Back at the house, and safely alone, she sat down at her desk just off the “gourmet kitchen” and began to cry. This built-in spot was a part of the design their architect had once identified as the “menu planning area,” though our mother was no more a planner of menus than she had been a creator of gourmet meals. Over time the location had acquired the less fanciful purpose of appointment arranging and bill paying, and performing all the aspects of family maintenance that she did in fact perform: school trip forms, passport renewals, the pathetic paperwork of being a mother, wife, and person. From this desk and the Power Macintosh that occupied most of its surface, Johanna had overseen the workmen and vendors who made it possible for them to drop in on the Vineyard house and find the pipes running clear and the rooms free of invasive species. She had kept track of everyone’s health insurance claims. She had made sure Sally had leotards for gymnastics and Harrison the next size of Suzuki violin, and Lewyn the math tutor he’d needed in middle school. She had scheduled the parent-teacher conferences and squabbled with her brother and sister over the care of their parents in New Jersey. She had managed, in other words, that deflated charade that had been the Oppenheimer family, or at least her Oppenheimer family, the one now ticking down to its failed and sad conclusion, after which, she supposed, her husband intended to move on with Stella Western and the boy who looked like Lewyn. All three of her own kids mad to leave, and her husband ready to step directly into his next Oppenheimer family, already in progress, perhaps close by, leaving her alone in this enormous, sad place with its astonishing views of the harbor and lower Manhattan. What more could she have done? What sacrifice had she not made, or effort not spent, in the single-minded pursuit of her husband’s remission, the goal she had understood them to share, beyond all others? Something, obviously. But what?
It wasn’t fair. It so wasn’t fair.
For a miserable half hour more she wept, with no one to see her in that house of five full-time occupants （plus a part-time housekeeper not due till four in the afternoon）。 For once the emptiness of the rooms felt like a gift.
There was a stack of invoices on the bit of desk not occupied by the computer, things that had come in over the past few days. The caretaker and oil company bills from the Vineyard, the tuition for CTY, for which Harrison would be forsaking Androscoggin this coming summer. And on top, by providence—if you believed in that, which Johanna, long after this day, would claim she did—the annual bill from Horizon Cryobank of Torrington, Connecticut, wherein the last of her embryos resided in liquid nitrogen. Horizon Cryobank had changed names and owners a couple of times, and once, even, its location, since that day in 1981 when the blastocysts that would be Harrison, Sally, and Lewyn had been placed inside a deeply pessimistic （and frankly resigned to failure） Johanna Oppenheimer. That day, indeed, it had been this sequestered embryo, and not the ones painfully inserted into her own uterus, on which she had pinned her ultimate hopes; when the transfer failed, as all previous attempts had failed, this was the embryo intended for somebody else’s competent womb, where it would—if she was very, very lucky—turn into a single child around whom she and Salo would make their longed-for family. But then Loretta, the Irish sonographer, had prayed a rosary for them, and lo: the miracle of the triplets had upended everything. And this sequestered child, the one who was supposed to be born, but who had never been born, had become—if not a forgotten thing, then a thing only thought of by one person （herself）， and that only once a year, when she paid this very bill. She had never told the children. What would be the point? And for Salo the cloistered embryo had simply ceased to exist once his triplets came thumping into the world through Loretta’s magic wand.
But they hadn’t been triplets, really, it occurred to her now.
Torrington, Connecticut. Johanna wasn’t even sure where that was, nor could she remember the name the storage facility had previously used, before being bought by a company that apparently managed many such facilities across the country. Cryo-Gen? Reproduction Options? Over the years there had been occasional notifications of these changes, all with assurances of the great care being taken and the profound understanding of responsibility, along with the annual rate increases. Johanna was a busy mother, and not sentimental about all of this technology. If anything, she regarded the annual bill as a kind of superstitious rite to be observed, and the embryo itself an inanimate object magically linked to her precious sons and daughter, but it never went further than that. It was a speck in liquid ice in a building somewhere in Connecticut. It was not even a thing in itself, and certainly not a person with any claim on her at all, let alone a claim even remotely comparable to that of her actual children.