“Uh, Phoebe,” said Lewyn.
“Pretty! What does it mean?”
He looked at her. What did it mean? Who asked a question like that of a stranger? He’d been told that the P of the baby’s name was for our grandfather Philip Hirsch, Johanna’s father, who’d collapsed the previous winter at our cousin’s wrestling match in New Jersey and never regained consciousness, but Lewyn hadn’t known what it meant then, and he didn’t know what it meant now.
“No clue,” he said.
The woman stared at him. After a moment she said, “Well, she’s certainly cute.”
She returned to her desk and her computer.
“Ba,” said Phoebe, his sister, from the plastic chair, but she hadn’t woken herself up, not quite. His sister’s fat lips and little chin were working against an imaginary bottle. “Nipple,” the word came to him, bringing with it another involuntary wave of nausea. She was still zipped into her padded down garment, the hood over most of her face, her fists only half protruding from the once-white cuffs of its sleeves. He wondered for the first time whether our mother was breastfeeding this baby, then he realized she couldn’t be. Had she breastfed him and his siblings, though? He’d never thought about that before, and he wished he weren’t thinking about it now, since the idea of it, of them, sharing her, maybe simultaneously two at a time, posed a violent threat to what remained of his composure. What if it woke up and wanted food? What if it wanted to look at him, and he was forced to look back?
“Mr. Oppenheimer?”
The receptionist was holding the mouthpiece of her headset away from her very red mouth.
“Would you go into the conference room, please? It’s the fourth door on the left. Mr. Goldman will meet you there.”
Lewyn gaped at her. “I … well…” he managed. She only smiled, rictus red.
“Please, they’re waiting for you.”
“But, what about her?”
The receptionist eyed him. “I’m afraid I can’t watch her here.”
The infant chose this moment to wake. She took a look around the unfamiliar room, and then at her barely less familiar brother, and prepared to wail.
“Fine,” he said, grabbing the handle grip. The baby arched up to get a better look at him. If they truly wished for a screaming infant in the “conference room,” then that was what they’d get. Ahead of them, down the carpeted corridor, a man with closely cropped red hair stood in the hallway.
“Good,” he said simply. “Thanks for waiting.”
Lewyn pushed the stroller into the conference room.
“Oh,” Johanna said immediately. “She needs a change, doesn’t she?”
Did she? Lewyn thought. The other person in the room, a bald man, or nearly bald but for a semicircle of white at ear level, looked unmistakably horrified. He was seated on the other side of the conference table and hadn’t gotten up.
“I didn’t realize,” Lewyn heard himself say.
“If guys had a sense of smell they wouldn’t be able to stand their own company,” said the redhead. He was closer to Lewyn’s age.
“I’ll go change her,” said his mother, taking the stroller as Lewyn stepped instinctively away from it. “Lewyn, this is Mr. Goldman.” She meant the nearly bald man. “And, I’m sorry, please tell me your name again,” she said to the one who’d waited in the hall.
“Evan Rosen,” he said, extending his hand. Lewyn shook it.
“Can I get you anything?” Evan Rosen said.
It took Lewyn a second to understand that this question was directed to him.
“Oh, no. Thanks.” He took the chair his mother had vacated. There were some pages from a white legal pad, covered with her familiar cursive. He saw the name of a company or, he supposed, a person named S. S. Western. Before he could see more, Mr. Goldman had cleared the pages away.
“Understand you’re on your spring break,” he said as he did. “No South Padre Island for you?”
“Oh. No. Not my scene.”
“I think Evan here made his way down to Florida on a couple of occasions.”
“Cabo,” said Evan Rosen, with a nostalgic smile. “Better class of individual.”
“You’re at Cornell, I think? Or are you the other one?”
Lewyn briefly considered claiming to be the “other one.” But his mother would be back soon.
“Cornell, yes.”
“You like it? I went to Dartmouth.” This was Rosen, and something of a non sequitur.
“Yeah, sure. Cold winters.”
“Not as cold as Hanover!” He said this as if there was a serious competition underway. “And you’re studying?”
Yes, of course, he nearly said. Why, because everyone, even these two who knew him not at all, believed that only the other one had any aptitude at all. Then he realized.
“Oh. I don’t know yet. Maybe art history.”
“Art history!” said Evan Rosen. “Now that’s unusual.”
Lewyn could hear the stroller squeak-wobbling toward them along the hall. Maybe they could leave now.
“No, it’s a good idea,” said Mr. Goldman. “In this family, to have someone who knows about art.”
Johanna was maneuvering the stroller into the room. The baby now had her juice cup, and all seemed temporarily well in her world.
“Right,” said Mr. Goldman. “Lewyn, there are a few things that need your signature.”
“Ba,” said the infant. She had grown tired of her juice cup and let it drop to the floor. Then, abruptly, she was outraged by this turn of events.
Goldman stood to take some papers from the tall man who’d just entered the conference room, then set them down in front of Lewyn. There were Post-its every couple of pages, feathering the right edge. “Sign here,” he told Lewyn. “Wherever there’s a Post-it, it’s either a signature or your initials. Here’s a pen,” he said, handing Lewyn his own. He kept the cap, as if he didn’t trust Lewyn to return it when he was done.
“What am I signing?” he whispered to Johanna.
“Guardianship,” she said. “It’s not why I came in, but Mr. Goldman reminded me we need to do it. With you here in the office he didn’t want to miss the chance. He had the paralegal work on it while we were doing the other thing.”
He stared at her, but she wasn’t even looking at him. She was reaching down beneath his chair for the plastic cup, which she returned to the baby with a maternal cluck.
“Guardianship,” he finally managed.
“Yes?” said Evan Rosen, the Spring Breaker with the 4.0.
“Well … of what?”
Mr. Goldman let out a single choke of laughter. “Of your sister,” he said deliberately, as if Lewyn were stupid, which, in this particular instance, wasn’t far off. At the word “sister,” he had thought, of course, of Sally. And if Sally was somehow in need of his guardianship, was Johanna also asking her, or—even worse—Harrison to sign guardianship papers for Lewyn himself? Was this more of our mother’s eternally enforced togetherness, absurdly reaching into some future past even her own demise?
Then the baby tossed her cup onto the parquet floor again, and they all looked at her, and Lewyn understood. “Wait, for her?”
“Don’t worry,” our mother said, as if they were discussing where to order takeout. “Just a way of making our wishes known.”
“And this is your wish?” he asked her with true disbelief. “Me? That I’m her guardian?”
“Well, not just you,” our mother said, sounding the slightest bit impatient. “All three of you. The three of you should be responsible for your sister. I mean, who else?”