One Cold Night

reality that was still much much better than this.
    She replayed Susan’s words, the familiar sound of her voice: “I am your birth mother.”
    I am your birth mother.
    Meaning Lisa had always known her birth mother.
    Meaning she had never been unloved or abandoned.
    Meaning the worst that had happened was that she had believed a lie. Like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. All petty lies to bring you up through childhood; then when you were ready, one by one the lies were peeled off you like too many winter clothes. She had learned the truth about all the other false idols. Now she knew the truth about another one: The mysterious mother wasn’t a mystery at all.
    She began to feel a warm rivulet flowing inside her chest, almost a physical sensation, like a vein relaxing. For a moment, her mind drifted farther away, and she could feel Susan feeling her, loving her, and she loved Susan with every bit of herself.
    She thought of the yellow line and wondered if Susan had seen it and if she had understood what it meant; the endeavor of Lisa’s forgiveness: implicit love.
    Then she thought of their argument, before she had decided to paint the line. She had been cruel when she asked Susan if she knew who Lisa’s father was. Even if Susan had slept around, which Lisa doubted, she wasn’t the type to lose track of who or when or where. Lisa pictured the kitchen at home, the factory, the office, the perfect stickers and bows on every item in thefront shop. Every single thing arranged just so. Maybe Susan had experimented when she was fifteen years old; Lisa could understand that. Just wanting to do it to see what it was like. She remembered reading in Maya Angelou’s autobiography that that was what she had done when she was seventeen, and the result of that one careless attempt at experience was a son, her only child. Unless Susan had had a real boyfriend, as Lisa had herself often fantasized about, someone very special who loved only you. She could see it having happened that way, too. Whom had Susan loved when she was fifteen? What boy had been special enough for that honor?
    “One, two, three, four, five.”
    Dickwad.
    “Six, seven, eight, nine, ten.”
    Are you convinced now that I’ve got all my ten toes?
    Within her secret mind, another vein popped open. It was something her brain shouldn’t have wasted any storage space on, but there it was: some pregnant woman across from her on the subway telling some lady next to her that when her baby was born, the first thing she would do would be to make sure it had all its fingers and toes. At the time Lisa had thought that was inane; weren’t there more important things to worry about? Like blindness or deafness or Down syndrome or microencephalitis or cystic fibrosis? The list went on and on. Ten fingers? Ten toes?
    Each time he touched the tip of one of her toes, accounting for it, she felt a tingle. She had almost lost sensation in them from the tight ropes at her ankles. Her fingers were floating away, too. Her ten toes and her ten fingers, leaving.
    She opened her eyes and dared to look at him.
    I just want to know you.
    Want to get to know every part of you.
    Never got to count your toes.
    Your toes.
    “Wait a minute,” she said. “Who are you?”
    He stopped counting and looked at her, surprised she had asked; he reminded her of the nerdy guy at her middle school who tripped in the hall when Glory said hi to him one day. The guy actually fell on the floor while the two girls moved away in a burst of giggles. With Dick’s blue eyes stuck on her now, quiet and staring, she felt a chill laddering up her body.
    One of his cheeks bunched up a little, but it wasn’t exactly a smile.
    “I’m your father.”
    Now the smile flourished on his face and she noticed his dimpled chin, exactly like her own.
    It couldn’t be true. Her mind filled with white noise, desperate to block and scramble his words: I... am... your... father. He stared at her with his pupils turned to tiny black dots even though they were inside the house, out of the direct sun. She wondered if he was on some kind of medication; obviously something was wrong with him.
    For the first time in her life, she was speechless. She could not do this. She could not be here now. This man could not be her birth father. She laid her head back on the pillow and let her eyes drift to the room’s single window. It was the old-fashioned kind, with a top and a bottom and