THE sheets are drenched. Again. Andi takes a long time to wake up, drifting in and out, aware she is hot, then freezing, then finally, when she moves into a state of consciousness, wet. Opening an eye, she looks at the clock— 4.02 a.m. It’s always four in the morning, these nights when she awakes, when she cannot get back to sleep. She turns her head to see Ethan, his back to her, his body rising and falling in deep sleep.
Lucky.
In the bathroom, she pulls the wet T-shirt off, slides the PJ bottoms down, and pads naked into the closet, pulling a dry T-shirt and boxer shorts off the shelf. But that leaves the sheets. Warm and wet.
The linen closet is in the hall, at the other end of the corridor, where the girls’ bedrooms are. Andi knows she shouldn’t open the door, shouldn’t check up, but she is being a mother, she tells herself. This is what mothers do. A stepmother may not have the same rights, but she is trying, has tried so hard to turn this into a proper family, and that includes treating the girls as if they were her own.
How she wishes she had children of her own. Still. Even though she is in her early forties, on a good day she could surely pass for thirty-six.
Every month, she keeps her fingers crossed that this might be the month, this might be the month a miracle happens. Every month, she swallows her disappointment and hopes for the next time.
She pushes Sophia’s door open gently to see Sophia, fast asleep, the bald teddy bear that she cannot sleep without, now lying on its side, on the floor next to her bed, Sophia’s hand curled out toward it, as if she is waiting for the bear to jump back in. Andi stands in the doorway and smiles, feeling a wave of love for her stepdaughter. Her daughter. And Sophia is her daughter.
She was eight when Andi and Ethan met, and instantly fell in love with Andi. Sophia now tells people she has two mothers, no differentiation in her head between Andi and her real mother.
That first family date, they had gone into the city, dim sum in Chinatown, then walked down to the ferry and taken it out to see the sea lions around the Bay. Sophia had grabbed Andi’s hand, skipped alongside her, and when they sat down for ice cream, she climbed on Andi’s lap and leaned into her, like a much younger child, as Andi stroked her hair, thrilled.
Emily, on the other hand, at twelve, had sulked the entire day. She had squinted evil eyes at Andi, and when Andi had attempted to engage her, asking her questions about school, attempting to share some of her own stories about going to school in New York, Emily had just grunted.
“What is she?” she had sneered at her father, at one point, with a savage gesture toward Andi. “Your girlfriend?”
“She’s my friend,” Ethan had said. “That’s all.” Which wasn’t true. They had, by that time, been sleeping together for seven weeks.
***
ON their first date, Ethan talked about his children nonstop, which was, as far as Andi was concerned, an unexpected bonus.
They met through match.com, a continual embarrassment to Andi. But where else did anyone go to meet people? she wondered. She had done a series of evening classes, with what she thought was a masculine bent— Fundamentals of Investing, Estate Planning 101, and Beginner’s Best Barbecue (which was a dud. What red-blooded American man, she realized, as she sat in an empty classroom, would admit to not being able to barbecue?)
