The Sea That Leads to All Seas

A month after her boyfriend Mohamed is deported, Larissa agrees to dinner with the dental student. When you are deported from the United States, you are barred from reentry for ten years. In 2013 Larissa will be thirty-five, the age most doctors cite for increased risks in pregnancy. She has decided on one plan for her life: to give birth to a healthy baby, a United States citizen. For now she takes appointments and manages files in the office of the dental student's uncle, where the student spent his time in training, making corny jokes between patients, putting a hand to his cheek and exclaiming "Tooth hurty!" when she checked in a two-thirty, and staring at her longingly.

On his very first day he'd leaned over the counter, the white lab coat riding up his arms, unmasking dark curls of hair. He smelled of fluoride and aftershave, antibacterial soap. To Larissa, a woman terrified of disease, the smell was not unappealing. Like most American men, he inquired first about her accent.

"Are you Russian?" he said. "Some of my ancestors were Russian."

"I'm from Ukraine," she said, and turned back to her computer.

The dental student is no longer really a student. He's a dentist and has a joint practice on Lake Shore Drive. He phones the office at least once a week from his own—calls Larissa has to answer—on the pretense of needing to consult his uncle on some dental matter. Over the phone the dental student has said she is a light, noted upcoming concerts outdoors at Grant Park, and described cozy little restaurants.

This time when he asks her how she is, she cuts to the chase. "I'm hungry. I can't get full when I have to eat alone."

He doesn't take the hint, or perhaps can't believe in it. "Alone? But doesn't your mother—I thought you lived with your mother."

Larissa does not. Her mother is only often visiting, a houseguest who leaves behind a toothbrush and takes with her a key. She is here now, keeping Larissa company since Mohamed has gone. But together they seem too much to be widows; food truly doesn't taste the same. She will send her mother back soon to her new husband, Randall.

Larissa explains none of this to the dental student. He knows nothing of Mohamed.

"Have you met my mother?" she says.

Rapidly, he seems to catch on. "I'd like to sometime, very much." The invitation to dinner is for them both. "How about that little Italian place I've been telling you about? The one with candles dripping down the sides of bottles?"

"Yes, all right," she agrees. "But wouldn't you rather my mother stayed home?"

He would, but—he says unabashed—Larissa has refused him so many times before. No, she corrects, he has just never really asked. He laughs, and she knows she has made him feel both stupid and proud to have finally won, and made of herself a kind of liar. The kind who lies for selfish reasons, and makes only the other feel good. If she had not just lost Mohamed irretrievably, she would not be doing this.

Larissa first met her boyfriend not long after the planes flew into the buildings in New York City. She was on the steps of the Art Institute museum, where she liked to smoke during her lunch break, and a crowd had gathered around the boys who drummed on plastic buckets for money. Mohamed was with his brother Hassan; both were photographers, here against their mother's wishes from Morocco, on temporary visas. The two Arabs with their cameras stood out from the crowd, though no one seemed to fear them.

The short one, Hassan, caught sight of Larissa watching and pointed her out. After a short discussion, they approached her. They looked like typical art school students, wearing ratty plaid shirts and winter scarves wrapped loosely around their necks. Mohamed kept a full beard, Hassan a thin mustache. Formally, Hassan introduced them, and...