Tomorrow they'll bury what remains of Jimmy Butler. It will be a big ceremony, the return of a lost soldier. His father, James, lives in the condo down the hall from Nick and me. When we moved into the building two years ago, James came out and held the door open for us. I don't mean he held it once or twice, I mean all day. He brought a metal kitchen chair out to the foyer and just sat there. Each time we approached the building with our arms full, he jumped to his feet and opened the front door. He moved gracefully for an old guy. Nick was afraid he was after a tip, but I could tell by the way he met my eyes each time I passed by, he was just lonely.

James told me about Jimmy that first day. We were standing in the doorway to my condo. Nick and I had just brought in our last two boxes. "Jimmy was 18 when he enlisted," James said. He looked at me closely. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-one," I said.

"You were born in '68?" he asked. I nodded. "That's the same year Jimmy was declared MIA," he said.

I'd never thought too much about the Vietnam War before. "I'd invite you in . . ." I began.

"Nonsense," he said. "Go on and get settled. We'll have plenty of time to get better acquainted." He nodded to a door down the hall. "That's me. Plato."

It took me a few days to figure out what he meant. The complex we'd moved into is an elementary school that's been converted into condos. It's an old brick building, built back in the days when the classics were considered a necessary part of education. Each condo has its own master, a stone carving found on the outside wall of each living room, just above the window. Our wall is dominated by a bust of Shakespeare, complete with high collar and quill pen in hand.

When we first moved in, I looked around at the high white walls and imagined the hundreds of children who once clamored in and out of the doors. I could almost smell their candy-sweet sweat and see their tiny arms waving in the air as they vied for the teacher's attention. Sometimes I think I feel them rushing past me in the hallway, calling out to one another, and I have to stop whatever I'm doing and take a deep breath.

Nick hates it when I talk about children. He tells me I wouldn't even think this way if we could have children of our own, and then I feel terrible since all the testing we did proved our fertility problems are with me and not Nick. Endometriosis. It did a number on my fallopian tubes. We could have gone the in-vitro route, but our insurance wouldn't cover it. At $10,000 a try, it really wasn't an option. Nick thinks my imagination is too strong, and those nights when I can't sleep and I think I hear the sound of tiny Buster Browns padding across the hardwood floors, I know he's right.

"Lily, think about Shakespeare if you need to feel a presence in our home," he told me one night, and I actually tried. I closed my eyes and thought of lines from the plays I'd studied in college, but all I could come up with was "Out, damned spot!" and the first half of Hamlet's soliloquy.

Before Nick got transferred East and we moved to Providence, I'd been working as a paralegal for a law firm that specialized in bankruptcy. We'd been planning to start a family, so after we moved, I didn't look for a new job. Instead, I decorated the condo and learned to cook. Nick and I made love on a schedule, according to ovulation charts and temperature readings. I thought living in an old school would give us an edge. Now I feel like an atheist in church. It's been six months since we found out we can't have children. When we came home from that last doctor appointment, I told Nick I wanted to move away from the schoolhouse, away from the lingering ghost smells of chalk dust and spilled milk, but he said the market was bad for condos right now.

"We'd lose our shirts," he said. "We've got to stick it out for a while."

"Is that all you care about, Nick?" I asked. "The money?"

"I'm not the one with the problem," he said. He immediately apologized, but that's the thing about some words, they sort of hang there forever. The next day he gave me a book of Shakespeare's sonnets. "Hop into bed, Lil," he said. "I'll read to you until you fall asleep."

"You don't have to do that," I said. But I let him tuck me in. I closed my eyes. He read so softly that I could barely hear him. Back when we were dating we'd go away most weekends on road trips. I always drove so Nick could read to me. He'd read anything: discarded directions, sex quizzes in Cosmo magazines, bottle caps of Snapple bottles, whatever he found on the floor of my car. He could make anything sound interesting.

"We could adopt," I said as soon as he finished his last sonnet.

He got up and put the book on the table next to the bed. He sat down beside me again. "I wanted to have our children," he said. "Yours and mine. I'm not looking to raise someone else's kid."

"An adopted child would be our child," I said.

In our marriage, we have something we call The No Card. When we're trying to make a decision and we can't agree, whoever feels the answer should be 'No,' gets their way. It worked when Nick wanted to paint the kitchen orange, when I wanted to sign us up for tango lessons, even when his brother wanted to move in with us for six months while he hid from debt collectors. But it couldn't work on something as important as this, it couldn't.

"No always wins," Nick said, reading my mind. And what could I say? After all, it was my fault we were having the conversation in the first place.

When I first met Sonia, Nick's mother, I felt as if I'd fallen down Alice's hole and landed in the 1950s on acid. She greeted Nick and me at the door and wiped her hands on her apron, saying, "Pardon the flour. I was just baking a pie." She looked me up and down. "Such small hips," she said. "Child-bearing will be tough on you."

Nick just laughed and pushed past her into the kitchen. Later, I asked him how he'd feel if my dad checked him over and commented on the size of his penis. "Really," I said. "I think your mother might be insane."

Nick shrugged it off. "She's just obsessed about grandchildren," he said.

He called Sonia recently to tell her that we couldn't have kids and she said, "I refuse to believe that medical mumbo jumbo. Just keep plugging away."

"You're kidding," I said to Nick later, when he relayed her message. "She actually used the word 'plugging'?"

"I don't think she meant anything by it," Nick said, trying to keep a straight face.

Nick wonders what I do with my days when I'm supposed to be looking for a job. To humor him, I send out resumes. Each Sunday I study the Want Ad section of the newspaper. I go on interviews every once in a while, but my heart isn't in them. The last interview I had, I sat across from yet another Human Resources robot, suffocating in my blue wool suit. When she asked me, "What kind of tree would you be?" I laughed until I realized she was serious, and then I said, "I'm the tree that's been pissed on by every dog in the park."

It wasn't like I wanted the job, anyway. I almost told Nick the story when I got home but I was afraid he'd say, "Why couldn't you tell her an oak or a maple, something with strong roots and a desire to grow?"

I don't tell Nick how I spend most of my days, either in bed, staring up at the high ceiling trying not to think about anything, or over at James'. His wife died ten years ago, and he doesn't like to be alone all day, either. He's part of a group called Families without Resolution. They keep after the White House, trying to get their missing sons' and daughters' bodies returned from Vietnam so they can be buried. I helped him with his mailings to the Pentagon and to various senators. I folded letters and sealed envelopes while he told me stories about Jimmy.

Listening to James, it was easy to picture Jimmy as a child, when he attended school in our building. I like to imagine him small and innocent and unclaimed by war, trudging up and down the very hallways I walk through every day, hallways that are now carpeted and lined with tasteful prints of water lilies and sunflowers. James told me that Jimmy was the kind of boy to cut school to go fishing, and how in seventh grade he once spent his allowance on an anonymous birthday gift to a girl named Betsy who everyone made fun of. "I think she had a hump," James said. "Or was it a cleft palate?"

A few months ago James told me about the conversation he had with Jimmy the night before he shipped off to basic training. Jimmy was scared, afraid he'd made a mistake in enlisting.

"It seemed like the whole country was against the war," James said. "'Jimmy,' I said to him, 'you are just one small person in a very complicated picture. But think big. Think about your country.'"

"Did he feel better about going?" I asked.

James shrugged. "He pretended to. That was all I could ask of him."

"Nick and I can't have children," I said. It just sort of came out. I hadn't even told my parents yet.

"What about adoption?"

"Nick is against it," I said.

James pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at me, hard. "What's there to be against? You want a kid, some kid needs parents. It's simple."

"Not to Nick," I said.

I was the first person James called to tell about Jimmy's body being identified. I couldn't understand him over the phone so I told him to hang on. I hung up the phone and hurried to his apartment. He was still holding onto the phone when he opened the door for me.

"It's over, Lily," he said. His eyes were red, and he needed a tissue. "My boy is coming home." He had a letter from the Pentagon clutched in his hand.

The next day Jimmy's name was in the newspaper, along with the names of eight other soldiers. Relic hunters in Vietnam had discovered the crash site of an American plane over two years ago. It had taken lab specialists that long to identify the bodies.

Today over dinner Nick asked me if I have any interviews set up for the next day.

"No," I said. "Jimmy's burial is tomorrow. I'm going with James."

"I forgot about that. Good, he'll need someone there."

"Yeah, that's what I thought," I said. I waited to see if he'd ask about joining us, but he grabbed a second helping of fried chicken and didn't say anything.

I was clearing the table when James stopped by. He wanted to know if I'd help him pick out a suit to wear to the service.

"Of course," I said.

"About tomorrow, James," Nick said. "Good luck."

"Thank you," James said. His eyeglasses were crooked on his face and he hadn't shaved. I hadn't seen him around since he got the news about Jimmy earlier in the week. He looked as if he'd aged ten years since then.

I walked with him back to his apartment. He opened the door to the hall closet, and we stood there a minute, surveying his clothes. He reached in and pulled out a dark gray suit that smelled of cigar smoke and cedar. The material was shiny on the elbows. I took a quick look at the other clothes and realized the suit was the best thing he owned.

"This looks fine," I said.

"I should have taken it to the dry cleaners," he said. "I don't know why I waited until the last minute." He sounded as if he might cry.

"It's okay," I said. "It'll be okay."

He walked into the living room and sat down on his couch. I followed him.

"I can't do anything more for him," he said.

I sat down beside him. "No one expects you to," I said. I put my hand on his shoulder. It felt bony and fragile, as if it would snap if I touched him too hard.

"I'm afraid people will expect me to put my boy behind me now," he said after a minute. "I can't. I can't just let go of him."

I reached over and took hold of his hand. "You thought he might still be alive, didn't you?" I asked.

"It felt wrong to give up hope," James said. "You understand, don't you?"

I thought about the extra bedroom in our condo, how I'd painted it yellow and stenciled a Noah's ark border on all four walls. No matter how high the pile of books we stack in there grows, no matter how much exercise equipment we store in there, it will always be a baby's room to me.

"Yes," I said. "I understand."

Copyright © 2000 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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