Diversification #6
When she’s heading out the door to a shift at the farm, and he’s getting back to his hotel after a run: “You weren’t joking
about the fog, it’s fucking freezing.” “Give it a few hours to burn off! It’s better in the afternoon.”
When he’s in the car going to dinner with Michael: “Michael eats? I thought he just needed fuel.” “I took him to Noma for
his fortieth, and I think it rivaled his own wedding for happiness.”
When Lili emails him a copy of her thesis, a moment’s distaste for using her @columbia.edu account to send work into the dark
web of @: “To confirm, your email just now constitutes your official application for BlackRiver’s analyst program?”
“Oh, fuck off.”
When Lili’s making a quick dinner, and he’s about to head into a meeting finalizing terms of the new acquisition: “It sounds
like enabling tax evasion for your investors.” “Ah, Lili. It’s an acquisition to improve our personalization capabilities
across asset classes, broad market indexing, and investor preferences to improve after-tax performance.” “So, tax evasion.”
When she finally breaks, and brings up the printed-out email exchange she found on his desk: “So, what’s this about developing
a phased fossil fuel divestment strategy for BlackRiver? Stronger shareholder voting policies against climate-obstructing
boards?” “Running some due diligence, are you?” “It was literally on your desk. What’s the play here?” “I thought it was an important conversation to start exploring more substantively.” “Just
so you know, Paris Agreement adherence does not equal getting laid.” “Really? I’m stunned.” “I don’t offer blow jobs in return
for decarbonization KPIs.” “Well, I guess I’ll rip up the proposal then.” “Aleksandr!”
The summer sprawls. She feels happy when she wakes up, a strong pervasive sense of health, mischief, and luck.
Her days are full of work at the farm and writing her thesis at the loft, nights with her friends: drinks on the Lower East Side, orange wine, cigarette smoke, hot sidewalks; chaotic group dinners; an evening of gallery openings in Chelsea, Amina focused on the art as Lili and James drink too much champagne, giggling; roommate movie nights with Jackie, cuddled on their couch, flicking through Instagram and painting their toes.
Over a farm shift, weeding rows of carrots at their Williamsburg location by the water, Eileen answers her questions about the job’s salary, benefits, trajectory.
Increasingly, it feels possible; like there might be a path coming together, ahead of her.
Throughout it all, she balances between his place and her apartment: Williamsburg, Tribeca, back and forth. Even in his absence,
the loft is comforting; it makes her feel close to him.
It’s there, too: grief, from the anniversary, amid the growing warmth. It swells up in the silence of her days, the moments
when she’s alone. It sometimes hits her hard, the reminder of absence, the presence of Jane’s photo in her phone, when she
wakes up at night, or as she’s falling asleep, at his place, or hers. Like a reinjured old wound she forgets to accommodate,
hurting with a rough vengeance, until she breathes through it, and allows it to settle tentatively.
And it arrives, in the form of a cardboard box, sturdily packed, heavily taped.
“Jackie!” Lili shouts, barging into their apartment; she shakes off her dirty Blundstones, fresh from the farm, drops her
old tote bag with produce on the kitchen table. “I’m home, let’s go!”
“Give me a second, I’m finishing my hair!” The sound comes from the bathroom.
Lili rolls her eyes. She unhooks her overalls, sports bra and shorts already on underneath; Jackie had begged her to come
to barre class. She refills her water bottle, wriggles her feet into her sneakers. Absently, she leafs through their mail,
taking a long drink of water: some Columbia stuff for her, a few checks for Jackie from her agency. A small box sits on the
kitchen table, fresh delivery; she glances at the recipient information—and stills.
It’s from Jane. The box she said she’d send.
Lili glances down the hall. She hears the ambient roar of the hair dryer, Jackie playing music on her phone. She picks up
the box, and heads into her room.
Sitting down on her bed, she uses her keys to slice through the seal of tape. The sun from her window leans into her room,
spreading across the floor, bathing her stacked books and plants as she wrestles the box open, tightly packed with rough,
brown kraft paper.
Curious, Lili unravels one of the first small packages she sees inside—Jane had only mentioned photos, folders.
Out of the packing paper, a few squat jars of golden syrup and multicolored granules roll out, falling into her lap: Jane had packed some honey from the garden—she kept bees in Mill Valley—along with bee pollen.
It surprises Lili. Does Jane remember how she liked putting bee pollen on her yogurt, back when she was a young teenager?
Their breakfast tables were busy, rotating casts of kids.
It seems unlikely that she noticed what Lili liked to eat, little habits.
But it’s a sweet gesture, despite its technical incompatibility with her veganism.
Gingerly—a little suspiciously—Lili sets the jars aside. She continues tugging kraft paper onto her floor until she finds
what she’s looking for: the manila folder.
She hasn’t read her case file before.
Lili sets the box behind her and flips through the feathery-soft pages, worn with age. It isn’t particularly robust: Social
Security number, simple medical history, immunization records, first report cards, a case worker report. She sees bold font—death
certificates—and quickly shuffles those away. She looks for the glossy tell of photographs, and finds them.
It’s a small stack of images. Mostly individual photographs, pictures of Lili—likely the photos that the department used for
placement and identification purposes, photos meant to help potential fosters or adoptive families become familiar with a
child.
She hasn’t seen most of these: her in a little denim dress running through grass, her as an adorable baby making grabby hands
at the camera, her as an absurdly cute toddler smiling toothily with her hair covered in multicolored finger paint.
A soft, fragile ache starts to reveal itself inside of her, somewhere in her solar plexus, as she slowly cards through the photographs, as if a shell is falling away.
She feels both protective of the little girl, and in need of being protected.
Because looking at these images, she perceives the sense of her parents.
Did her mother take the one of her at Crissy Fields, bundled up in the sunny cold with the beach and Golden Gate Bridge in the background, a stuffed toy deer gripped tightly in her arms?
Did her father capture this shot of her grinning at the top of a playground slide, gleaming metal in the sunshine?
Their perspective—behind the camera—is the same vantage point as hers now, looking at the photographs, seeing the image. As if they are sitting beside her.
“Hey.” Lili glances over her shoulder. Jackie leans in through her doorframe, dressed in pale pink and gray workout gear,
not dissimilar to a ballerina. “What’s up? What’s in the box?”
“Um, it’s some childhood stuff. My foster mom sent me her case files.”
“Oh.” Jackie stills. “Is it—are you okay?”
“Yeah, here, look,” Lili offers, waving her over. “Little me.”
Walking around her bed, Jackie settles down beside her. Tentative, as if expecting to be rebuffed. She accepts the photographs
Lili hands to her. Her hair is glossy, freshly blown out. Lili thinks about teasing her—a blow out, for barre class?—before
the manner in which her friend’s face melts completely overtakes her.
“Oh, Li,” Jackie enthuses, eyes bright, “you were a menace, look at those cheeks!”
Lili cracks a smile. “Yeah, I was cute.”
“I want one of you.”
She snorts. “You are nowhere near ready to have a child.”
“Okay—pot, kettle.”
Lili huffs a laugh, flipping through more of the photos, papers. Caught between pages, a few errant photographs flicker loose.
She lets them fall—will get to them in a second—wondering how many more there are, treading through the files carefully—
“Are those your parents?”
Lili’s heart seizes a little. Jackie has caught sight of the fallen photographs.
“Yes,” she breathes. Gingerly, she sets her case file aside.
Two photographs are in her lap: old images, colors faded. Only of her parents. She has never seen these before.
Her dad on a balcony in a distinctly Middle Eastern city—minarets, construction cranes; peeling paint of a colonial building—bare
feet propped up on the table, gray hush of early morning, lush green gardens below, fair hair a mess. He looked like he’d
just woken up, wearing a rumpled white T-shirt. She looks at the back of the photograph: 1995, Cairo. It was their post-undergrad trip, on their way to Beirut.
She looks at the next photograph. Her mother somewhere in the Marin headlands, hills green with trees, wearing a worn blue hiking backpack, her masses of thick black hair piled atop her head, curls escaping, glancing back over her shoulder.
She is grinning, bursting with joy. She looks younger than Lili.
Breath short, Lili flips it over: 1992, Mount Tamalpais. It was the year her parents had met in undergrad. Lili does the math. Her mother was nineteen.
“Can I?” Jackie asks, gently. Lili nods, proffering the photographs. She feels a little stunned. She keeps looking at the
photos, as her friend examines them. Fresh faces, new views on her parents. She supposes they were part of her adoption file.
Potential fosters want to know about the parents, too.
“Your mother was gorgeous,” Jackie observes. Lili has never shown her friends any of the few childhood photos she has, stashed
in the closet. Jackie’s fingers are careful, and gentle, around the photograph, as if she’s taking care not to leave fingerprints