by Susan St. Aubin
(10/06/04)

Monica's latest boyfriend thinks she lives alone. He has no idea there's someone living in her closet, not a roommate, really, but a woman Monica thinks of as a fellow sufferer on the road of life. "Chandra," Monica whispers, feeling the syllables slide off her tongue. Surely nobody's parents could come up with such a name, but Chandra says hers did.

"It's Sanskrit, for daughter higher than the moon and stars," she says in the bored tones of someone who has been repeating this information all her life, but Monica is still impressed.

"I love the way it sounds like Sandra, but not so ordinary," she says.

The first time Monica saw Chandra was through the peephole on her front door, a view that pushed Chandra's beautiful face forward, curls framing her head like a dark halo. Monica had no idea who this bell-ringer was, so she opened the door cautiously, leaving the chain hooked. It was like looking into a mirror that reflected an image of what she wanted to be -- a slender girl wearing nothing but a silky tank top and matching jogging shorts, her hair pulled on top of her head in a scrunchy, bouncing on her toes to cool down from her run.

"Hi," she said breathlessly. "You're Monica, right? You don't know me, but a mutual friend told me where you live. We have a lot of the same connections in D.C. I'm Chandra."

Monica took the chain off and opened the door a bit wider. Of course she knew that name from the newspapers, from televison, from radio, and knew the hell of having everyone know all about what you once thought was your private life.

Chandra stopped moving and pulled the scrunchy off her head, shaking out her curls.

"I read you'd been missing for three weeks, but you don't look like you spent all that time running from Washington to New York," Monica said.

"Of course not. I've been traveling, staying with people I meet along the way. I'm no long-distance marathon runner, but since I'm running away, I thought I'd actually run the last couple of blocks."

"I'm starting a new life here, too," said Monica, pushing on the door. "I'm letting D.C. go. That's something I've learned in therapy. I'm sure I don't know whoever it is who told you where I am."

Chandra put out her hand to hold the door open. "I met your guy Bill once," she said. "We've got more in common than you think."

Caught off guard, Monica relaxed her hold on the door enough to let Chandra into her living room, where all the windows were open to the sun.

"You didn't..." she began, but Chandra immediately laughed and shook her head.

"I have my own man, I don't need yours." Chandra blinked, as though used to darker rooms.

In the bright light, Monica could see that her well-made-up eyes were slightly red around the rims, with white cover-up no doubt hiding dark circles underneath. Monica knew the signs.

"So, Gary told you to take a hike?" she asked.

"No, I just took off. Obviously. I'd had enough." She sank to the couch and held her head in her hands while she sobbed. Monica didn't need to hear the story; she knew it by heart from her own life.

Chandra needed a place to hide, some place where even her best friends wouldn't find her, so Monica gave up her closet, the one the size of a small room that was in fact being used as a baby's bedroom when she'd first looked at the apartment. There was a smaller closet in her bedroom across the hall so it was no trouble to make room for Chandra by removing coats, and boxes of stuff she hadn't unpacked yet. She even bought a futon, something she'd been meaning to get for guests, and curtains for the small window. She took out the clothes bars, except for one so Chandra could hang a few things, and put in a four-drawer dresser and an extra bedside table she had. Until the room was ready, Chandra slept on Monica's couch; Monica let no one in, telling even her boyfriend that she'd gone to Miami for a couple of weeks.

"So where's your luggage?" asked Monica when the room was done.

With a dismissive wave of her hand, Chandra answered, "I left everything behind except these keys." She threw her key ring on the coffee table with a clank. "The last thing I wanted to keep," she said. "I'm not going back. I don't need any of that old stuff."

Lying on the futon in her new room, Chandra begins to spill her secrets, most of which are common knowledge by now, but Monica notices how Chandra avoids watching the news or reading the papers, and knows how rude it would be to tell her that everyone's already heard what she's telling. Monica lies beside her, like girls do at a slumber party.

"He shaved his whole body," says Chandra, clutching a pink-flowered pillow she carried in from Monica's couch. "We had this ritual before sex -- we'd have a bath together and shave each other all over. He even shaved my crotch, and I shaved his. He had a thing about hair, hated it anywhere but on his head. He'd had hair transplants and I used to tease him that he should use his pubic hair there, and his underarm hair, but he really didn't think that was funny. Actually, he didn't think much of anything was funny.

"You know, all that smooth skin, it was like making love to a snake." Chandra shudders. "I should have known. Especially after he talked me into getting a Brazilian Bikini Wax where they even do your pubes and your butt, yanking every last hair so it won't grow back for months. The only really nasty thing he ever said to me was that Jews are just too hairy down there. But even then he was apologetic, like it was his fault."

Monica sighs. "Yeah, both of us should have known, especially when they pretended to be so nice. Excessive politeness is always a bad sign."

"Right. That's why I came to you. Who else would understand? I mean, everyone knows what you went through with..."

"Yeah, but I'm so over him now." Monica takes a deep, meditative breath. "There was a time I thought -- well, you know what I thought -- that the big creep would leave his wife, quit his job, abdicate just for love of me. Me!" She laughs, but Chandra, who isn't ready to laugh yet, can only manage a weak smile when she whispers, "My guy still might, if I tell him."

"Tell him what?" Monica is caught short.

"That I'm pregnant with his child," Chandra whispers.

"No!" says Monica. "Now you're really trapped."

"Don't say that!" shouts Chandra.

Monica shushes her because someone might hear and call the police: she's still supposed to be on vacation in Miami.

"I'm happy," Chandra says with a shiver as she cradles Monica's pillow in her arms. "I'm so happy, but you're the only one I can tell. I was going to tell my aunt, but she can't keep her mouth shut. I mean, I love her, she's like my best friend, but I couldn't let her tell my parents. They might want me to have an abortion, so I have to wait until it's born. I can't kill his child. If I can't have him, I want his baby!"

"Don't be stupid," says Monica. "What are you going to do with it?"

Chandra sits up, shaking her silky curls. "I always told him I wanted a child, I wanted us to be together as a family, but he said he already had a family and wasn't interested in starting another one."

Monica puts an arm around Chandra's slender shoulders. "I guess both our guys already had what we wanted -- real lives, with homes and kids. We were just like a love drive-by for them. They shot us though the heart, and sped off. The big creep and the little creep, that's what they are."

"What's left for us, then?" Chandra pounds the pillow with balled fists, raising a cloud of dust. Because of the hours she spent decorating the closet, Monica hasn't kept up with the housework.

Life in Monica's closet isn't as cramped as you'd think. It's spacious, with a window that frames a view of the lights of the city, but Chandra only opens the curtains at night so she doesn't know what it looks like during the day. There's an overhead light, which is too bright, so Monica has had a wall lamp installed, with a soft pink bulb. The bathroom is next to the closet. Chandra is free to roam the apartment on weekdays when Monica is off working. Chandra isn't sure what she does, but Monica says she's self-supporting, which she encourages Chandra to become when this is over. Monica's into something with fashion, designing and selling purses or something, but Chandra doesn't pay much attention because she's focused now on what grows inside her.

On nights when Monica sleeps alone, Chandra doesn't have to hide, so she wanders around the apartment thinking of her man. He hasn't lived with his wife for years because his work keeps him in Washington, where she was until she lost her internship and couldn't find another job, and what did such a powerful member of congress do about that? She doesn't want to go there. It was different with Monica and Bill -- he lived with his wife and worked behind the scenes to find jobs for Monica, even if they were jobs she didn't want. Chandra looks behind her own scene and finds nothing but dangling, empty strings. She's been cut free. The play is over. Time to move on. She moves around the apartment, running her hands over her still-flat belly. She wonders what's inside -- a real baby, or something as horribly smooth as a snake, ready to devour her from within.

"I don't see how you do it," says Monica over a breakfast of low-fat yoghurt with strawberry jam on cornflakes. "I could eat nothing and never be as skinny as you. I'd kill for your body."

Chandra thinks she'd kill for Monica's breasts, that cleavage, that sensual mouth chewing the cornflakes. Every move she makes is sexy. She's glad her man never met Monica. She runs a hand through her curls, feeling their spring and bounce. Her hair, at least, is better than Monica's, which looks frizzy and bushy in the morning before she washes it, taming it with half a bottle of cream rinse until it's slick and smooth.

"What are you?" asks Monica. "Three months? Is there really room for a baby in there?"

Chandra helps herself to a bowl of cornflakes.

"You should see a doctor," says Monica.

"I did," Chandra replies, "and everything's okay."

"You need regular visits," Monica tells her. "My Dad's a physician, so I know these things.

"So's my father," says Chandra, a catch in her voice. "I know how to take care of myself.

"Is he an ob-gyn?"

"No, an oncologist."

"No kidding -- mine too. Doctors of death. What do they know about birth? To them, everything's cancer."

"That's not true!" exclaims Chandra. "My dad cures people. Cancer doesn't have to be fatal."

"Life doesn't have to be fatal," Monica answers, "but it usually is. Listen, my boyfriend knows this guy who's an ob-gyn, an older guy, very discreet. He used to do abortions back when they were totally illegal. I mean, even if you don't want an abortion, you can trust that guy not to say a word, whatever you decide to do."

"No, no one must know about this," says Chandra.

"So, what about the doctor you already saw? He knows, doesn't he?"

Chandra looks down at her cornflakes.

"Ha! You never even saw one, did you? Look, I'll ask Mike for this guy's number. I won't say you're here, I won't tell him anything, except that it's not for me, of course."

Mike is just one of Monica's boyfriends, the one she calls "the current one." She's trying to diversify, as well as train herself away from older, married men. She recommends her program to Chandra, but Chandra, peeking out of a crack in the closet door into Monica's open bedroom door, is not impressed.

Mike, an obsessive tennis player with a preference for night games in the heat of summer, usually arrives at Monica's apartment around eleven, dripping with sweat, his thick blond hair held off his forehead by a blue bandana. When Monica opens the front door, she shrieks and giggles for reasons Chandra can't see, then wrestles him down the hall and into the shower, where things become strangely quiet, except for the sound of running water. Once Chandra went into the bathroom and saw through the glass shower door that Monica was on her knees while Mike stood, his raised arms gripping the shower head.

Mike doesn't notice much -- not the extra glass on Monica's sink, not the extra bottles of shampoo and cream rinse on the bathroom windowsill or the second razor on the side of the tub, a green one next to Monica's pink. Chandra wonders if they ever shave each other in there. She misses the shaving ritual she once thought was so weird, thinking about it whenever she shaves her legs. She had Monica buy her a green razor because Gary's was black, and she wants to be similar, yet different. She's letting her pubic hair grow back, and is surprised at how smooth it is after the wax job.

With her closet door open a crack, she has a clear view of Monica's bed, but mostly what she sees is Monica's ass as she bends over the supine Mike, who just lies there groaning. That seems to be all they do. No wonder Monica is so dismissive of him in the morning, as she thoughtfully spoons cornflakes past her swollen lips.

"I think guys aren't worth the trouble," she says. "I'd rather just earn my own money, and take care of myself for sex."

Taking care of herself in any sense is a strange concept for Chandra, who wants above all to be wanted. What good are your own fingers if they don't love you? What good is the vibrator you buy, like buying time with a prostitute? What good, for that matter, is peddling purses for a living? Chandra is ambitious, not so much for money as for pride. She wants to be more than someone's wife. Her internship in D. C. was supposed to be the beginning of her career as a lawyer, then a judge, perhaps all the way to the Supreme Court, with her man supporting her goals along with his own.

Monica has plans, too. One hot Saturday afternoon in August, while they lie on Monica's bed to catch a breeze from her open window, she says, "I have a design concept -- a vibrating purse. Listen, it's obvious: you hold your purse on your lap, right? In restaurants, on buses and planes. You have everything you need inside this bag, but also, you have satisfaction whenever you want."

"What kind of satisfaction is that?" Chandra giggles uneasily. "A purse instead of a man?"

"Listen," says Monica. "A vibrator may break down, but it'll never break your heart. It won't make comments about your body, or refuse to leave its wife for you, or make you have an abortion, or even make you need an abortion. It'll never get you in the news, and you won't have to fix it breakfast. Let me introduce you to one of my favorites."

She reaches under her bed and pulls out a long rod with a soft rubber ball stuck to one end.

"What do you do with that thing?" Chandra squeals.

Monica laughs. "No, it doesn't go inside. God, you're so penile." She places the end with the soft ball between Chandra's thighs and presses the switch on the shaft.

Chandra sucks in her breath. "Oh," she says. "Oh! Turn it off."

But Monica follows her as she twists away. "Oh, please," says Chandra, pushing the vibrator away with her hands while her hips and belly still thrust against it. "I can't take it!" She's breathing like she was the day she ran up to Monica's door. "I don't think I want to do this now," she says, glaring at Monica.

"That's okay," Monica answers. "But you can borrow this any time you want. I keep it under my bed. You can try the other ones I have there, too."

Bob the fireman is another one of Monica's boyfriends, but he's married so he's not part of the program. Chandra watches through the cracked closet door while Bob carries Monica into the bedroom. Sometimes he even wears his red fireman's hat, while Monica cries, "Ooooh -- save me!" Bob carries her like she weighs nothing at all. Chandra is impressed by the muscles rippling under his thin white cotton t-shirt. He always closes the bedroom door, but Chandra can hear the buzz of the vibrator, and Monica's low-pitched growls of pleasure.

"Politicians suck," Monica says the next morning, her eyes half closed. "Actually, they don't suck, which is more often the problem. Except for..." Her eyes seem focused on something beyond the apartment walls. "They're basically all afraid of losing -- their wives, their families, their jobs, the next election. I only date real people now. Single, if possible." She sighs, as she always does after a night with Bob. "Of course, the best are already married."

Chandra nods. "I was tired of little boys by the time I was fifteen. That's when I started smoking. I'd light up a cigarette, and all the little boys would go away. Then I started meeting men."

"Yeah, I used to smoke, but I never inhaled. It was just for show. Do you think our mothers did any better than us, marrying doctors like they were supposed to? Mine ended up divorcing him."

"My dad's a saint," Chandra answers, her eyes filling with tears.

"But marriage to a saint -- what's that like? Saints can drive you crazy. My mother accused my father of verbal assault, which wasn't exactly true, but still -- saints have their ways."

"I wish I could go home," Chandra whispers.

"But Daddy's a saint, so you can't. A saint would never understand what happened to you. At least our guys weren't angels. Politics teaches you to be a realist. All your illusions about helping anyone get stripped away pretty fast, until nothing's possible but your own pleasure." Monica chews her cornflakes.

"No, our moms did well for themselves, marrying respected professional men like oncologists," says Chandra. "Where'd we go wrong, getting mixed up in politics? What are we, the world's only Jewish shiksas? Marrying the President? A congressman? What kind of ambition is that? And you, with the tennis players, and firemen. Is that any better?"

"It's a start," answers Monica.

At night they often lie on Chandra's futon in the closet, talking. Chandra feels more comfortable here than she does on Monica's bed with the vibrator lurking underneath, but suddenly one evening Monica drops something furry and pulsating just below her rising belly.

"Oh!" says Chandra in surprise as she struggles to sit up, but Monica pushes her shoulders down.

"Relax," she croons. "I want to try this out."

Chandra puts her hands down and strokes a fur even slicker than her own.

"It's fake mink," Monica explains. "No cute little animals were snuffed to make this baby."

Chandra opens the flap of the fur purse, feels inside, finds the paunch for the batteries, finds the switch, and turns it off and on again, up and down. When she starts to feel a glow in her cunt she gets nervous and turns it off.

Monica strokes the purse, then slowly slips her fingers under Chandra's shirt and up the slope of her belly, which rises like a mountain growing out of her. Monica is amazed to think that a child floats in there. She runs her fingers up the fine line of fuzz rising from Chandra's pubic hair to her belly button, following the curve of the dark line that has formed in the skin beneath. Chandra is letting that hair grow back, though she still shaves her legs and underarms.

"Your creep doesn't know what he's missing," Monica murmurs. "You're beautiful." Monica's fingers edge up over Chandra's belly button, which is starting to stick out now like a cork in a wine bottle; she tenderly fingers it, then slides down the smooth slope of her side and back to her pubic mound.

"I'm not into this," says Chandra.

"Neither am I," says Monica, getting her fingers into Chandra's moist cunt, then sliding them across her clit. More than anything else, she feels curious.

"Why does everything feel fuller now?" Chandra murmurs, as though this were some sort of medical examination. "My whole crotch feels swollen all the time, like I'm always turned on, even when I'm not. And I'm really not right now."

Monica notices she sounds a bit breathless. She sits up and spreads Chandra's legs, to have a better look at her cunt. Beneath its furry covering are lips so purple they almost seem dark brown, and what she can see of the interior looks richer and heavier than her own light pink. She stares, half expecting to see a tiny baby slide out. With her hands on Chandra's swollen sides, she feels a fluttering, as though doves were trapped in there.

"It's moving," Chandra explains. "It seems to like this."

Monica puts her tongue to the tip of Chandra's purple clit, experimentally, because she's really not into this, either, and is surprised to feel an almost electric jolt shoot through her, down to her own little clit, which throbs even though no one is touching it. Chandra lies still, not breathing, which worries Monica.

"Keep breathing for the baby!" Monica orders, running her fingers up and down Chandra's inner thighs while circling her clit with her tongue. Chandra shivers and inhales deeply, her belly surging.

Earthquake, thinks Monica as her own insides tremble. We're just two California girls sharing a good old earthquake. Her hand massages Chandra's stomach until all is quiet in there.

Monica wants to turn around, thinking, Why not? Her mouth is as good as any of those guys I fool around with -- but Chandra's belly is in the way, and Chandra definitely isn't going to be into sucking her anyway, so she puts her fingers to her own cunt, sliding its moisture over her clit, and breathes in unison with Chandra. Monica thinks of the big creep, as she always does at such moments, and knows that Chandra, her eyes closed tight, is thinking of her little creep, who would only suck her after every hair was waxed off. Monica licks Chandra's soft hair just to prove she's better than him, and feels Chandra's belly contract at that moment, feels the flickering throbs of Chandra's clit with her tongue as she comes.

Monica lies with her ear to Chandra's belly to see if she can hear splashing inside as the baby swims, but all is quiet. Her fingers keep sliding around her own clit until she comes, too, but Chandra, snoring lightly now, doesn't notice. After awhile Monica sleeps, dreaming that she hears the baby hum inside Chandra like a small whale.

Chandra takes the vitamins Monica brings her, on the advice of her father, who is at least a doctor even if he's not an obstetrician, and watches her diet. When Monica flies out to California to visit her father, to prove she's not the one who's pregnant, Chandra stays alone in the apartment. She's developed the habits of a person in hiding during a war, sleeping all day and walking at night. Some nights she even goes outside and walks the streets around the apartment building, relieved that the few people she passes don't notice her, even though her face is sometimes on the front page of all the newspapers. Where is she? the headlines ask. Even Chandra isn't sure she knows anymore. The air in the city at night is clear and moist, as though the weight of darkness has pushed all the oil and dust down into the pavement.

Inside, she stands in Monica's closet looking out the tiny window at New York's skyline glittering and flickering through the dark. She's not afraid because she doesn't think she'll need Mike's doctor friend, whom Monica keeps pushing her to see. Everything seems simple: the baby will just come out and be there, unlike its father.

Monica brings old textbooks back from her father's library, books on obstetrics and labor and delivery from a course he took in medical school, and she studies them intently. Even if Chandra isn't interested, Monica wants to be prepared. Mike's doctor friend knows a midwife whom Monica consults, a woman named Starbright.

"Call me any time," she says. "I'll just come over to talk, to check her over, or deliver the baby. Whatever she wants. Birth is a natural process."

"Thanks," says Monica, but she can't stop worrying.

For Chandra and Monica there is no future: their future is already in the past . Who could do better than having the president lick your twat? Unless it's a congressman. All they have to look forward to is one anticlimax after another.

"I'm really not into this," groans Chandra when Monica crawls onto her futon her first night back from California. Still, she doesn't move as Monica licks her belly, from popped navel in a circle down to her cunt, which smells and even tastes like a fresh oatmeal cookie.

Besides Mike and Bob, Monica has other boyfriends whose names Chandra doesn't even know. One is a skinny guy with a guitar who seems to be giving Monica music lessons in exchange for sex. Monica plucks away like a good student, and sings a song she wrote:

Caught in a love drive-by
spray of bullets in my heart --
Should have been red roses
Oh why did we ever part?

How long can I bleed like this?
Forever and a day.
Try and make me stop --
I'll blow your head away.

The boy applauds. "I love it," he says. "You've got that country sound down. But it's so urban!"

"That's me, city eastern via L.A.," says Monica.

Chandra longs for a cigarette, though she doesn't smoke, especially now -- just one cigarette to make the little boy go away. But Monica takes him into her bedroom, shutting the door so Chandra can't watch.

One night when Chandra looks out her window, things have changed: There's a hole in the lights of the city. Something's missing from the skyline, but she can't remember what. She feels cold, as though something more than summer is coming to an end. When Monica finally comes back, it's noon the next day. Her eyes are swollen and her nose is red.

"Well," she says, her voice husky. "Neither one of us is ever going to be on the news again. We're free. Look." She turns on the television, but Chandra doesn't want to watch. Instead she stays in her closet and looks out her window as smoke rises from the gap in the skyline.

The next morning it's still gray and smoky on the horizon where buildings once stood. Monica leaves early. She does volunteer work now, to help the victims, she says. Bob the fireman is missing and presumed dead. 'His poor family," she says, her voice at the edge of a sob.

The skinny guitar boy hasn't been heard from, either, though possibly, like Chandra, he just decided it was time to disappear. Mike drops by every evening but doesn't stay, and when he leaves, Monica crawls into bed in Chandra's closet, where they lie together, curled around the baby.

"Everything's changed," Monica whispers to Chandra. "We're what's left over. We're safe now, safe," she sings like a lullaby, her lips pressed to Chandra's belly.

Chandra doesn't believe in change, which is why she stays home when Monica goes out to do what she can. Still, Chandra stays up all day now, turning on the television often enough to know that she and Monica and their guys no longer matter.

She cooks dinner for Monica and whomever she might bring home, usually Mike, but often a fireman or two, firemen who aren't Bob, though they knew him and still hope to find him as they search for bodies in the ruins of the collapsed buildings.

"He was there when it happened," says one of them, a guy with dark, curly hair whom Monica watches with eyes that seem to possess as they caress, letting Chandra know that he'll be next in her bed.

Chandra calls herself Sandy now, and no one questions that, or her presence in Monica's apartment. The city is full of refugees. She's cut her hair short and her face is as round as her belly. She's becoming someone else.

Fascinated by the talk of searching for bodies, she bursts into the conversation: "Someday they'll find a body and say it's mine."

Everyone at the table looks at her.

"I am officially missing," she explains. "I might have been in one of those buildings. Or anywhere, in another city. But when they find me, it won't be me they've found, because I'm here."

She puts a protective arm around her belly. She hasn't thought much about the baby for the past few weeks, except when it occasionally kicks her ribs. It's her only family now. She feels removed from her old family in California, the people to whom she'll never return, and distant, too, from the baby's father, whom she thinks of now as its non-father. When she notices the curly-haired fireman looking at her while Monica watches him, she blushes and looks down at the lasagna she's made for their dinner.

Monica is offended. "There are people who really are dead," she says. "You aren't missing, you're right here. You could go home any time."

"Not anymore. I'm not who I was," Chandra/Sandy murmurs to her plate, feeling herself dissolve, feeling she's invisible, even to those beside her, eating the food she's put on Monica's table.

"Hey," says her new fireman friend, running a hand through his thick dark hair. "We all have our reasons for wanting change."

Monica looks away from him, stuffing a chunk of sausage into her mouth.

What will happen? For this evening, Sandy will take the curly-haired fireman into her closet. He's married, he has three kids, he makes love to her rising belly with a sort of worshipful admiration that almost makes her giggle. He says he loves pregnant women. His tongue massages her bellybutton, then finds its way down the slope to her cunt, which he licks as clean as he licked the dinner off his plate. She puts her hands over his furry back while he rubs his hairy legs against her smooth ones.

He worries she won't be able to get up off the futon on the floor, but she shows him how easily it's done, rolling onto her hands and knees, then standing up, panting only a little.

"It's excellent exercise," she tells him. "Pregnant women go to the gym to learn to do this. I've seen them." She lies down again, snuggling her face into the fur of his chest.

Monica, in her bedroom with Mike, has become the voyeur now, paying more attention to the sounds from the closet than to her own. What will become of this new person, Sandy, and her baby? She still worries about them, but senses they won't need her. Like everyone else, she wonders what became of Chandra.

Monica will work as she always has. Volunteer work can turn into a career -- she wouldn't be the first to use the Red Cross as a stepping stone to teaching or law or even politics. She'll be in the news again because she needs to explain herself to protect her future, to show people she's just like them before she disappears for a time. She might be seen occasionally, perhaps in the street with a boyfriend, laughing, licking an ice-cream, her tongue circling around it to catch melted drops of chocolate.

Sandy, on the other hand, will be someone you see out of the corner of your eye, the girl with the baby, the woman playing football with her ten-year-old or driving to work, a woman so much like you that you'll never notice her. The group around the table, complete in itself before dividing into separate bedrooms, or leaving to continue rescuing whoever can still be saved, will be gone by morning. Only Sandy, about to be born, to change into someone she would never have planned to be, will stay a few more days before she leaves to become the woman no one will ever find because she is everywhere.