Lost, again.

“We’re lost, aren’t we?” Marlene said.

“Define lost.”

She didn’t so much laugh as breathe heavy out the nose. “Do you know where we are?”

“I know where we’re going.”

“I know where we’re going too,” Marlene said, “but at least I’m honest enough to admit I don’t know how to get there.”

“You’re the navigator,” Sean said. “You tell me.” They’d established that part of the relationship early in their marriage, one of those jokey experiences that solidified into bond. He was frequently lost back then, turning too soon or too late, always certain of landmarks - that street name, that exit, those specific shoes dangling from telephone wires - which turned out not to be the ones he’d thought.

“It doesn’t work if the driver doesn’t listen to the navigator.” She put an emphasis on ‘driver’ perilously close to contempt.

“I’ve never had an accident,” he said. Hers were frequent enough. He waited a beat and she said, “Well, I’ve never been lost.”

“You sure ‘bout that?” He regretted his tone immediately but it was past apologizing.

For a minute he thought he recognized the street. Not in the ‘they’d been there’ way - this landscape, like the future itself, was untrodden - but in the manner of following directions. Familiar because it was where the instructions said said they were supposed to be. Something about the numbers on the buildings, their heights, six or seven stories, their early 20th century brick and ironwork ages. Brownstones. He’d been the one to take down the details on the phone.

“I think this is the right street,” he said, stopping behind a taxi discharging a woman, a dog - schnauzer? beagle? - a child about eight, long hair but boyish in shorts and a t-shirt.

Marlene looked at the neighborhood hopefully. “You think?”

“No,” Sean admitted.

She sighed.

Years later, in the actual future, this would never happen, as they’d just consult the phone, see the blue dot of themselves on labelled streets, follow a voice whose accent they chose for whimsy.

But here in the past the directions were on the back of an old electric bill envelope, hastily taken down over the phone with a pencil in need of sharpening, more wood than graphite meeting paper. Marlene consulted the envelope again. “I can’t even read your handwriting,” she said. “Is this a one or a seven?”

“My sevens have a slash. Is there a slash?”

“No.”

“Then it’s a one. What number? I mean the whole thing.” He squinted at the brownstones for house numbers but none were immediate.

“Can we just ask someone?”

He gave the neighborhood a grim smile, all of it again unfamiliar. Should the place even be in a neighborhood? Didn’t the lady on the phone mention something about a park? The conversation had been so loaded he had a hard time remembering any of the peripheral details, like how to get there. ‘Park in back,’ the lady, the nurse, had said. He remembered that, looked around for just such a driveway or side street. “I don’t think anyone around here will know it exists,” he told Marlene. “It’s not that kind of place.”

“What about the cab driver?”

The woman was down on her heels talking to the child and digging through a purse, clearly telling her - it was a girl - to keep the dog on the leash.

“Why don’t people ever get money ready before they leave a cab?” he said.

“Go ask now, while he’s stopped,” Marlene said.

Sean checked the rear view mirror; at least two cars now behind him just as trapped. Someone was going to lay into the horn in minute, for sure if he got out. “It’s too late,” he said, relieved the woman was back at the taxi’s window handing over cash, but then she started having a conversation with the driver and Marlene’s urgency started to press on him to move. Marlene’s urgency, always her urgency.

He was unbuckling his seatbelt, dropping the car into park, when someone behind did beep and the taxi pulled ahead. The woman turned and gave Sean that city-only ‘what?!’ or maybe ‘what the hell?!’ palms out gesture.

Sean held his own palms up that it wasn’t him, awkward smile all over his fice. Marlene rolled down the window as they pulled past and he had to slow, then stop, when she called out, “Excuse me?”

The woman gave a startled turn, the dog barked, and the little girl waved like they were old friends. Sean pulled to the side until the wheels squeaked on curb, then rolled his own window down and tried waving the cars behind them to go around.

“We’re looking for this clinic,” Marlene said.

“Clinic?” the woman asked. “There’s no clinic.” She looked rich. Long skirt, long hair, long face.

Marlene laughed nervously. “It’s, uhm, it’s a fertility clinic.” She looked down at the envelope and read the street address as if Sean’s writing was suspicious, as if the words might be wrong altogether.

Sean had the urge to tell the woman, this stranger, that the whole thing was Marlene’s idea. He might have under even the slightest difference of situation, then he felt a tiny measure of pride at his willpower or wisdom or something in staying silent.

The woman frowned, said, “Market? There’s no Market street around here. There’s hardly any markets.” She turned to the little girl, said, “Right sweetie? No markets here.”

The girl nodded solemnly. The dog lay down as if it felt this would take awhile.

“Let me see that,” the woman said and Marlene handed her the envelope. She peered at it, then glanced, head still down, at Sean and raised her eyebrows as if to ask, ‘are you sure?’

“I think you mean Meecher Street,” she said, then paused and looked them both over, assessed the car, its age and condition - old and weathered - Marlene’s hands, maybe for the ring, Martin’s cheap Casio watch on his wrist. All of it as if deciding whether Sean and Marlene should be making this decision at all, if directing them to the clinic wasn’t a mistake she wanted responsibility for. Then she took a strangely expectant breath and directed them some eight blocks over, under the overpass and elevated train line, out of the neighborhood completely, a forty-five minute city drive, what with all the lights and stop signs.

It was the kind of journey, all stop and go, drive and wait, that invites hesitation.

At a long intersection, one of those with a short light you miss twice before making it through, Marlene asked, “Is this the right thing? Are we ready?”

“Are we ever ready?” he asked. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.” He felt nothing of the sort.

“I don’t know,” Marlene said. They crept forward four or five car lengths, stopped again. “I still feel lost.”

“The weird thing about being lost,” Sean said, ‘is that every time it happens it feels brand new.”

“That woman had it all together. And so…judgy.”

Sean laughed, and felt a rush of certainty. He took her hand; she took his, squeezed. “You get lost, you go forward. I mean, we were lost back there, right? But here we are, back on track.” It was the kind of lost they’d have again and again over the years, through the kids and everything else, those moments when the relationship faltered, the way suddenly unknown, the companionship doubtful. But then you realize you’ve been here before, so many times that it has a kind of comforting unfamiliarity. All he had to do was drive. All she had to do was navigate them out.

The light turned green, eight cars ahead, and he made it through on the yellow.