Visible City by Tova Mirvis Page A

overwhelmed by caring for both her young children and her ailing parents that she happened to break her arm three times in one year, accidents each of them, although he’d of course wondered.
    “I don’t want you to say anything to Mom,” Emma said.
    “I don’t know if I can keep this from her,” Leon said.
    “Pretend I’m one of your patients with the right to confidentiality.”
    “I’ll have to bill you,” he joked.
    They laughed, though Leon remained unsettled. If Emma really were his patient, he’d know better what to say. In the midst of a recent session, his tightly controlled patient had interrupted her discourse on what her twins had eaten that day to tell him how much she hoped to run into him in the neighborhood. At first he had felt his customary impatience toward her, but he softened, his sympathy expanding. She was so embarrassed at her confession, as though she’d come up with the most outlandish fantasy ever uttered in this room. “And what would that feel like?” he’d asked her. “What would it mean for you to see me in that way?” As he listened to her wish, and understood the need to have more than she’d been given, he’d thought of Emma, his hand almost reaching for his phone. Upon arriving home that day, he’d offered to accompany her to the doctor because he had been struck by a fear. All these years, had he placed himself in an approximation of the therapist’s role, willing only to discuss needs but never gratify them? When he’d offered to drive Emma, she had looked at him with surprise. It was such a small gesture, yet her gratitude made it appear that he’d promised something far larger.
    Leon stopped walking and looked searchingly at Emma. She gripped his hand, mistaking the pained look on his face for sympathy. But there was no escape from the truth: today’s small effort notwithstanding, his experience of fatherhood was never something to which he’d given sufficient thought. It existed closer to the margins of his life than at its center.
    “I still don’t know what to do,” Emma said.
    “I know. Neither do I,” Leon said, and wished he could give Emma what she wanted. If only he could ask her explicitly, “What do you need me to do?”
    They continued walking, and at the construction site on their corner, Leon paused, glad to have an excuse to lighten the mood. In a matter of weeks, the site had progressed from a razed ground of rubble to a completed foundation. In a few more months, the steel frame of the building would be completed. In a year, the interiors would be in place. At least in this one spot, there was no indecision, no inaction.
    “There’s one of Mom’s former students. I’ll introduce you,” he said, noticing Nina standing in front of the construction site. She was holding Lily while Max peeked through an opening in the plywood barrier.
    “You really are out here all the time,” Leon said as Max picked up in the middle of an agitated conversation with an imaginary friend who was apparently suffering from a host of phobias.
    “Maurice is invisible and he has x-ray vision, but he’s still afraid of the city,” Max said to Emma.
    “This friend of yours is smart. If it were up to me, I’d tell him to pack his bags and move to the country,” Emma said. As Max launched into an account of Maurice’s day, Leon studied Emma’s smiling face as she asked Max about the continued adventures of Maurice. His daughter was a quick-change artist. No one would know that a few minutes before, she’d been crying in his arms. Her voice grew more animated, and he was reminded of the child she’d once been. She’d yet to shed some wide-eyed hopefulness, some inner playfulness. Now that she was encountering the pains of adulthood, she would lose those qualities, which was probably for the best—it was the only way to survive the sadness inevitably awaiting her.
    “Maurice isn’t usually this friendly to strangers,” Nina said. “He must like