Patrick doesn’t say what he’s thinking—that this whole plan sounds insane. Like off the charts insane. Not that he’s a poster boy for good relationship tips or anything.

Janelle is still weeping softly. He remembers what Marnie had told him about her—that weeping is her default setting.

He pours her a cup of tea, and she says, “I might be judging her. And then my mom said she and my dad would keep the baby while I went to school. So okay. But I just got off the phone with her and now she said that she’s not going to be my Plan B. She told me that she and my dad had a big talk, and they realized they have never gotten to do anything they wanted, and they want to travel. They don’t want to be tied down.”

“Which we are also not judging,” says Ariana.

“Nooo, but why did she then have to start yelling at me? She was saying that I can’t look to other people to clean up the mess I’ve made of my life, and it’s time I grew up and realized that I have to choose which life I’m going to have: saddling myself with a dependent that I can’t really care for, which means turning down my scholarship from BU, or finding people who will adopt my baby and getting on with my life.” It takes her forever to get this story out, because she has to keep stopping to cry. Patrick feels his own breath high in his chest. He cracks his knuckles.

“I categorically reject the two-choice view of life,” says Ariana. She gets up and goes over and gives Janelle a hug.

“Yeah, well,” says Janelle. “Tell my mom that.” Patrick hands her a fistful of paper napkins, and she blows her nose. He sips his tea and tries to think of something to say.

Janelle sits there for a few moments, contemplating the tabletop, and then she says, “Well, maybe there is another way. I met this woman on the subway the other day, and she’s a counselor, and she said maybe I should look into open adoption, which is a system where I could pick the parents I wanted for the baby, and then I could arrange with them to be part of my baby’s life. I could visit and make sure she had a good family life. It’s better . . . maybe. At least I wouldn’t feel like I was just throwing her away.”

“By the way, it’s a girl,” Ariana says to Patrick, and he nods.

“Are there . . . agencies . . . for this?” Patrick says. His voice sounds like it’s coming from far away.

“I’m going to find out. I’m a little bit exhausted by the whole idea. It’s already March, and she’s due at the end of May, and I’m in school so I don’t have a lot of time to interview people.” She puts her head down on the table, resting on her arm. “I’m just so tired of it all. Not knowing what’s going to happen.”

“Hell, I’ll take her myself,” says Ariana. “You can go to school, and Justin and I can take her out on the road with us this summer and we’d videotape people holding her. How would that be?” Ariana gets up and paces around the room, cracking her knuckles.

Patrick says, “Well, that seems like a horrible idea!” and Ariana says, “I was just kidding, Patrick! Where’s your sarcasm gene?”

“It’s gotten thrashed out of me,” he says. “It wasn’t working for me so well with the parenthood gig.”

Janelle bursts into a fresh round of tears. Maybe he shouldn’t have said the word parenthood. She buries her face and lets go with all the sobs. Patrick doesn’t know if it would seem creepy to get up and give her a hug, but he can’t seem to help himself. He stands up and moves toward her, feeling like he’s being carried along by a current that’s taking him away somewhere. It’s as though some part of him has forgotten that he’s not a hugger.

It seems everywhere he looks people are suffering and fighting, experiencing the collateral damage of being alive. Here is this teenager crying in his kitchen, knowing she doesn’t have what she needs to raise a baby. And here is Ariana, hurting from her parents’ disapproval of her plan for her life. And Fritzie—dear little rebellious, resistant Fritzie—scared of being abandoned, feeling that she has to push the boundaries every single day, to test out whether she can still be loved. That chin of hers, thrust out, and the POW haircut, the lower lip that sticks out and trembles and breaks his heart.

And Marnie. Oh God, Marnie. He thinks maybe he should send her a funny text: Hey, Marnie. I sent that artisty, angsty guy packing, and regular Patrick is back. Wonders where you are.

No, that wouldn’t work. He has to do better.

He’s been crap at being in the world. Looking at all the wrong things. Letting himself seize up with fear. Building guardrails all around himself, using his scars and his sarcasm to scare off any interlopers. Never paying attention to what mattered.

He gazes down, looks at the grain of the wood of Blix’s old table, thinks of all the dinners he’s had here, first with Blix and her friends, and then with Marnie and all the people she brought in.

Blix had said once to him: “Maybe everything that frightens you, Patrick, is really something helpless in you that needs you to love it.”

A thought hits him, like it’s the missing piece to a puzzle he didn’t even know he was working on.

He could be the dad to Janelle’s baby. He and Marnie could adopt her. Maybe.

Could that work? Is he insane? He feels that steady humming in his ears that means he’s getting some kind of feeling he’s not going to be able to block out. He checks with himself again. He wants this baby. Does he, though? He has never even entertained such a thought before in his life. He rubs his face, hard with both hands. Makes a little sound.

The two girls look up at him absently, then Ariana swivels her head back to Janelle. “We can find you a family, just the right family,” she says.

Oh God. He. Wants. This. Baby. He wants the baby and he wants Fritzie and Marnie—all of them here with him, being a family. A put-together family. He feels such a sudden pang of longing, so sharp it’s like heartburn. Maybe he should go look for an antacid and ask himself again later if this is really what he wants. Lie down until the feeling passes.

That thought makes him smile. This isn’t going to go away. A baby! He feels excited when he thinks about it instead of abject, pull-the-blanket-over-his-head fear. What would it have been like to have known Fritzie as a baby, to see that little flame of humanness in its beginnings? That spunk she has: What did it look like at four weeks of age? At age two? And how did love first show up in her eyes? What would it have felt like to have her stop crying and hold out her arms at the sight of him?

Dude, something says, you’ve been wise to be wary of babies. Think of their paraphernalia. Their screaming fits and their drooly chins. The diapers alone are scary as hell.

But another part of him answers quickly. Bring it on. He wants the whole happy catastrophe: mostly he wants Marnie back, but he also wants kids, the dog, the cat, strollers in the hallway, Legos on the stairs, the rows of little shoes, the diaper bag . . . and he can see himself and Marnie in bed with the two children curled around them, sunshine coming through the window, their faces tilted up to his.

He wants Marnie and her laughter and her funny little dances and her genius for magic, and he wants it all so much that his heart is aching. He wants Mercury in retrograde and the universe and Toaster Blix and the homeless people she loves.