I found another baby today. They’re always lying there, just past the gate, in the tall grass, where bitter pears fall in the summer. So, that tree is a baby tree now. I love the babies—coming to love them was exactly as everyone always describes: automatic, immediate, without decision—but something seems wrong. The babies grow up much too fast. I’m not being dramatic or even sentimental; I mean, the babies are growing up at an unnatural speed. 

It’s been hardly a breath, but the first is already applying for a job at the grocery store on the corner. The babies are insatiable: never enough of me to go around or milk with dinner. Hence the grocery job. Whole milk special, half-off. The first baby and I hardly speak anymore, except for when the baby reads aloud the problems in those bright blue and green books. I hardly remember any geometry. I get fatalistic when I feel insufficient, my worthiness challenged. Caretaking does that, makes you realize the limits of your apparent decency. 

You don’t even need to know this; you’re a baby, I scoffed one night, exhausted from work and fielding a question about the Pythagorean theorem. The baby gathered up the books from the kitchen table, face flushing red under a rush of tears. A stone smashed through the window in the middle of my body. Grow up, Babbo, the baby spat. The babies call me Babbo because I went to Italy once and was once a lesbian and now I have no gender. 

When I gave the baby your shoes, I said, These shoes once belonged to the person who showed me the pear tree where I found you. The baby asked, My father? I was surprised. I don’t know where the baby got this idea. I admitted, Not exactly, or I can’t be sure. The baby muttered, Slut, and I walked to the bathroom to close the only door in the house I can close, and began to cry. 

I know I can’t understand the babies. I was once a baby; I never agreed to being born, but I don’t know what it’s like to come from a tree. I know the babies hurt, yearn, wonder. I understand the reality of my feelings aren’t available to them, lessened by virtue of me finding the babies: a kind of conception making me a kind of parent.

See, I’ve wondered, but I really can’t explain it. You and I hardly touched that last summer: the love between us had fallen short, though we weren’t ready to acknowledge it yet. The last time it happened, we left the windows open, the door ajar. Your hands were wet from an orange, split in two in your palms. 

Today, I watch a string of dried oranges you made tap-tap-tap against the window as the baby tries on your clothes for the prom. Yes, you were here once. Maybe that’s all it took, all it ever takes.