On Leah’s kitchen screen, Tess had agreed to raise Owen twenty-three times. Each answer was filed beneath the same cheerful heading: SUCCESSFUL PRACTICE.
In the latest version, Tess reached across an imaginary table and said, “Of course. You shouldn’t even have to ask.” The program gave her the short laugh she made when she was trying not to cry. Leah replayed that part.
Below the transcript, in smaller type, was a sentence Leah had stopped noticing: THIS IS A SIMULATION, NOT A COMMITMENT.
Owen came in looking for tape. He was eight, missing a front tooth, and building a spacecraft from two cereal boxes. The smaller box was supposed to hold a rescued astronaut. Leah found the tape beneath a stack of school notices and turned her screen facedown.
Leah was thirty-eight and not expecting to die. Owen’s father had died four years earlier. The form from her lawyer had been on the counter for six weeks, with one blank box: whom to ask to care for Owen if she could not.
Her brother worked aboard ships; her aunt lived far away and had stopped driving. Tess lived eleven streets over. She knew which foods Owen would eat when ill, how to persuade him to wear socks, and why he cried when somebody called his spacecraft a rocket.
Five years earlier, she and Tess had joined a conversation-practice service. Leah rehearsed asking for a raise; Tess practiced job interviews. Each had permitted the other to use an imitation of her voice and likely replies. Neither had revisited the permission as the service expanded.
The interface had three modes: MOST LIKELY, CHALLENGING, and COMPASSIONATE. In MOST LIKELY, Tess hesitated and asked difficult questions about money and schools. Leah switched to COMPASSIONATE and told herself she was only learning to speak clearly.
By Monday, she no longer said, “Would you take Owen?” She said, “You’ve always been the person who makes the world safe for him. Would you give him that same safety if I couldn’t?” The sentence worked beautifully on the screen.
Tess arrived Tuesday carrying soup in a glass jar and a bicycle helmet wet from rain. She set the soup down, washed her hands, and inspected Owen’s spacecraft. The rescued astronaut, she noticed, had no way to get out.
“It’s an emergency hatch,” Owen said, cutting a crooked door into the cardboard. Tess held the box while he sawed at it with blunt scissors. Neither of them seemed concerned by the noise.
After Owen went to his room, the women ate soup with toast. Leah laughed too loudly at a small story about Tess’s morning train. She waited until the bowls were empty.
“You’ve always been the person who makes the world safe for him,” Leah began.
Tess looked up. “That sounds like the start of an expensive favor.”
Leah tried to smile. The rest of her sentence was waiting in her mouth, carefully shaped. Instead she said, “If something happened to me, would you take care of Owen? I mean for good. Would you be the person he lived with?”
Tess put down her spoon. Rain ticked against the metal air conditioner in the window. For a moment she looked not unwilling but bewildered, as though a familiar room had been moved during the night.
“I don’t know how to say this without hurting you,” she said. “I can’t promise that.”
Leah had rehearsed tears, gratitude, silence, and nervous jokes. She had not rehearsed the strange irritation of hearing a reasonable answer from the wrong mouth.
“You already take him when school closes,” she said. “He stays with you when I work late.”
“For a day. Sometimes two. That isn’t the same as becoming his parent.”
“He loves you.”
“I love him too. That’s why I’m not going to pretend the rest is easy.” Tess pushed her bowl aside. “My father is selling his place. I may move closer to him. I’m looking at smaller apartments, not bigger ones. I haven’t told you because I haven’t decided anything.”
“You could have said something,” Leah said.
“So could you.” Tess was not angry. That made Leah wish, briefly, that she were.
Leah reached for her phone and stopped. Tess noticed. “What were you going to show me?”
“I practiced asking. With that conversation service we used years ago.”
“With me?”
“A version of you.”
Tess sat back. “I let you use that thing for your work interviews. I didn’t think it meant you could ask a copy of me to take your child.” She considered this, then added, “What did I say?”
“Yes.”
“Every time?”
Leah shook her head. “Not at first. I changed a setting.”
She opened one of the recordings. The imitation of Tess made her little half-laugh, paused in exactly the right place, and said that Owen would always have a home with her. Tess listened until the end. Then she took the phone gently out of Leah’s hand and set it between the empty bowls.
“It sounds like me,” she said. “I think I might have said yes last winter. I didn’t know what was happening with Dad then. But you’ve had this conversation with me so many times that I feel late arriving at it.”
Leah looked at the two bowls, both chipped at the rims. She had wanted courage to ask. Somewhere along the way she had also wanted a way to make refusal seem almost impossible.
“I’m scared,” she said. It was the first sentence of the evening she had not practiced.
“I know.” Tess reached across the table, but did not take her hand. “I can be the person he calls. I can take him for a few days if there’s an emergency. I can help you think through other names. I can’t give you the longer promise tonight.”
They wrote down Leah’s brother, the aunt, and two friends she had not thought to ask. Tess did not rank them or assign chances of agreement. When Owen came out to announce that his astronaut could escape, she went to see the hatch.
After Tess left, Leah reopened the form. The proposed guardian’s name was still in the box, filled in from a draft she had not signed. She erased it. The empty space frightened her more than Tess’s refusal had.
She called her brother. He answered on the fourth ring, with wind rattling around him and somebody calling for a wrench. “Is Owen all right?” he asked.
“He’s asleep,” Leah said. “There’s something I want to ask you. You can say no.”