“I’m taking you to get ice cream for lunch,” Brenda told Blaine. “At the pharmacy.” This was the ace up her sleeve, and she was dismayed to have to throw it so early, but . . .

“I don’t want ice cream for lunch,” Blaine said. He started to cry. “I want to stay with Mommy.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Vicki said. “Can we just get inside, please? Blaine? Wil you help Mommy out here and come with me inside?”

Blaine shook his head. Strains of “Für Elise” floated up from Brenda’s purse. Her cel phone.

“That’s probably Ted,” Vicki said.

Brenda checked the display, thinking, Yes, it’s probably Ted, but hoping it was Walsh. The display said, Delaney, Brian. Brenda groaned. “Shit,”

she said. “My lawyer.” She shoved the phone back into her purse and, fueled by her anger at the cal , barked at Blaine, “Let’s go. Right now.”

Reluctantly, Blaine climbed into Brenda’s arms. She gasped; he weighed a ton.

“I want to stay with Mommy,” he said.

If only the university officials could see me now, Brenda thought as they walked through the sliding doors into the bright chil of the hospital. They would have mercy on me. Anyone would.

They slogged toward the admitting desk, where a busty young woman waited for them. She had blond hair held in a very sloppy bun with what looked like crazy straws, streaky blusher on her cheekbones, and breasts that were shoved up and out so far it looked like she was offering them up on a platter. Didi, her name tag said.

“Victoria Stowe,” Vicki said. “I’m here for a port instal ation.”

“Righty-o,” Didi said. She had long painted fingernails with rhinestones embedded in them. Brenda wanted to whisk the girl home and give her a makeover. Pretty girl, bad decisions. Didi slid some forms across the desk to Vicki. “Fil these out, insurance information here, signature here, initials here and here. Sign this waiver, very important.” She smiled. She had a lovely smile. “It’s so you can’t sue us if you die.”

Brenda took a long, deep drink of the girl’s cleavage. Could she buy the girl some tact?

“I’m not going to die,” Vicki said.

“Oh, God, no,” Didi said. “I was only kidding.”

In the waiting area, they found a row of chairs in front of a TV. Sesame Street was on, and Porter became entranced.

“Go,” Brenda said. “Get it over with. Go now while we’re calm.” Blaine emptied a tub of Lincoln Logs onto the polished floor.

“I can’t,” Vicki said, sitting down. “I have al these forms to fil out.” As she said this, the forms slid off her lap and fanned out al over the floor.

Suddenly, a nurse appeared. “Victoria Stowe?”

Vicki bent over, scrambling to pick up the forms. “I’m not ready. Were these in any special order?”

“Bring them along,” the nurse said. “You can fil them out upstairs.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Didi cal ed out. “Go now, or you’l back everything up.”

Vicki remained in her seat. She looked at Brenda. “Listen, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“What?” Brenda said. Vicki’s tone of voice made her nervous. Brenda traveled back twenty-five years: Brenda was five years old, Vicki was six and a half, the two of them were playing on the beach on a cloudy day in matching strawberry-print bikinis and yel ow hooded sweatshirts. There was a bolt of lightning, then the loudest crack of thunder Brenda had heard either before or since. Vicki grabbed her hand as the rain started to fal .

Come on. We have to run.

Until the obvious differences between them emerged, they had been raised as twins. Now, Brenda felt a fear as strong as Vicki’s own. My sister!

Fifteen years ago, when Brenda had spent her study hal s as a library aide and Vicki was student council president, who would have guessed that Vicki would be the one to get cancer? It didn’t make any sense. It should be me, Brenda thought.

“Mom?” Blaine said. He knocked over his log cabin running to her.

“If you can be strong and go with that nurse, I wil take care of things here,” Brenda said. “The kids wil be safe. They’l be fine.”

“I can’t go,” Vicki said. Her eyes fil ed with tears. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

“Victoria Stowe?” the nurse said.

“They need you in pre-op,” Didi said. “Otherwise, I swear, things wil get backed up and I wil get blamed.”

“Go,” Brenda said. “We’l be fine.”

“I want to stay with Mom,” Blaine said.

Vicki sniffled and kissed him. “You stay here. Be good for Auntie Brenda.” She stood up and crossed the room stiffly, like a robot.

“Vick?” Brenda said. “What did you want to ask me?”

“Later,” Vicki said, and she disappeared down the hal .

An hour passed with Brenda feeling like a broken record. How many times had she suggested they leave—to go to Children’s Beach, to get ice cream at the pharmacy?

“With sprinkles,” she said. “Please, Blaine? We’l come back and get Mom in a little while.”

“No,” Blaine said. “I want to stay here until she comes back.”

Porter was crying—he’d been crying for twenty minutes, and nothing Brenda did made him stop. She tried the bottle, but he wouldn’t take it; he spiteful y clamped his mouth shut, and formula ran al over his chin and the front of his shirt. His face was red and scrunched, tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes; he threw back his head and wailed. Brenda plopped him down on the floor, put an orange plastic goril a in front of him, and hunted through Vicki’s bag for the goddamned pacifier. Porter shrieked and threw the goril a in anger.

Brenda pul ed out a box of Q-tips, two diapers, a package of wipes, a Baggie of Cheerios crushed into dust, a set of plastic keys, two Chap Sticks, a box of crayons, a sippy cup of what smel ed like sour juice, and a paperback cal ed When Life Becomes Precious. Vicki could go on Let’s Make a Deal with what she had in her bag, and yet there was no pacifier. Brenda checked the side pocket—the bottle was in there, and aha!

Under the bottle, squashed at the very bottom of the pocket and covered with lint and sand, was the pacifier.

“I found it!” she said. She brandished the pacifier for the girl behind the desk, Didi, as if to say, Here is the answer to all my problems! Brenda stuck the pacifier in Porter’s mouth and he quieted. Ahhhhh. Brenda sighed. The room was peaceful once again. But not a minute later, Porter threw the pacifier across the room and started with fresh tears.

“Blaine?” Brenda said. “Can we please go? Your brother . . .”

“There’s a soda machine at the end of the hal ,” Didi said.

Brenda stared at her. Soda machine? She had two tiny children here. Did the girl think her problems could be solved with a can of Coke?

“We’re not al owed to have soda,” Blaine said.

Didi stared. “Maybe you could use a walk.”

The girl wanted to get rid of them. And could Brenda blame her, real y?

“We could use a walk,” Brenda said. “Let’s go.”

She carried Porter, who was whimpering, down the polished corridor. Cottage Hospital, she thought. The kind of place where they fixed up Jack and Jil after they fel down the hil . Nothing bad happened here. Vicki was somewhere in the cottage hospital having her port instal ed. For chemotherapy. For cancer.

It should be me, Brenda thought. I don’t have kids. I don’t have anybody.

Before she got the teaching job, Brenda had never seen Champion University, except in photos on the Internet. She had taken a virtual tour like a prospective student and checked out the neo-classical buildings, the geometric lawns, the plaza where students sunbathed and played Frisbee. It looked, while not bucolic, at least sufficiently oasis-like, a real col ege campus in the melee of Manhattan. But at the start of second semester, in January, the blocks of Champion University were gray and businesslike. This only served to make the English Department, with its Persian rugs and grandfather clocks, its first-edition Henry James in a glass museum case, seem more inviting. Mrs. Pencaldron, the department’s supremely capable and officious administrative assistant, had rushed to make Brenda a cappuccino, something she did for professors currently in her favor.

Welcome back, Dr. Lyndon. How was your break? Here is your class list and the syllabus. I had them copied for you.

Brenda reviewed the syl abus. They would start by reading Fleming Trainor, and then they would compare and contrast The Innocent Impostor with the works of contemporary authors: Lorrie Moore, Richard Russo, Anne Lamott, Rick Moody, Adam Haslett, Antonya Nelson, Andre Dubus.

The reading list was so delicious, Brenda wanted to eat it with a knife and fork. There’s a wait list for your class, Mrs. Pencaldron said. Thirty-three people long. In the fall, Dr. Atela wants to add another section. Does she? Brenda had said. The department chair, Suzanne Atela, was only five feet tal , but she was exotic and formidable. She was a native of the Bahamas and had cocoa-butter skin without a single line of age, although Brenda knew her to be sixty-two years old, the mother of four, the grandmother of fourteen. She had published copiously on the literature of the Beat generation, and there were rumors she had slept with one of the minor players, a cousin of Ginsburg’s, which seemed fantastical to Brenda, but who knew what the woman was like when she took off her harlequin glasses and unpinned her hair? Her husband was a handsome Indian man; Brenda had never met him, though she’d seen a photograph of him wearing a tuxedo, on Suzanne Atela’s desk. Suzanne Atela was formidable only because she held Brenda’s future, and that of every other untenured professor in the department, in her tiny, delicate hands.

Brenda surveyed her class list. Upon initial inspection, it looked as though she had struck gold. It looked like she had gotten a class of only women. This was too good to be true! Brenda started amending the reading list in her mind—with a class of only women, they could attack Fleming Trainor and the problem of identity with a gender slant. Just as Brenda started scribbling down the titles of some real y incendiary feminist texts, her eyes hit on the last name on the list: Walsh, John. Sophomore.

Mrs. Pencaldron had tapped on Brenda’s office door. “There’s been a change, Dr. Lyndon,” she said. “You’l be teaching your seminar in the Barrington Room.”

Brenda grinned stupidly even as she crumpled her list of incendiary feminist texts and threw it away. First the cappuccino, then a mention of teaching two sections next year, and now the Barrington Room, which was the crown jewel of the department. It was used for special occasions—

department meetings, faculty luncheons—and Suzanne Atela taught her graduate students in that room. It had a long, polished Queen Anne table and an original Jackson Pol ock hanging on the wal .

“The Barrington Room?” Brenda had said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Pencaldron said. “Fol ow me.”

They made their way down the hushed hal way to the end, where the door, dark and paneled, loomed with importance.

“Now,” Mrs. Pencaldron said, “I’m required to go over the rules. No drinks on the table—no cans, no bottles, no coffee cups. The room must be opened and locked by you and you must never leave the students in the room alone with the painting. Capiche? ”

“Capiche, ” Brenda said.

Mrs. Pencaldron gave Brenda a long, unwavering look. “I mean it. That painting was bequeathed to the department by Whitmore Barrington and it is worth a lot of money. So, for that matter, is the table.”

“Gotcha,” Brenda said. “No drinks.”

“None whatsoever,” Mrs. Pencaldron said. “Now, let me give you the security code.”

After Brenda had practiced locking and unlocking the door and setting and disarming the alarm with a long, complicated security code, Mrs.

Pencaldron left Brenda to her own devices.

“I hope you realize, Dr. Lyndon, what a privilege it is to teach in that room,” she said as she walked away.

Brenda pitched her cappuccino cup into the trash, then organized her papers at the head of the Queen Anne table and took a second to consider the painting. El en Lyndon was a great appreciator of art, and she had passed this appreciation on to her daughters with museum trips that started as soon as Vicki and Brenda were out of diapers. But real y, Brenda thought. Real y, really—wasn’t the Pol ock just a mess of splattered paint?