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On the walls were photographs Jenny had taken of Tara and me. For a while Jenny thought about a career as a photographer. She still walks through the apartment with her camera around her neck, taking pictures. On the bookshelves were her casebooks and her legal manuals from the public defender’s office.
    My books were also on the shelves. We share the office; I live here too. But I travel light, Jenny says. I could fit all my possessions into a couple of suitcases. Why get attached to objects? I was happy to have Jenny decorate our home. It felt no less mine for her doing so.
    Novels lay throughout the bedroom. Jenny loves Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov; when she was a girl, she told me, she pretended she lived in nineteenth-century Russia. Sometimes at night we read aloud to each other before we go to sleep.
    â€œTell me what you were like as a child,” she asked me once. “Make it so real I can see you.”
    On the floor sat a huge oak chessboard, made in England in the eighteenth century. It had been passed down through Jenny’s family.As a child, she had played chess with her parents; now she played with Tara.
    I told Jenny stories about being adopted, how much it had meant to me as a child. I said that someday I might look for my birth mother.
    â€œWhy not look for her now?” Jenny said that if I knew where I came from I’d be able to get on with my life.
    â€œGet on with my life? What makes you think I’m not getting on with my life?”
    â€œYou’re a dreamer, Ben. It’s like your life is out there in the future, but it’s anyone’s guess what that life is. Sometimes it’s like you’re watching yourself. It’s as if you’re not in your own body.”
    â€œI’m in my own body.” I slapped the floor to show her I was there. I pounded my fists against my chest. “I’m here, Jen. Look at me. I’m in my own body.”
    â€œYou should try being like Jonathan. He goes to work every day and comes home at night. He and Sandy make plans. They may be gay, but they live a more normal life than we do.”
    â€œWe live a normal life. I go to work and come home every day. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    But I understood what she was saying. Though I’d moved into her apartment in January, almost two years after we’d started to go out, it hadn’t been as simple as that. I moved in incrementally, shirt by shirt. One day I realized all my clothes were there and it made no sense to keep paying rent on my apartment.
    In smaller ways too, I couldn’t make a clear decision. I waited until the last minute to pay my bills. Once my phone line got disconnected. I didn’t keep a date book, and I hated to make plans. Did I think I would die before the weekend came? Did I believe my birth mother would show up and everything else would become irrelevant?
    â€œLive a life,” Jenny said. “Get a life.”
    â€œI have a life.”
    â€œAll right,” she said. “All right.” But she wondered whether maybe I should look for my birth mother, whether that might help me sort things out.
    â€œIt’s possible,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
    But I didn’t think about it any more than usual.
    â€œThings just take time.” I ran my hand along Jenny’s neck, down past the open buttons of her blouse, to the pale, freckled hollow between her breasts. “You don’t plan a life. You grow into it. You only understand it when you’re looking back. Besides, what’s the point of making plans? Man plans and God laughs.”
    There I was, believing in my own way that everything was fine, that my life was moving ahead.

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    A month later the letter came, forwarded to me from my old address.
    Dear Ben Suskind,
    Almost thirty-one years ago I gave birth to you. I was sixteen and terrified, I was completely alone. Your father and I had no