There is a brightly colored bulletin board on the wall.  Each letter of the alphabet is cut out of construction paper and stapled against the electric blue background.  Under each letter is a picture – A for Alligator, B for Bear, C for Cockatiel.  All of them are animals.  Under X, a stag stands patiently, a square object over its midsection, revealing curving bones.  X for X-ray.

Outside, the leaves flash white undersides – it is windy, threatening to storm – in the pale security lights around the window.  Behind the trees, the sky shows the first signs of the coming dawn.  Henry leans over and picks up a broken piece of crayon, rolls it gently between his thumb and forefinger, feeling its sticky wax where it protrudes from its wrapping, seeing the slight trace of color it leaves on his skin.

Henry stands with one hand on his broom and thinks of his children in Jamaica, thinks of how he hasn’t seen them for three years except in the photographs his wife sends regularly.  Slipping one hand in his pocket, he takes out the latest letter, runs his fingertip over its folds, tries to feel the hand that wrote it.  Genevieve has cut her hair.  She think she look like a movie star now – it’s all curly around her ears, showing de back of her neck.  She’s doing well in school.  Says to tell you Art and Maths are her favourites.  Henry Junior have new trousers for school – he growin’ so fast he need dem all de time now!  So the money you sent last week been very good for us – we all thank you and pray for you and miss you.

He wonders whether the children remember him, whether his wife goes to bed with other men.  He is getting older; his hair is turning grey around his temples, and his belly protrudes a bit at the waist of his dark blue jumpsuit.

He whistles softly as he drops the crayon in the trash bin, where it lands with a metallic thunk, and twirls his broom around under the teacher’s desk.

Miss Emily Garrison is twenty-nine years old and not married.  The thought used to obsess her, when she was twenty-five years old and not married.  A quarter of a century is an easier number to obsess over than is twenty-nine.  Thirty might bring it up again, but she’s busy these days, so she hopes not.  She lives on her own in an apartment that’s always one good hour’s cleaning away from being neat enough to satisfy her, with a mirror in the bathroom that has three busted lightbulbs over it and a bathtub that’s not quite deep enough to cover the tops of her breasts and her shoulders when she lies down in it.

Her life is one of almosts – she almost graduated at the top of her class, almost married a lawyer from New York City who took her to dinners she couldn’t afford.  She almost joined the Peace Corps for two years in Tanzania.

Instead, she is twenty-nine, unmarried, and living in a small apartment at the top of a hill in Yonkers.  She commutes into Manhattan every day with her head against the window and a book open in her lap.  Every day she stands up in front of twenty-eight third-graders and the animal alphabet she posted carefully on the bulletin board one afternoon last August. Vocabulary words under each animal; different ones each week.  She puts them up so she won’t have to answer a million questions on how to spell them, and takes them down before the spelling test each Friday.

She wears long skirts and lots of scarves and jewelry, and her hair is always twisted at the back of her neck with a tortoiseshell clip.

At night, in her apartment, she sits in her windowseat and stares out at the lights down the hill.  She listens to the neighbors fighting in Spanish, calling to their kids, gossiping on the corner.  She tries to hear the cats twisting through the alleys, tries to ignore the car horns blasting.

She likes old books and old furniture; her apartment is crowded with things from flea markets, no over-arching decorating scheme, just a lot of things she likes, put wherever they’ll fit.  Each small space has its own internal consistency, but the thing as a whole is rather like a jumble sale.  She thinks she likes that.

Her mother writes to her, still; thinks the telephone is barbaric. Trying to tell her about e-mail would be like trying to tell her how to navigate a spacecraft to Pluto.  Emily likes the letters though; they’re written in a strong, smooth cursive across expensive paper. She feels cared for and wrapped in love whenever one appears in her mailbox among the slick advertising supplements and the endless stream of bills.  But they make her feel guilty, too, because she never writes back fast enough.  Partly, it’s because she likes the feeling of having the ball in her court, of mulling over her next letter, her next creation.  Letting the epistle gestate inside her, until it’s red and warm and ripe, before putting pen to paper.  She writes at a little pigeonhole desk that spent thirty years living in her grandfather’s barn until he died and her grandmother told her to take whatever she liked.  She’d found her grandfather’s war chest: “R.K. Garrison, 1st Lieut.”, camouflage green and buckled with solid leather straps, and toyed with the idea of keeping it at the foot of her bed.  But it would be out of place in the cluttered, shapeless bohemia of her bedroom, among the theatrical masks, the candles, the red paisley bedcovers, the tapestries, and the old maps.

She has her class picture on her mantelpiece, and the classes she had for the four years before this one; the three before that are on top of the refrigerator while she waits to find a horizontal surface where they’ll fit.  She has favorites, of course, and has long since made peace with that.  Her favorites aren’t the smartest, the prettiest, the best behaved.  They’re the curious ones, or the rebellious.  There is a girl who regularly hides a book under her desk during math, and Emily hates to call her on it; she knows the thrill of illicit reading.  When she was at Vassar, she would get up a half hour before she had to so she could sneak in some reading for pleasure at the student café.  She was surprised by the looks she received upon telling someone the book in front of her wasn’t for any of her classes, actually.  Or the story she was scribbling – no, she was an Education major, not Creative Writing –wasn’t for a class, either.  She just – well, she just – liked it.  After college, she kept it up, sneaking books under the desk at the doctor’s office where she worked the summer after she graduated, not knowing whether the security cameras were on her or not.  Pushing her book quickly into the cubby in her desk if her boss came by, trying to look busy.

She has finished a novel.  It sits, precious and lovely, in a desk drawer, next to sixteen rejection letters from agents.  She has thirty-six years before she is as old as Laura Ingalls Wilder was when she published her first book.  She smoothes each letter out carefully before she adds it to the pile, and she sits by the window in the living room, listening to people fighting and making up, listening to the cats wending their way to their cardboard and plastic homes, drowning in words.

Olivia Stewart has gotten used to people calling her dad a fag.  She’s nine years old, and has freckles across an upturned nose, and glasses, which perch impudently on that nose.  Her hair is wavy and red, and she wears jeans and brightly colored t-shirts and lots of plastic bracelets that glow in the dark.

Her room is at the end of the hall, next to the linen closet, and it has her bed up against one wall, absolutely covered in cushions, so it’s more like a couch than a bed.  She has a movie poster for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and a mobile of dancing fairies hanging down from her light fixture.  Daddy Adrian bought it for her birthday last year, and she likes to lie in bed and watch the ladies in their different-coloured tutus, with their spangled wings and their ballet poses, spin lazily around over her head.  She has a rug that you can hardly see, because it’s covered in clothes and drawings (she likes drawing fantastic old-fashioned outfits; her dad bought her a bunch of coloring books with historical clothing in them, and each design is laboriously copied and revised and colored in before she starts designing her own).

She is under the impression that Daddy and Daddy Adrian are going to get married next year, and that she’ll be the flower girl; she writes wedding invitations in awkward cursive, which she’s learning at school, and thinks that she wants them to adopt a baby brother for her.  She likes taking care of Daddy, choosing his tie for him in the morning and playing pretend that she is his mother and he’s going off to school.  She asks him if he’s done all his homework and reminds him to eat breakfast.  Daddy works for an organization that wants to make people stop throwing bad stuff in the water that people have to drink.  Olivia is very concerned about this; she feels sad and confused when she thinks of all the birds and fish that are dying. She draws pictures of them, with passionate slogans underneath them, and yells at Daddy Adrian not to squash the spiders he finds in the kitchen.  He shrugs his shoulders and sighs, but usually he lets her trap the creatures under a glass and take them to the elevator to set them free on the leaves of the bushes in front of their building.

Daddy Adrian is a writer; he has a study at the other end of the apartment from Olivia’s room, and he writes articles about animals for magazines, which means he’s sometimes suddenly out of town.  When that happens, Olivia and Daddy play Scrabble and order Chinese food, and Olivia carefully pulls all the cashew nuts out of her chicken with her chopsticks and drops them on Daddy’s plate.  Sometimes they go to the park and watch the ducks; Daddy tells her that there are adolescent ducks who will go stay with other families and help take care of the ducklings before they go off and have families of their own.  Olivia sometimes wants to ask Daddy about her mother, but it makes her feel scared, sometimes, to think about her.  She sees her twice a year, but her mother lives in Colorado and doesn’t like to talk about Daddy Adrian when she talks to Olivia.  When they talk on the phone, Mommy sounds like she’s about to break, and her Christmas presents are sometimes late.

Olivia doesn’t remember when she lived with Mommy and Daddy, because she was only a little baby then.  She doesn’t remember the court room and the judge, or Mommy crying.  She remembers a little bit when she was living just with Daddy, when she went to see Mommy at the special hospital where people go when they have problems.  She remembers Daddy throwing out all the bottles and getting angry when Grandma brought over wine to go with dinner once.  There were a lot of teenaged girls around to take care of Olivia then, and Daddy stayed in his room a lot.  She remembers – she was about five then – when they started going to an Episcopal church on Thirty-Third Street that had red doors.  She met her best friend there, Samantha, and it was so exciting when Samantha’s mommy had a little baby girl named Gracie, and Samantha got to hold her, and Olivia came over and she was the one who found out that Gracie had her first tooth.  Olivia loves going over to Samantha’s house; it’s a real house, out in Brooklyn, with a garden and everything, and Samantha has a dress-up trunk with all sorts of stuff in it, capes and magic wands and crowns and fancy dresses and clothes that look old and patched-up, which helps when you’re playing Little House In The Big Woods, and a policeman’s badge, and everything.  They drape Samantha’s climber in shawls, and hide under it with the sun coming through all those colors, and they make up worlds full of gardens and magical cities and unicorns.

Daddy Adrian usually picks her up; he likes the Subway, he says he tells himself stories while he’s riding (“me too,” says Olivia, and cuddles against his shoulder), and sometimes they tell each other stories, out loud.

Olivia does a report for History on “My Family,” and she draws a careful family tree, with Daddy on one side and Daddy Adrian on the other, with pictures of their parents, and stories about Daddy Adrian’s grandfather, who fought in World War One and lost a leg.  Miss Garrison writes “Excellent” on it, with two exclamation points.

After Henry stashes his brooms back in the closet, a mouse sticks its twitchy nose out from a small hole in the wall of Room 4B.  He has left his mate and babies a few feet behind him; she is curled around six blind young hairless things. They are all hungry.  There are odd, sharp smells – they make his nostrils flare and his whiskers shiver.

The mouse sniffs and wiggles his ears in the silent classroom with its chairs stacked neatly on desks and its book reports – big white flapping things he thinks are birds – and its family histories and its vocabulary word alphabet.  He smells and he feels his way out of the hole, waiting for the scent to begin the trail, waiting, breathing.  Outside, the first drops of a storm break as Henry shoves his hands in his pocket and heads towards the Subway, stopping off to greet Hamza at the newsstand and buy a copy of Newsweek and a candy bar.  Hamza is standing behind the counter, squinting through his glasses at Sports Illustrated and compulsively chewing nicotine gum.  He glances up when Henry walks in and says, “Heeey, brother, how ya doin’?”

“Not bad,.”  He points at Hamza’s magazine.  “’Cept I still can’t believe that Guerrero trade, I tell you that.”

“It ain’t right.  2.34 ERA and no better closer in baseball.” Hamza shakes his head. “How’re your family? Get another letter?”

“I did. They’re good. Genevieve gets her hair cut like a movie star now,”

“They grow up quick.”

“Don’t they? How’re yours?”

“Good,  The boy is working with my uncle’s travel company now on school holidays.  He’s good with computers.  And maps.  And chess.  Not so good with girls, though …”  They laugh. “But that’s no bad thing, really.”

Henry pays him. The two men wave at each other as the edges of the sky grow brighter.

Ten miles away from each other, Emily and Olivia are both still sleeping – when they wake, both will brush their teeth and stare in the mirror at their bodies that are twenty years apart, both will be thinking of the test on the life cycle of a frog that is scheduled for that morning.

As Henry jogs down the steps of the subway, the mouse in the classroom takes his courage in both his front paws, and makes a run for it, dashing to the teacher’s desk and grabbing three crumbs of blueberry muffin that Emily dropped Friday during lunch, while Olivia skipped rope on the playground and counted to fifty-seven before she tripped, crumbs which Henry did not catch with his broom as he noticed the leaves in the window and thought about his wife and his daughter with her new haircut and his son who was growing taller.