On the way home from seeing Jeanne and Claire off at the airport, he stopped at the bistro on the corner of their quiet street. He felt young, unencumbered. He didn’t even have his briefcase with him—he’d come home early from work and left it at the apartment when he went with them to the airport.

He sat outside by himself at one of the three metal tables on the sidewalk. The new, small leaves of the trees that bent over the street were the tenderest of greens. It was a mild evening, and the big folding windows of the restaurant were pushed back, releasing the noise from inside. This lifted his spirits. When the waitress came out to take his order, he asked for a dirty martini and oysters, a half dozen.

While he ate and drank, he watched the couples inside. Slowly his sense of exile from the world evaporated. The waitress came out to ask him if he needed anything else, and he ordered an expensive glass of white wine and another half-dozen oysters.

The sky was lavender above him. Yellow lights were coming on in the apartments in the houses across the street. The rooms they revealed seemed full of promise and mystery. Had there been, ever, such a beautiful evening? Everything felt strange and new to him.

The color in the sky deepened, and he asked for his check. When he looked in his wallet for his credit cards, he felt a little shock at seeing the American bills there—it seemed to him that he should be carrying some other currency, he was at such a distance from what he felt was his life.

He walked slowly the half block home. As he entered the dark apartment, he thought of Jeanne. He remembered how she had looked, standing in the line to go through security—Claire just a bulge in the baby carrier on her front, her purse on one shoulder, the big overnight bag, full mostly of Claire’s necessities, slung from her other shoulder. She had turned to look for him to wave goodbye, her eyes searching the crowded space, and in that moment she had looked so alone, so burdened, that he was sorry he wasn’t going with her. He raised his hand and waved it wildly over his head until she spotted him, feeling a desperate wish to make up for how separated from her he’d been. Her face softened, opened. Awkwardly, she shifted the overnight bag so that she could blow him a kiss.

He thought of that moment often during the weeks she was away, weeks when he swung from the kind of easy pleasure of that first night alone (he ate out almost every night, he drank much more than he usually did) to his dread when he thought of his sense of distance from Claire. His repulsion, really.

He made promises to himself. He would help Jeanne more. He would act as though he loved Claire, in the hope that it would open a way for him to feel that love. He thought of his mother, not his mother with Claire, but what he remembered from his own childhood—her inexpressiveness, what seemed her lack of feeling. He didn’t want to repeat that. He could not allow it, allow himself to feel so cut off from his daughter. He would be like his father, like Graham, joyous and loving.

Did you get to choose? It seemed to Lucas this must be possible, that this must be some of the point of living in a family. You could look at different ways of being in the world, you could exercise some will.

He watched children when he was outside, and he was outside often—the weather held steady in its beauty from that first night on.

Four days before Jeanne and Claire were to return, Lucas left work late and was walking home from the subway in the pale twilight. There was a woman walking slowly toward him on West Tenth Street, pushing a stroller. Even from a distance, he could hear a kind of mindless chanting arising from within it, and when he got closer, he saw the child making the noise. It seemed to be a little boy, though Lucas couldn’t be certain of that—his hair was longish and curly. He might have been somewhere a bit over two. He was singing—mnh, mnh, mnh, mnh—moving up and down again and again through just a few notes. He was holding a badminton racket across his lap, and he was playing it, his left hand holding the handle, his right hand strumming wildly across the stringing of the racket’s head.

He looked directly at Lucas without self-consciousness, without even seeing him, really, so lost was he in the music he imagined he was making.

As they were about to pass each other, Lucas’s eyes swung up to meet the mother’s. She met his gaze and lifted her shoulders, making a quick sly face, a face that indicated both a relinquishment of any responsibility for the little boy’s behavior and an amused pleasure in his game.

It was a vision for Lucas, a vision of the fact of the inner life, even in someone so young. A vision of the way Claire too might come to have a self, independent of him or Jeanne.

That night he dreamed of Graham. He was dancing in the living room of the Cambridge house with each of them in turn, but each of them as a child. He bent tenderly first over Sarah, Sarah at the same age as the boy in the carriage—her hair still shortish around her head, her sturdy legs stomping on the old wooden floor of the big room. Then Sarah slowly turned into Annie, a small, dark child; but he knew it was Annie because there was something mysterious, something sexual, that was part of her dance with Graham. Nothing explicit—Lucas felt, rather than saw, the strong erotic element working between them.

Then Lucas, although perhaps because he couldn’t actually get into this dream, since he was seeing it from outside, Graham was dancing with a creature, an animal of some kind—feral, it seemed in the dream. But he knew this creature to be himself.

And last, Frieda, whom he treated more tenderly than anyone else. They waltzed, prettily, gracefully, his father leading Frieda gently. His kindness, so entirely in character, was unbearable to Lucas. It made him uncomfortable, ashamed; and it was then that he woke up.

The aftermath of the dream, though, was relief, a sense Lucas had that Graham had come in his dream to help him, to show him the way, so that he would know how to do it too, to love easily, generously, those who were close to him. To dance with Claire, with whoever she was. Perhaps also the sense that she would simply be who she would be, as each of the dancers with his father in the dream was. As the child in the carriage had been. That he didn’t need to worry about that. It would be all right.

He hoped it would be all right.

Jeanne’s plane got in at one, but she had insisted he not take the time off from work to meet them. She said she could manage it all—the baby, the luggage, the cab. She would call their neighbor David when they got close, and he could come down and help her bring things up.

So Lucas arrived home from work at the time he usually did. He was just putting his key into the lock when he heard the latch click free from within. The door swung open, and there was Jeanne.

She stepped forward, into his arms, and it was as though the tension of the months after Claire’s birth had never been. He felt the full length of her strong body pressed against him. He felt rescued. After a moment, he held her head in his hands and tilted his own head back to see her face. She seemed to be laughing, and then he saw that she was also crying. He kissed her eyelids—the salty taste—and then her mouth, open and warm. “You’re here,” he said.

“You’re here,” she answered.

They rocked together side to side, a little like the dance Graham had done with Annie in Lucas’s dream.

“Is Claire napping?” he asked after a moment.

She stepped back, wiping at her eyes with the heels of her hands. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Go and see.” She smiled. “She’s in the living room.”

Lucas made his way down the hallway toward the light that was the living room. And here she was, lying on her back on the floor in a yellow shirt and diapers, looking up intently at a kind of mobile that arched over her, its legs on the floor around her. Her hands, fisted, worked in the air above her, as if she thought she could reach the suspended cloth animals if she tried hard enough. Her bare feet worked too, dancing and kicking, and she made gentle noises of effort.

He saw instantly how changed she was. He knelt next to her. He could sense Jeanne behind him, watching them.

He bent over her. “Hello baby,” he said. “Hello, Claire.” Her head wobbled a little from side to side, looking for him, and then her eyes found him.

He said it again, smiling down at her. “Hello, Claire.”

She looked up at him gravely, focusing hard on him—he thought for the first time that she could actually see him. And then her whole body answered him, her arms and legs doing their dance, for him this time. A wide, toothless grin transformed her face, and he felt something inside him lift, change, in response.

Father, he thought.

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