"Ask her why she's crying,” Roo said sidewise to Pierce, who shook himself from Maria's eyes to see that yes, the nun was still brimming, unspeaking but uncomforted, and regarding them.

"Estas lagrimas,” Pierce said to her, guessing, and pointing to his eye. “Que esta es?"

She looked at them a moment as though in wild hope or fear, and turned away, and went out, and then in a moment she came back from the adjoining ward and in her arms she held another baby, wrapped in the same blue and white blanket, with the same huge eyes full of what surely seemed to be wonder and love and happy expectant need, that's the trick of it, and she brought this baby before them, and placed it in Pierce's lap, right next to the one in Roo's lap, Maria.

"Jesusa,” she said.

Any two babies can look very much alike. Roo and Pierce both thought that thought, for a moment. Very much alike. The nun wept quietly, her hands clasped before her.

* * * *

"I never thought of two,” Roo said to Pierce. “I didn't imagine. I never once thought of two. Did you?"

"No. Never.” He had not, in any practical way, been able to think of one; had dreamed and imagined, had seen himself in some conceivable future holding the hand of a small black-eyed girl—as though in a movie, himself and her, on their way to, oh, school or the candy store—but he knew this wasn't thinking of the way Roo meant it.

They sat with coffees in a soda, back downtown now. The place was open to the street like a stage set with the fourth wall missing. Ancient cars of kinds no longer made in the land they had come from, Studebakers, DeSotos, went by slowly; Utopia is a country of slow drivers. The table they sat at—had been sitting at a long time, stunned and silent mostly—was red, white, and blue enamel, with the word PEPSI written on it in swirling blue letters, a message from his youth.

"I don't know what to do,” Roo said, devastated. “I can't think. I can't take one and leave the other. I can't."

"No?"

She looked at him as though suspecting he could, and shocked by the suspicion. “No. No, I don't think I. I couldn't."

They sat silent. He thought of Jesusa appearing in her towel or wrapper. Was that even real?

"Maybe it was just a terrible dumb idea,” she said. “To come here to this country and dig around for what we want, not knowing anything. How could that go right.” She stared at empty futurity. “We should just go home."

There are some silences and stillnesses that we remember afterward with greater vividness than acts: as though even after a long time, after years, our souls can still flow out of us and into them. As Pierce's did then.

"No,” he said then. “We won't go home."

"Pierce."

"We'll take them both."

She clapped her hand to her brow, staring down at the coffee spill on the enameled table. “Pierce. Don't say that. You don't have to. You're a good guy, I know you want this for me, I know it. But don't be stupid. Don't."

"No,” he said. “Not for you. For me. It's what I want. I want this to happen, I want to take both of them home. It's the only way, and it's what I want."

"No."

"Yes."

"Pierce,” Roo said. She had grown still, ceased to comb her hair with her fingers and slap the table; was only regarding him. “Think about it. What it's going to be like. This is years and years of commitment. All your life. Two, not one but two, and it may be that even one you could be sorry about, and think later you'd made a mistake, in a way you never could if it was your own, you see? Have you ever thought about that?"

He hadn't, really; she could see that in his silence; and in his silence she could see him understand that she had thought about it, which she had never plainly said before.

"I mean can you see what this is going to take? Can you? I mean just the money."

"No, Roo,” Pierce said softly. “No, I can't see."

"Can't?” she said.

"I can't, no. I can't really imagine. You're right. I never have been able to imagine the future, or see what's going to come of what I do, or of what anybody does. I can't do it. I don't know why. I try to work it out, practically, but I never really can."

"Yes."

"You know."

She said nothing, but of course she knew it was so, had always known, and from now on (he thought) she would know he knew too.

"So I can't tell what this will be,” he said, “or what it really means, no. But it's what I want. I know that. And if you'll do it with me, then I'll do everything I need to do, whatever it is. But just step by step. Just step by step."

The soda was filling up with men and women, men in white figured shirts, women with children.

"Really?"

"Yes. I want to do this."

"I don't know how you can say that without knowing."

"Well, I'm saying it. And you don't know everything anyway."

She wouldn't smile; he wished she would, and he refused to think that she didn't smile because she truly saw all that lay ahead, for him and her and them.

"Both,” she said at length. “Oh my God."

He waited.

"We could go back there, at least,” she said. “Arrange another visit. We could ask, ask what, what..."

"Okay,” he said. “Okay then. Come on.” For a brief moment the soda around him, the poster for Emu cigarettes and the coffee machine and the Pepsi tables and the street outside lurched or sank as though preparing to vanish, but that was only because of his own rising to his feet, his own lifting of himself by his legs and arms, which changed his Point of View and the world with it. Relativity. It all settled again peaceably in an instant, and he felt in his pocket for taxi fare.

* * * *

Maybe it was only because Roo had been so well prepared for the future she had previously cast for herself that the different future she was offered had unsettled her so badly. Pierce thought this later, when not having the two of them was inconceivable. She wept in the taxi, she shook her head to shake him off when he asked why, but shook her head too when he offered to turn back.

Strong and clear, though, and fearfully gentle to take one and then the other in her arms, then to do what had to be done. Come on, she said to him, and he did. It meant starting all over again, as she had known and he hadn't, because the forms, stamps, seals, permissions, visas, authentications, oaths couldn't simply be copied exactly, alike as they would need to be; they were identical yet unique, as Jesusa and Maria were. And there would be a journey home alone for one of them, Pierce the one, and back again, as the unbearable days and weeks slid away.

But then on the airplane together, going home bringing them both, looking down at them as they looked up or slept or woke; bigger already than they had been when the four of them had first met.

"What'll we do,” Roo said, leaning over close to him, “about their names?"

She'd asked before. “I don't know,” Pierce said.

"Their names are their names. New ones would be so ... fake."

"But."

"Well, I mean you know. Maria, okay. But together with Jesusa?"

"I know. Why are we whispering?"

"You can't just change one name; that would be terrible."

He thought it would be too, and thought maybe he knew why. “Well, we'll change both. Maria can be Mary. Mary, Mary, sweet as any name could be."

"Okay and?"

"Jesusa. Jesus. Hm. Well, he said I am the way the truth and the life. Via Veritas Vita. How about one of those? An epithet."