support crutch while she placed manila folders into a filing cabinet.

“Before you can proceed to your appointment,” Miss Culpepper said, her voice high, “I just need to make sure that all your paperwork is in order.” Entering a low-ceilinged cubicle area, she pulled out a chair. The desk surface empty save for a boxy desktop computer (its plastic faded to the color of curdled milk), an opened carton of orange juice, and a series of elaborately framed photos, the same child: smiling in a tutu, smiling with her dollies.

“She has your lovely skin,” Alice said.

Miss Culpepper blinked, a few times, as if figuring out how to respond. Allowing herself another minor grin, she sat, smoothed out the front of her skirt. A few taps at the desktop brought a pair of fresh pages from a printer the size of a minifridge, at rest on the floor behind her. “Review these. If the information on these pages is accurate, the hospital asks you to sign on two individual pages. This first one authorizes us to bill and share the information with your health insurance. Next to the Post-it, please.”

Alice gripped the pen.
Keep doing the simple things.

Miss Culpepper kept typing. A new page arrived. “This form, in case your health insurance doesn’t cover the costs, or refuses payment. You acknowledge responsibility for the outstanding charges.”

“I don’t understand,” Alice said. “Our policy covered most of New Hampshire, my chemo induction. There’s no reason to think this should be different?”