A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,127

all the time.

But really, what choice did she have? If Colin was ever going to forgive her, she would have to be as conciliatory as possible. Maybe she didn’t deserve to see Moira.

Wania had left Moira’s stuffed animals in a row; a dozen googly eyes stared at her like a jury. She opened Moira’s closet. They had kept a few of Ronan’s things, his favorite Yankees jacket, a suit he wore only once that Elm had never been able to give away, even when she finally got rid of his Simpsons T-shirt and his Lego collection. Maybe it reminded her of what he would have been if he’d lived, grown up to wear a suit to important occasions. Or maybe she was hoping against hope that his body would be found, that they could bury him. In any event, it hung there, limp, in Moira’s closet.

What had been her plan, she wondered, for re-creating Ronan? She knew she couldn’t literally replace her son, but she had been hoping that just seeing him would ease the cramp of missing him.

It was best not to fight Colin now; she didn’t have the strength. But when she thought about packing up her daughter’s life, it seemed so unfair. Poor kid, she’d have to move and lose a parent at the same time? Colin should stay in the apartment; Elm should move out. Maybe she wanted to punish herself, she admitted. But she also thought that a few generous gestures might soften Colin slightly.

She went back into her room to pack her own suitcase. The baby gave her a nudge. She felt worse now than she did in the first few weeks after she returned from Thailand. Then she had felt confused by grief. Days would slide by and then minutes dragged on for eternity. Now she had a clear view of the ways in which she was affecting the world. As much as she wanted to turn back time and redo the moments just before the wave hit, now she wanted to go back before the implantation, before that stupid party that gave her the idea, to go back to simply missing Ronan instead of plotting to resurrect him. He was just a kid. How had he become her messiah?

What struck her most was the unreasonable quiet. She had grown up in Manhattan; the sirens and the thuds of people living on all sides of her, their muffled sneezes through the bathroom vent, the slam of their doors when they came home, all were part of what Elm considered normal. Yet now she was living in a brand-new high-rise corporate residence, double-paned windows that didn’t open and soundproofed walls and ceilings. She was so high up even the sunlight filtered through in an alien way, the strange glass reflecting its light into small particles that reassembled themselves to look like light, but were somehow different.

She could see her building from the window. Her own apartment was on the back side, so she couldn’t see into it, but she had the strange sensation of watching herself from above, living in an establishing shot for a movie. When she called Moira in the evenings, she pretended to her that she could see into her room.

Moira had taken the news that Mommy was going to live down the block with her usual nonchalance. It was unclear whether she understood that her father thought this was likely to be a permanent arrangement, but they had agreed, for everyone’s sake, to make it seem related to the birth of the baby. Moira made paper clothes for the child, and often brought home cards she’d drawn in school, her unadulterated excitement in sharp contrast to Elm’s trepidation.

The oil painting arrived at her new apartment. It was large, two feet by four feet, and Elm took a deep breath before she opened it. It was lacking in any artistry, but the painter, whoever it was, had captured something about Ronan’s eyes, the sparkle, from the school picture. Elm found it comforting, and instead of draping it back in the butcher paper, she leaned it against the wall, face out, where she stared at it for hours.

After work each day she went directly to her corporate apartment, resting until dinner. Twice a week she walked the couple of blocks to her home (she still considered it hers; it was still the place she lived, in her mind). Colin, now free during the day, made dinner, appallingly bad renditions of recipes from