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Interstate 95, September 2016   Celeste sat on the front seat wearing her black turtleneck sweater She had three sweaters: black, blue, and festive Celeste got carsick if forced to sit in the back seat She liked to sit in the front, upright as an Egyptian, eyes on the road The baby also got carsick but no position helped Eliot seemed to find the entire world abrasive   I glanced in the mirror Mimi sat with one arm around the infant seat, adding an extra fleshy layer of protection One of her eyes was lined in black kohl, the other bare Eliot must’ve interrupted Oddly, I preferred the bare eye, the pink lids curling petal-like Someone honked You’d think I’d have been better at keeping my eyes on the road after my father’s death, but the long traffic-clogged sweep rendered me indolent   ‘Hey, cheer up It might be cathartic Maybe you’ll get over avoiding an entire country’   ‘What?’   ‘Catharsis Meeting your mom Closure Yada Yada’ Mimi was smiling, in her I’m pretending to be an upbeat positive person way Her gestures of comfort were often sincerity masquerading as irony   ‘She’s a bitch, but so what? I said I’ll go I’ll go No big deal’   ‘Every time someone asks about art from Japan you turn them away If it’s a choice between your issues and the Waldorf crèche, I’d rather we wasted money on the crèche’   ‘It’s not just my mother, okay’ There were lots of reasons I didn’t deal Japanese art That market was saturated, and I didn’t like Tokyo You couldn’t eat on the subway, and they used soy substitute in their ice cream   ‘Oh?’ Mimi rubbed her neck, which had been giving her pain since the pregnancy   ‘I mean like you know the legend about how the goddess who gave birth to Japan had another child first’ Mimi cracked her neck, and irritation swooped through my knuckles ‘This baby of theirs, he had no bones Hiruko The name literally means leech child’   ‘Jay’   ‘So what did Japan’s mom do? She pushes this baby out to sea’   ‘Jay, you’ve told me this story already You told me after the first ultrasound’   ‘But you get