“You know what they call remodeling — the marriage buster,” Katia said, as she took a grim sip of her coffee in the disaster that was Tory’s future kitchen. The ceiling above them was bereft of skylights, only a shroud of thick plastic separating them from the elements. Lucky for them that December in Southern California meant eighty-degree weather.

Tory blinked in the fine drift of sawdust that blew continually, sideways and up from the floor, like living in some kind of tan snow globe. She imagined pirouetting in it, like some low-rent version of The Nutcracker. “But your spouse is supposed to drive you crazy. Not die.” She lowered her voice as a toothy boy with skin the color of almonds walked a drill saw through the room, stirring up a whir of dust. He had been there about a week, one of a revolving army of day laborers who came and then disappeared. She could be wrong, but she thought he was flirting with her, and despite herself she tried not to wear the very ugliest of her flannel pajamas in the morning. She noted that Katia bent over the table in front of him so that the dark cave of her cleavage was visible.

Privacy was a thing of the past, Tory and Gordon having given up the rental they had planned to stay in until the house was completed. It had been six months since they had euphemistically “camped” in their own house, jammed into a small maid’s quarters off the kitchen, sharing a dwarfish half bath, cooking over a hot plate, and developing a communal life with the construction crew that included drinking Pacificos on the roof at five each evening before knocking off for the day.

The crew went back each night to homes that, although undoubtedly less luxurious, functioned, whereas Tory and Gordon roamed the ruins of their future like ghosts, unable to enjoy any of it. A Wolf cooktop still in its cardboard box, a marble countertop upended along the far wall. The only thing that actually thrived in the house was the ants — long, sinewy trails of them, going from nowhere to nowhere. For the life of them, Tory and Gordon couldn’t figure out what the insects were looking for, there seemed so little to sustain them.

A month before, instead of readying the finished house for Christmas, they had been informed it would be another three months, and then Gordon had inconsiderately gone and had a heart attack. Tory had always been pleased with their ten-year age spread, thinking no matter how old she got, Gordon would always be considerably older. A safeguard from being cheated on, if nothing else. She had never thought through the flipside of the deal. For some reason, she figured if he made it through his forties, they were safe, but then in his fiftieth year on the planet, in the middle of dry-rotted crossbeams and crumbling Italian limestone, he upped and had a heart attack that put him in the hospital.

Now Tory got teary-eyed every time she watched Gordon argue with the contractor, Ned, or climb the dangerously spiraling staircase for the afternoon cerveza. It had never before occurred to her that he might not be there by the time the house was finished.

In her usual ill-thought-out way, Tory had invited Katia for the holidays, partly for support, partly to support, since Katia had been battling breast cancer, finally getting it into remission only to have her husband, Clay, leave her. Tory had never liked Clay, but she couldn’t tell Katia that right then — it seemed a little underhanded, a little late to the game. She had been a bridesmaid at their wedding after all. Add to that Gordon’s daughter was coming home from college, suffering from a broken romance, and it all made Tory want to pour herself a drink. The taboo against drinking at breakfast was overdone anyway. What was the real difference between a mimosa cocktail for Sunday brunch and a Scotch straight up on a cruel Monday? Instead, Tory left Katia at the table and went to brush her teeth.

Ned, the contractor, had insisted on laying bait traps everywhere, and now as Tory bent down eyelevel with the sink, she watched a slow-moving ant struggling to carry a dead companion. It was epic and tragic in its small ant way. Tory was mortified that she might have been the cause indirectly, although in the past when ants had invaded her kitchen, she sprayed them down mercilessly with Windex.

Back in the kitchen, she watched as Ned climbed down the dramatically dangerous staircase from the master bedroom — a staircase of limestone planks levered into the concrete wall with open air in between each step and no handrails. They were so over time and over budget that Tory doubted that Ned was keeping up the exorbitant workers comp insurance, but in her exhaustion she was incapable of worrying about this, becoming Buddhist about it all.

Ned rubbed his eyes as he talked to her, a habit that allowed him to both avoid eye contact and not seem shifty. “We ripped out the wall of the shower to install the rain dome showerhead you wanted…”

The  you wanted barbed, insinuating that Tory’s impetuousness was partly to blame for the disastrous delays.

Tory stayed quiet until she couldn’t bear another moment. “And?”

“You should come see it yourself.”

“I won’t know what I’m looking at. Spare me the agony.”

“PVC pipes. Spliced together. Clogged with old gout.” He spit the words out like they were obscenities. “A sloppy job. I’m surprised the thing ever even worked.”

Tory had grown to detest Ned after the first weeks of moving in, his constant dull optimism that they would be finished soon, his impenetrable, some might say comatose, calm in the face of the opposite. When everyone sat on the roof drinking beer, Ned would strum his guitar like some 60’s commune hippy. But when Gordon lay naked on the half-bath floor, flopping like a fish, Ned had been heroic. Crazed, Tory ran back and forth picking clothes for Gordon (what do you wear to a heart attack?) while Ned performed CPR until the paramedics arrived. After he was stabilized, they couldn’t get a stretcher through the building debris, so Ned carried Gordon’s limp body up the stairs as tenderly as one would a bride. Tory had gone Buddhist about him, too, ever since.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“We’re packing up in a few hours for Christmas break. No water till we get back in two weeks.”

The last straw. Tory’s tears ran gummy through the fine sawdust on her skin. Ned, appalled, turned and fled.

“Well, honey,” Katia said, “look at the bright side. At least we don’t have to put up a tree.”

Surprisingly few people travelled on the actual day of Christmas, most were already where they intended to be. When Tory scored four economy seats to Italy, Katia and Gordon were surprisingly docile, and Caitlin, moody from being boyfriendless, couldn’t care less. A frazzled young mother and her three toddlers occupied the row behind them, the children entertaining themselves by kicking the seatbacks in front of them while mom slept. Thankfully it was a European airline so they gave out small bottles of wine like it was water, and Tory fortified herself. She tried to be upbeat, and read aloud her Intro to Conversational Italian: “Buon giorno. Buona sera. Buona notte. Ciao. Prego. Arrivederci.

“Arrivederci, Roma,” Gordon said. “Remember that song?”

“It’ll be glowing with candelight,” Tory continued. “Italy is full of Catholics so they take the holiday seriously. The churches will be so beautiful for midnight mass. And they have chestnuts roasting on every corner. I love chestnuts.”

Caitlin, dry, aesthetic, asked the stewardess how much farther it was to Palestine from Italy. The stewardess looked troubled and moved her snack cart up the aisle, skipping their row.

“I wanted crackers, and you’re freaking her out,” Katia complained.

“Why?”

“You know.”

“That figures, that you would stereotype anyone associated with the Middle East as a possible terrorist.”

“Honey, it’s Christmas. Who goes there on Christmas?”

“Uh, it’s the land of Jesus’s birth and all.”

Tory opened another bottle of wine. Katia had never had children or stepchildren, and didn’t know the art of ignoring what didn’t kill you.

They stayed in a long dark apartment on a piazza that was anchored on one end by a stern, white church. Tory and Gordon snuggled on the narrow, hard mattress that first morning and listened to the church bells as if they were magic. The bells rang morning, noon, and night, and, in addition, marked every hour, and pretty soon Gordon was complaining that they woke him up, and he bolted the shutters and locked the windows before they went to sleep at night.

When Tory took her brood to Italy, she promised, if not snow, at least crisp, Christmas-like weather, which Southern California never provided, but as luck would have it, they arrived during a record heat-wave so that restaurants shoved mothballed tables outside, and clouds of mosquitoes bloomed on the Arno. Not a roasted chestnut stand in sight.

Tory had been friends with Katia since college, and they were equally relaxed about their aging looks, but Katia had been coerced by her plastic surgeon during her mastectomy to have implants put in. From a boyish figure she had transformed into a B-list starlet. It was a change of identity as violent as puberty. For the first time in her life, she had serious cleavage, and she changed the way she dressed to accommodate it: Spandex T-shirts, sheer button-down blouses. Especially after the idiot Clay left her, it was almost like a challenge, Hey, I’m still in the game. Now she got hungry looks from the Italian men they passed in museums, restaurants, on the street, and Katia, formerly indifferent to flirting, now returned their looks fully, like a starving cat. Tory thought none of this was a good example for Caitlin and tried to distract her with shopping.

“What would you like, honey? A purse? Maybe a beautiful pair of Italian shoes?”

“I want a plane ticket to Palestine.”

Tory sighed. “What about your dad?”

“He can come too.”

She really was a most difficult girl. “How about a plaster-cast of David? For your desk?” She remembered as if it were yesterday Gordon’s visits with the girl when they first married. Caitlin, at ten, distrustful about her father’s new life. But by the end of their allotted weekend, she’d wrap her frail arms around his waist, crying to stay with him. There were times, those first years, when Tory feared he’d capitulate, go back to his ex just to mend the family.

The unseasonal Florentine heat made trudging through the narrow, cobbled streets tiring. The Boboli gardens baked. The leaves on the roses were scorched. In the streets, sewage gases bubbled up from the vents and filled the air with threatening, portentous smells. Tory imagined that this was what it had been like in the Middle Ages, the contagions of plague and cholera that ravaged the fortress cities regularly. There were more torture museums than you could shake a stick at. They saw Galileo’s first telescope and his shriveled, tobacco-colored middle finger behind glass. Tory thought she had underestimated the sadism of the Italians.

In the palazzo where their apartment was, a small, rickety elevator took up three of them at a time so that one was always left behind, or they took turns in pairs. Late one night, Caitlin was with them, forcing Tory to stand so close to Gordon that she could smell his aftershave. If she were alone with him, she fantasized she would have raised her skirted leg, and he would make wild, panty-less love to her in that metal cage. Since his heart attack, he had not touched her. He absent-mindedly hummed a tune musicians had been playing in the Piazza della Signoria. They read that the piazza had been the site of regular hangings and burnings by the powers that were, but now they mostly only served overpriced Bellini cocktails to the unwary. Instead, Tory held Gordon’s hand and felt old.

On their first Friday night in town, Gordon felt too tired to go out to dinner.

“How can you stay in while we’re in Florence?”

“We’ve been out every night since we got here. I need a rest.”

“I don’t want to go alone.”

“Take Katia and Caitlin out.”

Caitlin was sitting sideways in a stuffed chair, long coltish legs over the arm, watching CNN. “I’m staying with you, dad. We’ll order pizza.”

Undeniable that Gordon had grown mild since the attack, and he seemed irritated that Tory wasn’t catching on. He acted like this was a Lesson for the Future Without Him. “A girls’ night out will be good for you.”

Normally she would have pouted, or even broke out in tears, but she wanted to act brave in front of Caitlin. “I know just the place.”

“It’s a blue moon night tonight,” Caitlin yelled, riveted to the TV.

Tory’s idea of authentic meant obscure, and she and Katia made the long walk over the Ponte Vecchio and started down the warren of streets of the Santo Spiritu. Although she had programmed the address into her cell phone, it seemed optimistic in the face of the medieval disorder, the street names inconsiderately painted on the upper corners of the dark buildings, impossible to see, blue moon or not. They walked past window after window of charming restaurants, filled with candlelight and people and food smells, and Katia lagged farther and farther behind.

“Wouldn’t any of these be fine?” Katia finally said.

“This is a special place. Only locals go there.”

“Because only they can find it.”

The guidebook said that house numbers for businesses were painted red, for residences in black. Or maybe it was the reverse, Tory couldn’t remember, although none of it mattered because it was too dark to see. Where was that full moon anyway? They wandered up and down a street for fifteen minutes before Katia, in a burst of frustration, went into a business to ask for help. It ended up being the restaurant they were looking for.

The place was empty and brightly lit, more like a Laundromat. The proprietor was friendly enough, if distracted, despite the pitch of Katia’s tight-fitting sweater. He put down a plate of antipasti and a bottle of wine they had not ordered, then escaped to check on the soccer game on TV in the kitchen before they had a chance to order.

“I told you we came too early,” Tory said. “He figures we’re Americans.”

“We are Americans. Who like to eat early, what’s wrong with that?”

There were small, bite-size, olive pizzas, and prosciutto wrapped around asparagus, salted ricotta, a side of white beans, and wonderful bread. The two women plowed through the food, then finished off a large arugula salad.

“This is the best food ever,” Katia said, licking her fingertips.

Tory nodded, eyes closed. “Better than sex.” She had had too much to drink on an empty stomach.

Katia patted her hand. “Give him time. He’s probably scared he’ll have the big one, you know. Like a time bomb that could go off any minute.”

Tory nodded, maudlin, and speared another piece of cheese. “How did we end up in the most romantic city, on the most romantic night, two women alone?”

“Gordon is still here. Quit acting like he’s not. Trust me, you’ll know when he’s gone. I haven’t slept with another man since Clay left.”

Katia looked strange and lovely that night — her close-cropped brown hair, her unlikely tight sweater. Tory would never manage as well alone. She felt guilty that she had revealed sacred information about Gordon. As much as she loved Katia, she would not reveal the sad failings of their marriage to an outsider. One of the bonds of matrimony was not to let the garbage leak out to the world at large. 

The proprietor came sailing out of the kitchen with two large plates of mushroom ravioli. Their menus still lay, ignored, at the corner of the table. They had never ordered. Was it maybe like omakase, like those Japanese sushi places back home that kept serving you food of their choice till you were full? The proprietor smiled big every time either Tory or Katia said anything in English, politely not understanding. But they did know enough to order sparkling water, acqua gassata, and it arrived stubbornly still, so maybe he simply didn’t care, or maybe he was taking advantage of their tourist status (remember to check the bill) to clean out his kitchen. Why did the Italians always treat Americans like silly children? Regardless, the ravioli tasted like pillows of foreplay.

By the time the homemade Limoncello and cantucci arrived, Tory and Katia were floating away on an orgasmic, foodie high when Gordon and Caitlin appeared in the doorway. “How long have we been here?” Tory whispered. Nine-thirty, and the restaurant was packed. The hostess shook her head, but Gordon pointed a finger at their table and was led through.

“You came,” Tory said, and the shock of seeing him made her face burn, as if she had been caught being unfaithful. “What changed your mind?”

Gordon shrugged. “Caitlin wanted to see the blue moon so we walked down to the Arno. Then it was so close.”

Neither Tory or Katia believed this story for a second, surprised only that Caitlin didn’t contradict him, that they had managed to find the hidden place at all.

“I’m glad you came,” Katia said. “Tory’s been pouting.”

Gordon sat down and looked up at Caitlin, expectant. “Someone had a bunch of admirers on the bridge.”

Caitlin rolled her eyes and pulled out a chair with a shriek of wood on stone.

“You should have fun with these Italian boys,” Katia said, “while it’s still meaningless.”

Caitlin pursed her lips. Tory wondered if she herself had been so gloomy and earnest at that age.

“I used to be like you, saving it,” Katia said. She had drunk another glass of wine and was feeling feisty. Pretty soon she’d go on a tirade about Clay. “Take it from me — someone older and wiser. The only thing I regret is all the men I didn’t sleep with.”

“You should have called me back then,” Gordon said, laughing.

Caitlin’s voice raised in pitch. “You don’t understand. Farid and I are soul mates.”

“When you’re eighteen, ‘soul mates’ is a euphemism for sex.” Katia banged down her wineglass for emphasis and spilled purple drops along her fingers, the tablecloth.

With the addition of two more people, the proprietor turned the table over to an Irish waitress. No more omakase. Tory suspected that sending the girl was to avoid them ordering in their remedial Italian. Now the two women got to re-experience the entire meal as voyeurs.

The waitress took their orders and delivered only what they asked for, which seemed much less magical. Another bottle of wine was ordered to keep the new diners company, and although Tory was quite sure she was drunk, she also was quite certain that the horse-faced Irish waitress was flirting with Gordon, and that he was flirting back. After the girl delivered their salads, she stood in front of him for an inordinate amount of time and answered Gordon’s uninspired questions.

“Of course, the weather is much nicer, and there are so many English and Irish here, a whole slew of pubs that I can go to when homesickness strikes.” The girl spoke only to Gordon, as if the rest of the table didn’t exist. Tory and Katia exchanged significant looks.

“But how do you do it?” Tory said, the wine definitely affecting her brain. “How do you bear living in all this dead beauty?”

The thing that struck her about the city was that everything had already happened, long ago, and they were simply trolling among the remains. The place was as much a museum on the outside as the inside. Which did not prevent her from loving it.

The girl dragged her gaze over to Tory, then quickly turned back to Gordon.  “Can I be getting you anything else? More bread?”

“That would be amazing,” loyal Katia said.

An hour later, the meal finally ended for the second time, they staggered up out of their seats and towards the door. Gordon left a lavish, lecherous tip, and the Irish girl hurried after him with his forgotten scarf, wrapped it around his neck, and kissed his cheek. They all stood, a bit speechless.

“You remind me of my uncle,” she said. “He died a few years back.”

But all the victory that Tory could have felt over Gordon disappeared, and she was left only with pity. He was the love of her life, after all. She was embarrassed that he was deemed too old, too homely, to be seen as an object of lust by this young waitress with the horse face. Tory went so far as to wish Gordon would run away with the slutty Irish girl because hating him would be so much easier to bear than his dying.

The moon had risen, and, high, they trudged through the glowing streets, feeling cautious and bruised by all the superfluous beauty. Crossing the bridge, the moon silvered the backs of the heroin addicts huddled over their supplies, and the lighted windows of the buildings reflected nicely in the algae-clogged Arno.

“Such a lovely night,” Katia said, hooking her arm in Gordon’s. “Thank you.”

“But why not a single vendor of chestnuts?” Tory said. “Imagine walking along with a hot bag of them, nibbling as you go.”

“How can you think of eating another bite?” Katia asked.

Caitlin was still sulking, and Tory, sulking over the injustice of the absentia chestnuts, walked next to her, putting her arm around the girl’s brittle shoulders.

“So tell me about this “blue moon” of yours.”

Caitlin shrugged, sensing drunken patronage, but going along with it. Her mother, Gordon’s ex, was mostly too busy for her, hosting a woman’s talk show on TV, so even a clumsy, second-hand mothering was probably better than nothing.

“It’s not really blue, of course,” Caitlin said, squinting out at the dark waters. The girl thrived in the world of facts, but Tory doubted that would take her far in life.

“Really?”

“It’s like an extra full moon based on the solar calendar. A numerical anomaly. It doesn’t happen very often.”

“Like us all being together in Florence tonight.” The idea of Gordon being gone put her relationship with the girl in perspective. She did not fool herself that even after ten years of marriage, Caitlin would think it necessary to include her in birthdays and Christmases. They were accidental family.

“I guess.”

The moon patted strips of milky light down the length of the slowly churning water.

“Kind of disappointing that it isn’t really blue.”

“When it’s really blue it’s due to atmospheric disturbances — volcanoes or forest fires — that emit particles in the air. The particles need to be one micron in diameter, wider than the wavelength of red light.”

“You’re a frighteningly smart girl, aren’t you?” Tory said.

They had been bad tourists, wandering the streets in search of restaurants, wine,  panini, none of which were at all hard to come by, exploring place almost exclusively through their taste buds, but now they collectively felt that they should see something “important.”  They decided to go first to the duomo, the most obvious attraction, beautiful if overwhelming, just in case they ran out of steam. They trekked around the cavernous interior, and then Caitlin insisted on going to the top of the dome. They agreed, not really thinking about the logistics — many, many stairs, four hundred, sixty-three to be exact — until they had already paid the hefty euro entrance fee.

At first it was a game, playing a relay of who would lead and who would follow, but they were exhausted by the time they reached the narrow catwalk around the top interior of the dome. The fleshy angels writhing above them, the larger-than-life, hallucinogenic vision of the Last Judgment, still didn’t prepare them for the excruciating last push. What, other than faith, could explain such a thing being built? The stone passage grew much narrower, the steps small and steep. It was poorly lit. The air smelled dank. There was the minerally smell of bodies passing them on their way down.

Caitlin, enthused for the first time on the trip, plunged ahead while Katia and Tory grabbed handholds and tried to gain leverage off the curving smooth bare walls. Tory’s leg muscles screamed, but she was concentrating on Gordon’s labored breathing behind her. She knew he would be insulted if she suggested they stop short of the top, instead descend and hang out in the limbo of the Last Judgment and wait for Caitlin.

The stairs spiraled tighter and tighter. Small, fortress-like windows with views of the city spread out below them. They could see the sunny hills, and tumbling gray-black clouds rolling over them, a god’s eye view.

“I can’t do this,” Tory said.

“Getting too old for this,” Gordon taunted, and she took a deep breath and pushed upward again, only later realizing that he’d goaded her like a teenager, to hide his own frailness. Their life — built on granite, built on sand — either way it would end in ruins. She felt like calling back home and telling Ned to take a torch to the house, burn it down to the ground.

After another impossible series of turns, the three adults stopped, panting, spent, while Caitlin spiraled above them. From far away, they heard: “Come on, everybody. It’s so cool.” Gordon closed his eyes and leaned his forehead on the stone wall. Tory’s pulse stopped. Forget all the religious stuff, she has a vision as least as powerful as that one down below: her future without him.

Gordon opened his eyes. “Gelato is what I need.”

The clouds came down from the north, and cold rain pounded the city. The Californians realized they had been fooling themselves, thinking they wanted winter. It was the night of their post-Christmas celebration, and Tory had begged the manager to scrounge them up a tree. After the climb back down from the dome, she decided to go back to the apartment for a nap and to check on the night’s preparations. The rest of them would press on for the first floor of the Uffizi.

Alone, the rooms felt strange — the shutters dark, the rooms gloomy. She went to pop open the window and saw the pigeons close up — their charcoal feathers, their blood-red eyes, their cruel feet. She left the window ajar and heard their cooing under the eaves. She lay like a schoolgirl in the high, narrow bed, with its chaste post on each corner. A long time ago, Tory had been a professional ballet dancer, but there came a day when she lay in a bed much like this one and simply no longer wished to move. Three months later she had met a married Gordon in a bookstore.

After he had divorced Caitlin’s mother and married Tory, Gordon had cheated on her, too. It was the time when they had seemed the closest together, and his absences for business had been almost painful. On his homecoming days, she cleaned the house, cut flowers, bought wine and prepared elaborate meals, much like the one that was being prepared for them today by others. When at last he had confessed, all she could think of was the happy hours she had spent in the kitchen, imagining each task as an act of devotion to him. Afterwards, their old house had appeared dead, as if they had been stolen from, but without anything being missing. Eventually they sold the house and bought the one they were now remodeling.

Like other couples, they had gotten through, but had not withstood. Tory never forgot that Gordon was capable of betrayal. That knowledge infected her, until she found herself sure of nothing: children grew up and left, friends moved away, neighborhoods and cities metamorphosed before one’s eyes, and even a repentant husband could not guarantee to be there forever. Eventually, in the mirror, even one’s own self slowly slipped away into the past. Betrayal didn’t cancel love, only drove it deeper, like a pick into a block of ice.

It was late afternoon when Caitlin and Katia returned laughing, carrying brightly glossy, colored bags. They put on pretty dresses while Tory built a fire. She opened a bottle of wine. Caitlin brought one wrapped gift after another to put under the bare tree.

“I kind of like this crazy Christmas,” she said.

They played carols they had stored on their ipod, opened boxes of cookies, cut bread and cheeses for a platter, washed fruit.

“Where’s Gordon?” Tory asked, still lost in her ancient, sour resentment of him.

“He said he was getting something special.” Katia winked. When Tory had taken off to a cabin in Big Sur after finding out about the affair, Katia had tracked her down and sat on the deck with her, overlooking the ocean. “What’s so great about this, huh?’

Now, feeling unaccountably in the holiday mood, they sat around the fire and talked, ate the cheese and drank the wine. The restaurant downstairs called and asked if they were ready for the dinner to be brought up.

“Not yet,” Tory said, fumbling with the cord, staring out the French windows at the dark, inhospitable night. It was raining the night Gordon showed up at the cabin, obviously directed there by Katia. He had stood on the gravel driveway and allowed himself to be pelted with rain for hours until Tory relented and let him in. What if now Gordon was lying unconscious on some street, unknown, in a foreign place, on a rainy night? Caitlin had tired of carols and put the TV back on. Katia changed back into workout clothes to do her exercises. Tory snuffed the candles in dread.

It was then that they heard the rattling of the cagey elevator with a collective sigh of relief. But they made no move until they were sure. At last, the jiggling of the key in the door, and it flinging open. Gordon stood in the doorway — drowned and commanding: “Come here!”

The three women clamored to him.

“Hold out your hands,” he said. He ignored the worry in Tory’s eyes as he shook out a big bag into their poor, cupped palms . Out tumbled chestnuts, like hot, still-beating pigeon’s hearts. Tory wanted to contain them, but they spilled through her fingers anyway, disappearing with sharp little raps against the wooden floor.

After our first year in southeastern Ohio my husband Ben said that he needed to spend the summer in a city, and that’s how we ended up, that June and July, living in a dark one-bedroom apartment over Pine Street in Philadelphia, the kind of place where a thing like this could happen. We had picked Philadelphia because it would give Ben easy access to Poe’s house and Whitman’s house for research. Plus he said good things about the neighborhood – antiques, little urban parks, beautiful old houses. We had picked the apartment because it was short-term. We pictured a building full of people like us, wandering academics and their families. Instead it was one of those month-to-month places for people who don’t know what’s going to happen to them beyond a paycheck or two.

“Is this safe?” I said to Ben when the landlord left us alone in our apartment. Little Tamar was asleep in my arms, six months old then. I bounced her and looked at the dirty green curtains hanging heavy and lopsided along the windows, the dark-spotted rugs.

“It’s safe,” Ben said. “You have to be pretty rich to live in this neighborhood.”

“Not to live in this building, though,” I said, bouncing. I pictured the narrow, dark hallways we had come through on the way up to this apartment. The weak lightbulbs and the gray walls, dirty as though weary people had been leaning on them for many decades.

Ben shrugged. “It’s not fancy.”

There wasn’t much to do about it, so we stayed there, and when Ben wasn’t out researching we wandered into the city together to entertain ourselves and Tamar. She was still young enough to not care much about zoos or children’s museums, but a ride in the stroller or a stop at a park bench made her happy and gave me and Ben a chance to absorb the movement and life of a city, the aggressive summer sun of the east coast. I liked being outdoors there. The atmosphere I had grown up with in Portland, Oregon, was softer, but any kind of city was a joy for me.

Even when Ben was out working, I tried to be out of the apartment as much as possible. The building was very quiet – maybe that should have reassured me, but it ended up being part of what unnerved me. It left a lot of mystery in the other apartments. And the quiet also meant that thoughts about the fall crept in on me, questions about whether I’d just keep haunting the streets of our new little Ohio town with Tamar in the stroller or whether I would try to get back to work. I had been to a lot of school, but didn’t want to do what I had been taught to do.

“So what do you want to do?” Ben had asked more than once.

“If I knew, I’d do it,” I had said.

Those were the kinds of things I couldn’t help but think about when I was alone inside for Tamar’s naps. The rest of the time I took her out, even just to the little park on the corner across the street, where we’d watch all the cars back up at the traffic light and then get moving again. Or I’d talk to the strange guy who owned the antique store next door to the building. He was a short, middle-aged guy named Frank with marine tattoos and a bad hairpiece, and he liked to talk about how slow business was, and about the war in Iraq. Once while he was sweeping the sidewalk – he swept the sidewalk, I think, to keep from spending time in a shop without customers – he said that if he hadn’t been too old, he’d go and “cut off Osama bin Laden’s fucking head” himself. Then his eyes went to my stroller and he said, “Sorry. You know.”

Otherwise I sat in the park, waiting for Ben to get back.

Because of all of this, when the doorbell unexpectedly rang during one of Tamar’s afternoon naps I sort of leapt up to go answer it, without even thinking. If I’d had time to think, probably I would have stayed in the apartment with the door bolted – but I was in a desperate way, and it was like a reflex, responding to that desperation as much as to the doorbell.

There was no intercom, and I locked our place up, Tamar sleeping inside, and went down the flight of stairs to the main door. It was a beautiful door, the glass covered with an ornate leafy grillwork that fit in with the rest of antique row. Behind it were the shapes of two men.  

I opened the door, and the two men were police officers in uniform, but with protective vests on. Immediately my mind went to Tamar up in our apartment. I think I lifted my hand in a kind of defensive instinct.

“Can I help you?” I said, right from the script.

The man in front, a kind of leading-man face, smiled. He was wearing a baseball cap with the Superman logo on it. “Sorry to bother you,” he said. “We were looking for someone else, but you were the only person who answered any of the doorbells.”

“Oh.”

The man behind him had no cap on, just some neat dark hair. He seemed to be trying to not catch my attention, standing behind and down a step from Superman, who now brought my eyes back to him by pulling out a piece of paper.

“Have you ever seen this person in this building?”

I looked at the photo. It was the face of a Middle Eastern young man with close-cropped hair. I studied the picture carefully, looked at it all very closely, as I felt I should. The name under the photo seemed Middle Eastern, too.

“I haven’t,” I said. I actually hadn’t ever seen anyone in the building. Still – I felt a chill on my back. “Is this a dangerous person? Is he in this building?”

The officer smiled again. “He probably doesn’t live here anymore. It’s a last known address – from a year ago.”

“I have a baby upstairs. I’m alone with a baby.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, and then he pulled a business card from a shirt pocket, under his vest. It offered up Superman’s name – William McAlister – along with the words Homeland Security. My heart seized. I looked again at the second officer, dark and quiet in the background, his look steady, uncommunicative. “If you do see this man,” Officer McAlister said, “just give our office a call. But don’t worry. I’m sure he’s moved on.”

Then they were leaving and I was closing the door and leaning on the grillwork. My heart was going fast. Tamar. I jumped off the door and bolted for the stairs. I was very aware now of the darkness of the hallway, the other people hidden away in the other apartments around me. I took the steps two at a time.

And there he was in front of me. There, standing in the open apartment door across the hall from ours, was a man. The man. His hair longer, wild from sleep, stubbled face, a white t-shirt and sweatpants on, but the very man who had been in the photo. Behind him his apartment was very dark. I saw maybe the edge of a table. He was rubbing an eye socket with the heel of one of his hands.

“Who was that?” he said. “They rang my bell.”

Tamar was past him, through our door and in our apartment. I felt a little like a wild animal in a very dangerous situation, a crucial moment.

I moved toward him. I had to. “It was the police,” I said, talking without thinking about it just because he had asked me a question. “They were looking for you.” His face fell wide open in dumb surprise.

He was going to ask me something else, maybe, or do something, but then I got past him, fumbled until I had the door unlocked, and just turned my head as I went in. “Good luck,” I said. Later on I would wonder at myself, at why I had said any of what I’d said, the mindlessness.

I held the inside of the door closed with my back, feeling the wild pulse of my whole body against the cheap, light wood. Then I turned, looked through the peephole. The man was shambling down the stairs. I ran to check Tamar in the bedroom – still there, and fully asleep. Then I was in our ugly dark living room with my cell phone open.

A woman, a dispatcher, answered.

I whispered: “Officer McAlister was just at my building.” I gave her the address. “He was looking for this man – I don’t remember his name – and I hadn’t seen him, but then I came upstairs and he was there.”

“Is he still in the building?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know. He was going down the stairs. I told him…I told him you were looking for him.”

“I’ll get a hold of Officer McAlister and get him back to your address as soon as possible,” she said. “Can you be there to answer the door?”

“I have a baby in my apartment,” I said. I could feel that wild animal feeling again.

“Can you go outside with her? Wait across the street?”

“Okay,” I said, more because this woman seemed to think it’d be a good idea than because of anything I thought about it.

After I hung up I went to the bedroom and stood over Tamar’s portable crib. I didn’t know if she’d be safer in here or outside. I didn’t even know where the man was. My hands curled around the top rail of the crib. She was a pale baby, chubby but not nearly as chubby as other babies her age. She still had only these wisps of hair.

I left her for a moment to go check out the hallway alone. There was nobody anywhere, not outside my door, not on the stairs, not by the front door.

I ran back and scooped Tamar up – she barely stirred – and then I checked the peephole at the apartment door – still nobody there – before going through it and then fast down the stairs. I ran outside and across the street to the little park, put us behind a big tree there so that we couldn’t easily be seen. I was holding Tamar like we were in a strong blast of wind. I danced from foot to foot and saw Frank come out and sweep the sidewalk. In his shop window I saw the chairs and lamps that he wasn’t selling.

I got on the cell phone to Ben, and as soon as he picked up I just started pouring the story all out. “Wait, wait – what?” he said, and I went through it again.

“Wow,” he said when he got it. “I’m coming. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t worry – it’s probably just some immigration thing. But stay away.” Right. I could do that.

The police car – a regular car – pulled up to the curb a few minutes later. Officer McAlister and the quieter one got out, spotted me easily and crossed the street to me. The Superman hat was still on. “Do you know if he’s in the building?” he said.

“I don’t know. I guess I told him you were coming.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that. “Can you please let us in?”

“Right,” I said. Tamar was in my arms – but I was too shell-shocked to do anything but take directions. Only later did it occur to me that I could have just given him my keys. I crossed the street, somehow in the lead. I hadn’t been in the lead of anything for a year – maybe longer. Maybe since I first saw the blue line that meant pregnancy on the test stick. I held Tamar and shifted her into one arm and unlocked the door.

“Can you show us which apartment door it is?” he said.

Again without thinking, I went in and up the stairs, still in the lead – and just as I was going to point to the door, I saw that the man was already standing there, still messy from sleep. His eyes were all young consternation and uncertainty.

“They came back,” I said lamely. My chest had seized up again.

The two officers pushed past me and used the man’s name, backed him into his apartment. Their hands were on their holstered guns. The sight of that woke me up, made me realize what I was doing, got me moving back down and out to the sidewalk. Frank was still standing there with his broom.

“What was that, anyway?” he said.

“Homeland Security,” I said. I was only halfway seeing him, all the rest of my astonished, horrified attention on the danger I had just taken on, and not just for me but for Tamar, too. A new kind of shock started to set in.

Frank didn’t seem that surprised to hear the words Homeland Security. “Who were they looking for?”

I stammered, told him I hadn’t caught the name, but that it was the Middle Eastern man on the second floor. How could I have taken Tamar back into that place? I took a first step away from the building, ready to run.

But then Frank sighed, leaned his weight a little on his broom. “Yeah – that’s what I thought.”

I looked at him, all my attention on him now.

“No – nothing like that. I mean, I actually know a guy, and I had Adi checked out when he moved in last year.” I looked at him with more surprise. He shrugged. “I’m not having any terrorists living next to my shop. But the point is he checked out.”

I felt the edge of another kind of chill come over me. “So why were you expecting this?”

“He’s on a student visa, and a couple of months ago he just stopped going to class. He’s a nice kid, Adi, but he’s lazy. I told him it was going to catch up with him.”

I had called the police to come arrest a slacker. A slacker who was an Arab. The chill surged through me and I bounced Tamar a little vigorously to shake myself loose of it.

A moment later the front door opened, the leaves of the grillwork sweeping out into the street, and the two officers, Superman again in front, took Adi out to the car. He looked at me for just a flash, a depressed sort of look, resigned. My eyes dropped away from his and I saw that he had these dirty sneakers on, completely untied, flapping loose on his feet. Next to me, Frank shook his head. “I’ll call somebody, Adi,” he said.

I looked at the young man’s face again. He was nodding, already turned away from us, focused on the inside of the police car. The two officers put him in there, holding his head down to keep it from bumping the door frame, and went to their separate doors. Officer McAlister tipped his Superman cap to me quietly – a blast of nerves went through me until I remembered that this was just a delinquent student – and then he got in the car, and they all drove off. Still the other officer hadn’t said anything. I guessed it was a technique of theirs – heroic cop, silent cop.

“A shame,” Frank said. “I’d better make that call.” He picked up his broom and went back inside.

I stood on the street corner a minute. The cars went by. Tamar continued to sleep – she hadn’t woken up this whole time. She didn’t know anything about it. There was nowhere else to go, really, but still I didn’t go back into the apartment. I waited for the street to clear of cars and then I crossed the little street to the park and sat on a bench, waited for Tamar to wake up on her own.

Ben found me before she was done with her nap. He was half-running, with his cell-phone to his ear, and I heard mine ring just as I saw him come into view. I told him I was in the park and he swung his head around a little wildly until he spotted me.

“Are you okay?” he said. “What happened?”

I told him. For a half-hour I had been sitting in my considerable guilt – about Tamar, about the poor student I had turned in – and it was good at least to say it all out loud.

“Wow,” Ben said, sitting. “Well, what else could you have done? I mean, really?”

We sat together on the bench for a long time, and eventually Tamar woke up, and I fed her, and we walked upstairs to the apartment. Adi’s door was partway open, and I could see that it was definitely the edge of a table there, a single dirty plate.

“Do you think we need to move to somewhere else?” I said. “I mean, what if he comes back and he’s angry?”

Ben pulled Adi’s door shut. “They’re not going to let him go,” he said. “They’re going to deport him. You can bet on that.” Ben was always very sure about how things would go. He put his hand on the small of my back and I let him guide me into the apartment.

And that was it. The summer just went on from there, with Ben’s work continuing and our family time together and all the walks through Center City Philadelphia. Adi never came back and Frank confirmed that, as far as he could tell, it had all resulted in deportation. The door across the hall stayed shut. When Tamar napped I sat in the apartment and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with the approaching fall. Spend all day every day with the baby in our Ohio house with the nice floors and the mold in the walls and the big yard and the cars racing by on the county road with the blind turns? Cruise the library again looking for other moms? Get a day job somewhere? And doing what? With all this going through my head, I almost hoped the doorbell would ring with some more excitement, but again I felt guilty whenever my mind flashed to Adi, which it often did. I always pictured that slept-on hair, the loose sneakers, his eyes looking into the police car.

Whenever we spent time with one or another of Ben’s friends or relatives from the area, he always asked me to retell the story. He felt that it was a pretty good story, more comic than frightening if Adi was just a lazy student. So I told the story, and I learned how to build the suspense and what side details were the ones that really grabbed people. Everyone was really interested in the Superman hat, for example. That was part of what made it comic, but I always wound up talking about how bad I felt about the whole thing, and I always ended up feeling bad from telling it.

One time, though, we were eating dinner with a couple, both of them lawyers, and the woman said, “You know, there’s no way they would send two guys around for just a little visa problem like that. There are way too many people in violation of their visas.”

I sat up straight in my chair. The table was set beautifully, a dark tablecloth spotted with candles between the pewter dishes of food. Their whole place, a big Center City apartment, was gorgeous. They had been lawyers from the minute they were born, I thought. “What about profiling?” I said. “He was from the United Arab Emirates.”

“Even so,” she said, and her husband nodded. “There are just way too many. He had to have been a person of interest.”

Ben’s eyes were wide, in his taking-it-in, interested look. How about that? his eyes said.

“So maybe…” I said.

“Probably,” the woman said. “Fairly probably.” I remember the way that she held her fork in her hand in that moment – loosely, tines-up, but as though it would have been hard to get it away from her if you lunged for it. She was ready.

After dessert, I went to get Tamar, who we’d put down to temporary sleep in the couple’s bedroom – they didn’t have a baby themselves. I stood over her portable crib, the same way I had on the day the police came. You couldn’t tell that she was pale, or anything about her hair, in the darkness of the room, but I could see her chest going up and down. I had come to be able to see that under virtually any conditions. I often checked her. I stared at the breathing now and wondered what I would do next. Every time I checked, she was always breathing. Every time I stood there, I held the edge of the crib like looking over a wall at something uncertain on the other side.

He was certainly one of the most famous tailors on all of Kyushu. Even women from big cities like Fukuoka and Kagoshima coveted his evening gowns and long skirts and would come driving over the mountains in their fancy cars, descending upon Ebino with eyes that looked neither right nor left as if afraid to take in the details of our shabby farming town. The women would stride into his shop on wobbly high heels only to leave an hour later with large white boxes containing mysteries of silk, taffeta and the occasional sequin. But to us, he was simply Teiraa-san. The Tailor.

            The front of his modest shop looked out across main street Ebino, practically unnoticeable between Mr. Noguchi’s fish shop with its mountains of crushed ice and the Fukae’s Soba restaurant. The yawning plate glass window of the tailor’s store was filled with a sturdy hedge of gray and black cloth. Hundreds of suit jackets stacked against each other like flattened soldiers. Squeezing this hedge from the two sides were blank-face mannequins that wore his suits with so much pride. Inside the shop the walls were layered with bolts of somber fabric; grays and navy blues, mossy browns and the occasional pin stripe. There wasn’t even a counter or a cash register. Teiraa-san kept everything in his head.

            Teiraa-san’s real name was Nishikokubaru Junichiro. But few people ever called him that. My father, who was ten years older and had once worked for Teiraa-san’s deceased uncle, was someone who did. He called him by his long full last name. And he shouted it. Although my father shouted almost everything and so it wasn’t a great surprise to hear that awful but all too familiar bellow each time I accompanied him to Teiraa-san’s shop.

            “NI-SHI-KO-KU-BARU-KUN!” my father would boom, his fingers hooked into the front pockets of his dark suit. Somewhere near the third syllable I would hunch my shoulders and hold my breath, waiting for that final nnnnn to come sliding mercifully out.

            Then Teiraa-san would bow and grin and say, “You’ve got a cold or something? Laryngitis? Why so quiet all of a sudden?”

            He was an elegant man with limbs like eels. Flowing and in constant motion. The long fingers that stuck out from the sleeves of his yukata (he himself never wore the Western style suits he made with such renown) were knobby yet graceful, and always occupied with a piece of cloth. He was either testing a new stitch while he talked, pulling the darting fish-like needle through a patch of fabric, or measuring. Always measuring. Sometimes he would measure me while he spoke with my father. His nimble hands would wrap the cloth measuring tape around my neck, across my shoulders, down my arm, encircle my waist. All without looking at me. My father never seemed to notice.

            Teiraa-san was a single man and as such an object of intense curiosity for me, not to mention for the rest of the town. It was rare in Kobayashi for men to remain single and stay put. If they weren’t married by a certain age everyone knew they were planning to move off to Fukuoka or Miyazaki or once, in a famous case, to Kyoto. But Teiraa-san was different. He was staying and that was clear but no women flitted past his window in their best dresses nor invited him to their families’ hana-matsuri in the spring. Every year in April he made the rounds of the town, stopping to admire the swiftly falling cherry blossoms with all the families in turn.

            Once I dared ask my mother how old Teiraa-san was. I was helping her make mochi for our own hana-matsuri that night. In my excitement to see my cousins and aunts and uncles I had more courage than usual.

            I asked my bold question but kept my face pointed toward the mass of glutinous rice I was sugaring. I heard her stop and wipe her hands across her apron.

            She sighed, “Not as old as you think, Ayaka, but he has lived more than most of us.”

            What a magnificent riddle this sentence was for me. I knew that Teiraa-san was the oldest son of his father and so many years my senior. I finished sugaring the mochi, wrapped it carefully in plastic and put it in the fridge, my thoughts bustling with reasons why Teiraa-san might be so lucky.

            That night when he finally stopped by our party, after my father had shouted his welcome and two of my aunts had accosted him with dress ideas, Teiraa-san stood alone under the largest cherry tree on our property sipping a frosty mug of beer my mother had pressed upon him. I was, to my great embarrassment, just above him in the branches of the tree. It was the last year I was allowing myself the luxury of climbing the tree during the matsuri, for the next year I could no longer behave like such a child.

            I had been studying the effect of the wind on blossoms that didn’t seem at all likely to fall but then did with only the slightest breeze when I heard my father’s customary boom and so knew that Teiraa-san was in the garden. I had resolved to climb down immediately so as to study his face and determine his age but then a handful of enormous dragonflies had landed on the very branch I was sitting and I lost myself completely in an examination of their jeweled serpentine bodies.

            “Is the branch sturdy enough for me, too?”

            I searched the lawn in the dimming light for one of my cousins. Emiko hopefully, because she was loud and brash and could deal with Teiraa-san without trembling, or worse, crying, like I knew I might.

            “So you think it’s too weak? That is sad indeed. You might have to cut the tree down in a few years then.”

            “It’s not weak,” I answered despite myself. “It’s the strongest tree in the garden.”

            “I see the genetics of volume do not run in your family. That is a relief.”

            And then I couldn’t help but laugh because I knew he was making fun of my father and no one had ever dared do that in front of me. But I stopped laughing right away because he was climbing, and quickly. Soon he was seated on the branch next to me, holding onto to a higher branch for support.

            “You don’t like parties, Ayaka-chan?”

            He knew my name and this was enough to send me into a mortified silence.

            “I know what you mean. Sometimes it is nice not to have to speak to anyone. Let’s just admire the cherry blossoms, shall we? People talk too much anyway.”

            Sitting in the tree was also the first time I had ever seen Teiraa-san without something in his hands. And so those two awe-inspiring appendages were motionless. He had let go of the upper branch and was resting them on his knees. I was unable to stop looking at them. They were not beautiful objects, by any means. In fact, they were scarred and pricked, ragged with hangnails and his fingernails badly needed cutting.

            He caught me staring and laughed, “Pathetic aren’t they?”

            I shook my head with defiance, swelling with respect for arguably the most famous of Ebino’s citizens.

            “No, Ayaka-chan,” he said, holding his hands up to touch a withered blossom. “These are useless.” He plucked the browning flower and it fluttered to the ground. “That one didn’t even have enough sense to fall on its own.”

            He changed the subject then, complimenting me on the mochi which my mother had informed him I had made. We discussed the weather and my suspicions that we would see a dragonfly plague before the end of summer. He agreed with me, I realize now with a certain condescension and good humor, that this infestation would be a marvelous thing indeed.

            Before long he bade me goodnight and slipped down from the tree to continue his visiting with other families around town.

            In May the year I turned seventeen I was invited to my first dance by a university student who would later become my husband. I knew exactly who I wanted to ask to make my dress for me but was relieved when my mother broached the subject with my father on her own.

            “You will ask Teiraa-san to make Ayaka a dress, won’t you?” My mother always had a knack for understanding the potential of a situation.

            “Nishikokubaru-san?”

            “Of course. Who else?”

            My father grunted his assent and I could let out the breath I was holding. But I was not allowed to choose the pattern for my dress. Only the color.

            My mother said, “Do what you want. But I think you should consider a light green. Like the ocean. You will look nice in that.”

            I didn’t want light green. I knew what color I wanted. I wanted plum. A deep plum. So deep there were other colors hiding inside. When I told my mother she smiled and said, “Not a bad idea now that you say it.”

            It took a few weeks for the dress to be ready. I was in agony over what style my mother and father had chosen for me. Each day when I came home from school I hovered near my mother, offering to help her chop vegetables or run an errand.

            “It’s not ready, yet,” she would laugh. “Now go do your homework and leave me alone.”

            Finally the day arrived. I came home late from cram school where I had spent hours preparing for my university entrance exams. It was the first evening my head had been so filled with other concerns I had forgotten about the dress.

            My mother surprised me by saying, “You can go pick it up. Teiraa-san wants to do the final fitting with you there. You better hurry.”

            She wasn’t coming with me. No one was coming with me. This was both a certain joy and a source of panic. I almost telephoned my cousin Emiko to come along. But decided against it. She would bear exuberant witness to my failure if the dress wasn’t all I had hoped.

            I raced toward the tailor’s shop, hardly aware of people or friends I might be passing. It was already dark but the evening was warm, hinting at a long and early summer. Teiraa-san’s shop was only a few blocks from my family’s home but the distance seemed to take me forever. As I walked, I remembered his quick moving hands on me when I was a child. Measuring, always measuring. I realized suddenly he would do the same tonight. Those days I was gradually becoming aware of a confusing universe existing between men and women; a universe I knew would soon open itself up to me. But just then, the idea of anyone having access to the skin of my neck, my shoulders, my arms and then reaching around to measure my waist was enough to send a ferocious heat to my face.

            I stopped outside the front door to gather my courage. This is when I saw the buttons.

            Like neatly planted rows of shiny vegetables, the buttons sprouted from the garden of Teiraa-san’s carpet.  Pink ones, red ones, blue ones. Black with polka dots, orange cloth with embroidered daisies, white with gold anchors.  The buttons were everywhere. I had never seen so many. I couldn’t even push open the doorway for fear of upsetting the plastic rows. There were triangular ones and circle ones as big as my wrist. What seemed like a million little dots of light in one corner were the white ones; a starry night against the dark rug.

            From amidst this mass of buttons, Teiraa-san saw me and waved me to the back door. “Go around!” He pointed left and explained, “That way, around there!”

            I wove my way around to the back of the shop, stepping carefully across an unruly garden plot. The fragrance of drying herbs filled my nose. Passing his garbage cans, I suppressed the urge to peak inside. What did he eat? What did he throw away?

            I greeted him again at the back door and slipped inside. Once in the shop I remembered why I had come and looked around for my dress.

            Seeing my face, Teiraa-san laughed. “You must be patient!”

            The buttons were everywhere along the floor. He had pushed back the racks of suits that usually made the area in the shop unbearably tight and was holding a jar of buttons and distributing them by color into rows along the floor. In his fingers were several translucent blue ones, like drops of sea foam.

            He motioned for me to pick up a jar. “It won’t take very long.”

            I wouldn’t have dared contradict him, although I was already tired from all my studying. I looked into the jar. There seemed to be a million of them. Yellow, green, leather-covered, silver. I could see he had sectioned off the room by color and type and size. But I was afraid to walk around to place the buttons from my jar.

            “No, it’s easy. Watch.” He was wearing only tabi-socks and the split between his big toe and the rest of his feet seemed impossibly wide. He stepped out onto the carpet and I looked closer. There were indeed footpaths between the planted buttons, just wide enough to step into with a bare foot. I removed my shoes and reached into the jar.

            We worked for an hour and I tested the quality of the buttons between the tips of my fingers before laying them down in their rows. The black ones were the most difficult to arrange. Some had differences so slight it was impossible to distinguish them. A delicate groove, a slight smoky tone, barely visible flecks of silver beneath the black plastic. My favorite, however, were the oversized buttons fashionable at that time. When I found a plum colored one, the color of the fabric I had picked out for my dress, I held it for a moment in my hand. It was a smooth flat disk the size of a persimmon; the edge contained a delicate scalloping with indents the exact size of my fingers.

            Teiraa-san saw my preoccupation with the button. “You have a good eye, that is the partner of the button I chose to fasten the sash of your dress. Now it is without a mate. You can put it in that tin on the window.” An old cigarette tin lay open on the sill. More buttons, presumably other matchless ones lay scattered inside like paint drops against the shiny metal.

            “May I have it?” I asked, certain suddenly I had to have this matching button.

            He watched me carefully. “That’s maybe a good idea. In case you lose the first one.”

            My mind raced to why I might lose the matching button that was already on my dress and of course the only scene I came up with involved someone else’s hands. Someone else’s hands in a hurry to untie the sash. I gripped the button between my fingers.

            Teiraa-san smiled quietly, knowingly, and went back to work sorting buttons. He began humming to himself under his breath.

            Teiraa-san was probably in his late forties by then, an old man to me. But his hair was still very black and the skin on his face unlined. I understood that many women thought he was still handsome. Although when they mentioned this fact, it was always in passing and the idea quickly dropped for another seemingly more important one. He was ‘handsome’ but he was ‘unfortunate’ too.

            By then I was well aware of the story behind Teiraa-san’s misfortune. I had heard it in the same way everyone in town had heard it – through snippets of conversation while my mother had tea with a neighbor, at the supermarket when two women bent their heads together at the sight of his lean figure passing the window, once even my father made reference to it after a visit to Teiraa-san’s shop.

            Her name was Haruko Tanaka and she moved to Ebino with her family when Teiraa-san was a young man. Most people say she was stunning. My mother says this isn’t really the case, but people love to remember her this way. Apparently, she was delicate and most likely her fragility is what made her so attractive. Within a year of the Tanaka’s arrival, the two families began to have discussions and soon enough Haruko and the tailor were engaged. Some people say the young couple spent many evenings that first spring admiring the fireflies together near the gorge. And that after their engagement was announced publicly they were seen eating dinner together nearly every night, either with his family or with hers. They also say they were once caught skinny dipping in Lake Ohnami.

            Things didn’t go well for Teiraa-san and Haruko Tanaka. It was soon discovered in town that the Tanaka’s had moved to Ebino from a suburb of Hiroshima. This fact had obviously been left out of the marriage negotiations. As expected, Teiraa-san’s family withdrew their support.

            Some people tell it that Teiraa-san wasn’t swayed by the information. Others say that it was out of a sense of duty that he remained with her. He’d given his word and would not back down. I like to imagine that after the bad news about her origins hit Ebino, Teiraa-san and Haruko passed their evenings in discussion. They weighed their options. Maybe they would avoid having children. Maybe they read medical journals and compared her position in kilometers from the blast to concentric circles of radiation sickness patterns. Maybe they didn’t care and just wanted what all young couples who are in love want. To discover everything there is to know about one another without interference. But none of this mattered in the end. Haruko died of ovarian cancer a few months before their wedding and the Tanaka’s moved away, probably back to Hiroshima where their other children might have some hope of marriage someday.

            I finished sorting the buttons and wondered why Teiraa-san never married after losing a fiancé. Being so young I assumed true love came only once and since the tailor had missed his chance, he’d never had another one. This idea appealed to me that day as I waited nervously to be shown the dress that would, I was sure, decide my own romantic fate.

            We had finished sorting all the jars and stood for a moment among the fields of shiny plastic color. At my feet were the yellows in a gradual array from cream to mustard. I had a sudden and unexplainable urge to dance across them, to kick the little plastic discs into the air like rice scattered at a festival. I contented myself with touching a few of them with the tips of my toes. Teiraa-san finished a swathe of blues, pushing the tiny buttons into neat lines with his long fingers. He turned in a circle to survey the room.

            “Yes,” he said. “That will do.” And then he began gathering them up by color, by type, by size and depositing them in a box, that I saw after further inspection contained an assortment of smaller glass jars. He worked fast, bending and scooping the puddles of buttons, until finally the room was clean again and now seemed suddenly, disappointingly, devoid of color.

            “You see, Ayaka-chan,” he began. “That didn’t take too long did it?”

            “Not at all,” I agreed, wondering whether I would ever see my dress. “I never imagined there could be so many different buttons. How do you ever decide which ones to use?”

            He stared at the box of now-sorted buttons. “It’s hard, the wrong button can ruin a piece of clothing. You have to lay everything out, go all the way to the end before you really know what you have, what you want.” He fingered the buttons, his mouth pinched. “Thank you. That was a great help.”

            And yes, the dress was perfect and I wore it well at the dance. I kept in my handbag the extra plum button that Teiraa-san gave me. Just in case.

            When I got the news that Teiraa-san had passed away, I was already divorced and living alone with my two daughters in Miyazaki. We spent most weekends at my parents house in Kobayashi anyway, so I didn’t even consider not going. It was August and the typhoon season was well underway. Everyone on Kyushu was waiting for a large typhoon the news stations were promising but as yet we’d only had a continual barrage of small lifeless storms that heated the air to an uncomfortable dampness and then never really blew themselves away.

            On the hour-long drive to Kobayashi my oldest daughter considered the particular reason we were returning to my home town that weekend. She was twelve and had met Teiraa-san several times. He even made her a dress once to wear as a flower girl in a cousin’s wedding. “It must be very sad to die,” she said, watching out the window. She had her father’s voice; she’d had this from her tiniest childhood.         

            I reminded her that Teiraa-san couldn’t be sad. He was gone. He was peaceful.

            “But I’m sure he’s not gone, gone, mother,” she sighed, confident I was wrong. “He’s a spirit now.”

            This is when my younger daughter, eight years old, piped in, “If he’s a spirit, do you think then that he can fly? That would be wonderful to fly.”

            This set the two of them off on a discussion about where they would fly to and how long it would take to get there. And whether it would be more tiring than running, for example.

            At the funeral I paid my respects to Teiraa-san’s ashes, lighting a stick of incense for his urn and pausing for a moment to remember him. I had not seen him much in the years since I moved to Miyazaki; it seemed each time I returned he was older, quieter. He’d grown a slight humpback and lost some of his elegance. But not his energy. He’d worked right up until a few months before his death. There was a rumor a few years back that Kato Tokiko, the famous folk singer, had even ordered a dress from him for a concert. But the type of dresses he made had mostly fallen out of style.

            Even though I saw him rarely, each time I did run into him he was always polite. And he never forgot my name.

            “Good evening, Ayaka-chan,” he would say in passing. He never used my married name and I liked this about him, especially after my divorce. For just a fleeting moment I wasn’t someone who had changed her identity and then somehow misplaced it.

            After the funeral, my cousin Emiko and I sipped icy cold mugi-cha on the back porch of the Nishikokubaru house. A flock of pheasants pecked the ground at the outer perimeter of the small yard. My daughters, along with some other children, were chasing the birds and hooting with delight. I had never seen Teiraa-san’s family home and it seemed too quiet, too austere. There was only one sister of the family still living, the youngest one, and she flapped among the guests in a black dress I was certain Teiraa-san had not made. Whenever she passed us, Emiko would lower her voice to barely a whisper but she did not interrupt her story.

            “He was supposed to be a doctor, but he failed the exams twice.”

            This surprised me as I’d always considered Teiraa-san one of the more learned men in Ebino of his generation.

            Emiko rolled her eyes to signal her impatience but I didn’t take this personally. She had become impatient with the world in the last few years. “Think about it. Did you ever see him write anything down? What about a cash register? Did you think he was just old-fashioned?”

            “He didn’t know how to read?”

            She shook her head. “No, dyslexic. But for a man of his generation he was for all intents and purposes illiterate. They wouldn’t have helped him much at school. No math. No writing.” This news was a surprise and made me feel, for the first time, real pity for Teiraa-san. “But,” Emiko continued. “No one would dare say he wasn’t a talented tailor. He was amazing.”

            She paused in her story to remind her son not to fall in the pond. From somewhere in the house behind us I could hear my father shouting a joke. In a few seconds a room full of people erupted in peals of laughter. Teiraa-san’s sister paused in her task of filling a plate with crackers to cock her head and smile. Emiko and I bowed slightly to her.

            Afterward, my cousin leaned further into me. I could smell the lavender shampoo she had used since we were teenagers. “Do you remember when Ken went to Australia on business last month and I brought Shuji here with me and stayed with my mother?”

            I nodded.

            “Teiraa-san had just gone into the hospital and my mother, who was visiting Auntie Naoko after her surgery, stopped to see him too. When she got home she mentioned he had been in a bad mood. She was surprised. For someone who’d gone through so much.”

            “Poor old Teiraa-san,” I found myself saying, as if by rote.

            “She told me he must have terrific regrets about his life. I disagreed with her right away because I think of him as such a successful person.” At this point, Emiko tossed her hair over one shoulder and looked beyond the children. I knew she was thinking of her husband, Ken, and the trouble he’d had keeping a stable job.

            Another shout from my father inside the house interrupted us and Emiko shook her head in exasperation. We both thought it was inappropriate that my father, in his 89^th year, was still unable to dampen his vocal cords in certain situations. I could see some of the guests were starting to trickle away.

            “So?” I prompted Emi, wanting to hear the rest of her story.

            She looked me right in the eye and said, “It’s like I said, he never wanted to be a tailor. He wanted to be a doctor.” She paused for a second, keeping me in suspense. “And Haruko didn’t die of cancer.”

            This new pronouncement seemed ridiculous. Here we were discussing someone neither one of us had ever met. And with such fervency and discretion. I was reminded of that stifling small town atmosphere I had begun to hate as a younger woman, an atmosphere I believed, with hindsight, propelled me to marry young. To escape at all costs.

            “How did she die, then?”

            “Apparently, she threw herself in the river.”

            “How sad,” I said instinctively, yet I was blindsided for the briefest of flashes by the memory of my own years-earlier depression. I’d stayed indoors for nearly three months, not sleeping and not eating, filling the hours with crossword puzzles and magazines. This period of my life ended suddenly when my youngest daughter decided to drag me outside on the pretense that the street was flooding. With kittens, no less, an invention I am particularly proud of her for now. “Why did she do that?”

            “She had cancer, of course. That part of the story isn’t a total lie. But, just wait, there’s more.”

            “Emi,” I chided. “This is a sad story. Try at least to sound like you know that.”

            She made a face at me but then catching a glimpse of her son chasing my youngest daughter with a fistful of fireflies that illuminated his hand with each collective breath I could see a sliver of chagrin pass across her features. When she spoke again her tone was quiet. Respectful.

            “I guess Teiraa-san somehow realized what she was trying to do and he tried to save her. But he didn’t make it in time and she was stuck too far under when he reached the river. He wasn’t even able to pull her out. Instead he fell in himself and some men were called to help him get out. He was sick for months.”

            “Why don’t people talk about this part of the story?” I asked her, thinking how many times I’d heard the tale of Haruko and Teiraa-san’s unfortunate engagement.

            Emiko shrugged her shoulders and the question hung between us. Yet I knew that I, too, would always choose to remember his story a different way.

            We were interrupted then by our Aunt Naoko, our mothers’ youngest sister, who was getting tired and wanted a lift back to her house. Emiko agreed to take her and I stayed behind for a short while longer.

            I stood outside alone, in the darkening light that finally forebode the typhoon promised by the news stations, and watched my daughters. They had released the fireflies and were sprawled on their backs in the grass with their eyes closed. Another child, a boy, was tickling their noses with a long blade of wheat grass and I surmised quickly that the first one to laugh out loud would have to suffer some punishment. Their faces, both of which looked so much like their father’s, were scrunched into the delightful grimace of someone trying incredibly hard not to laugh but who wants very much, at the same time, to let free a spectacular whoop of joy.

            We had values.  We had Le Creuset pots.  We had fold-out couches in our living rooms, where we slept with our husbands at night.  Beside these couches, we had books stacked on the floor:  Modern Library editions of Kafka and James Joyce and Georges Sand.  Beneath these high-minded selections, we had Lorna Doone and Anne of Green Gables, touchstones from a time when reading in bed was our guiltiest pleasure. 

            We had blue jeans long before other women wore them.  We had degrees in literature and anthropology and biology, hard-won in night classes at City College.  We had aspirations but did not yet have careers.  We had cookbooks with French recipes that confounded us.  For a few years, we tried to muddle through until we gave up on the fancy dinners our children despised and turned back to the roasted meats of our childhoods.

            And we all had children: two or three apiece, whose strollers we tucked beneath the stairways in our buildings.

            We were individuals, of course, but we seemed so much alike, I still speak of us today in the plural.  Each of us had endured bookish, lonely childhoods in the outer boroughs; we had been the pride and bane of our immigrant parents’ lives.  When we found one another along the broad avenues of what, growing up, we had reverentially called The City, we recognized one another as landsmen, all of us dark-haired women who carried the inflections of our parents’ Yiddish in our speech.  Our cramped apartments were fine with us; we would never in a million years live in some bourgeois outpost in Long Island, and the only way we’d return to Brooklyn was in a coffin.  We called ourselves The Quorum.  We called ourselves the Collective Unconscious of the Upper West Side. 

            Our children played in a bleak little playground near the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.  We invaded the place with our sand toys and tricycles, the bags we packed with apples and breadsticks.  While we pushed our children on the swings, we talked about Carl Jung, whom we understood in a handful of telegraphed phrases, and Ingmar Bergman, whose films played downtown and which we desperately wanted to see.  On the grounds of the Cathedral, several peacocks wandered freely.  Sometimes, we took our children over to see them, although the great birds frightened us with their manic darting, their unholy screaming and reputation for viciousness.  The hens were a dull gray, nothing much to look at, but the males were magnificent.  I think we wished to see ourselves in them: rare and graced, transcendent in their vaguely shabby setting.

            It was during this time of strollers and failed cassoulets that Rebecca Redl moved into the building where I lived with my husband and our two boys.  I first saw her sitting on the stairs, reading a book.  Instinctively, she shifted her body while men in brown uniforms lifted chairs and bookcases up and over her head.  At first glimpse, I took her for a girl of twelve or thirteen, because at that age, I, too, would have read through the apocalypse.  Her hair fell to her shoulders, black as obsidian.  My first impulse was to touch it, the way it shined.  Although the shirt she wore was so big and loose it nearly swallowed her whole, her loveliness had a sleek economy, as it is with certain lucky girls before their bodies assume an adult’s heft and gravity. 

            A few steps below, a little girl with the same dark hair smoothed and re-smoothed her skirt over her knees. 

            On the second-floor landing, a man smoked a cigarette and gave curt direction to the men who carried the furniture up the stairs.  This man was tall and lean and had cropped silvery hair.  Later, I would learn that he was her husband, his name was Eric Redl, and he was a professor of philosophy at Barnard, some ten blocks north.  I don’t remember how I came to know these things.   Rebecca and I never exchanged such information about our lives.

            The little girl buried her face in her hands when I introduced myself, and Rebecca, with some reluctance, it seemed, told me her own and her daughter’s name.  I asked Rebecca what she was reading, and she held up a thick hardcover.  Buddenbrooks.  I hadn’t read Buddenbrooks, but I told her I had loved the hundred and twenty pages of The Magic Mountain I had managed to complete while my sons napped.

            “I wouldn’t say I ‘love’ this book,” she replied in a way that foreclosed further discussion.  Nonetheless, I was willing to look the other way.  I felt generous then.  I had a husband whom I both loved and respected; I had two healthy, vigorous boys; I enjoyed the company of like-minded women.  I told Rebecca about us, how we met at the little playground near the Cathedral every morning, and how her daughter would have instant friends.

            “Instant friends,” Rebecca echoed, and I heard in the blankness of her voice the simple-mindedness of my presumption.   

            Later, I made soup for her, my mother’s vegetable bean.  The day after I delivered it, she left the pot outside my door, scrubbed clean and without any sort of note inside.

            I was surprised, then, when Rebecca showed up with her daughter at the playground a few days later.  The little girl, whose name was Vera, wandered over to the edge of the sandbox.  Clutching her doll, she watched the other children dig. 

            In a manner of speaking, Rebecca became part of our group, but she held herself above it, like someone who refuses to join the party and demonstrates her refusal further by waiting outside the room on a wooden chair.  The two of them would arrive late in the morning, Rebecca wearing a man’s shirt and Vera a perfect little dress.  Rebecca would nudge her daughter to go play, but Vera stood to the side with her doll while her mother read on the bench.  Sometimes, one of us prompted our children to give her a turn with a tricycle or shovel, but whenever she was offered, Vera just shook her head and gnawed on her doll’s soft arm.

            It crossed my mind that Vera might be mentally retarded, and I told myself that would be a terrible thing, a tragic thing, for a clearly intellectual woman like Rebecca.  But one day, Vera approached as I was unpacking my boys’ snack.  Her eyes widened as she watched me hand out Fig Newtons and pour juice from the Thermos.  She stared while Joel and Peter devoured their food in thirty seconds flat.  Over on the bench, Rebecca turned a page in her book.  I handed Vera a cookie, and she wolfed it down.  I thought nothing of it.  We mothers fed and comforted one another’s children all the time.  I handed Vera a second cookie, which also disappeared in the wink of an eye.

            “These cookies are my favorite kind,” she piped in a voice as pretty as a bell.  Then she skipped away, back toward her mother.

            “I gave your daughter two Fig Newtons,” I told Rebecca at the bench, when I saw her fold down a page to mark her place.

            “Oh.”  She glanced up in my general direction.

            “I hope that’s all right.  I know people feel differently about sugar and so on.”

            Rebecca laughed sharply.  “I have no opinion about sugar.”

            Vera looked down and raked her fingers through her doll’s hair.

            “I wasn’t sure what to do…she just seemed so hungry.”

            “She had breakfast at nine.”

            “I just know that some days, my boys get hungry every hour….” 

            When Rebecca blinked, I noticed, because her gaze had been perfectly steady until then.  With that blink, I knew, she’d put her essential self out of reach.   

            But I pressed on, with a dogged insistence on good will, at which I both marvel and cringe today.  “What are you reading?”

            “La Nausée.” 

            It took a moment for the information to compute.  “I admire your powers of concentration.  Most days, I wouldn’t trust myself to get through a fashion magazine.”

            Rebecca stood up.  “You’ve been very nice, but I think it’s best to be honest.  I am not interested in friendship.”  Her voice was neutral, not unkind.

            “Fair enough,” I said, as lightly as I could manage.  I walked back to the sandbox and called my sons out for lunch.

            “I want to be friends with you,” my husband said when I rehashed the exchange that night, after the boys had gone to bed.

            “I know, I know, but it’s just so rude.  I mean, what did I do?  Gave her kid a couple of cookies.  The crime of the century.”

            “She wanted you to know what you can expect from her.  At least she was direct.”

            “You’re no help.”

            “Like I said, I like you.”  Harry pulled me toward him.

            It was a temptation I couldn’t resist: letting drop a few sideways comments to the others while she read on the bench in the park.  La Nausée!  Why couldn’t she just say it in English?  Dresses her daughter up in fancy clothes but can’t be bothered to bring a snack.  Why do some people even have children?  Even today I wonder: why was I so undone by this woman’s refusal to count me as one of her own? 

            One memory I’d almost forgotten but seems important now to recount: once, at the park, I heard Rebecca singing softly while Vera danced around her, swooping and twirling like a top.  When I moved closer, I recognized it, the same wordless, minor-key melody my mother used to sing to me.  Rebecca met my gaze, soft and open for just a moment, until she turned away and closed her arm around her daughter.

            It was fall, then winter.  The weather and a spate of colds kept me and my sons away from the park.  The colds turned into croup, and I spent several nights with each of them outside the steaming shower and many days trying to keep them occupied in our small rooms.  By this time, Rebecca and I exchanged only brief nods when we passed in the hallway.  Often it was easier to feign absorption in the mail or my grocery bags and pretend I never saw her at all.

            One day, Eric Redl appeared at my door, dressed for work and carrying a briefcase.  It was a Tuesday morning, nine-thirty, and already my living room looked like a shipwreck.  Vera stood beside him, clutching his arm.  When I stepped toward them, she sidled closer to her father, as if she’d climb inside his body if she could.

            “Would you mind?” Eric asked.  “I have to teach a class at ten, but I’ll be back after that.” 

            “Of course.”  I reached for Vera’s hand, but she pulled away.   She wore a mismatched skirt and sweater.  Her chin was streaked with jam.

            Eric leaned toward me.  “Rebecca’s gone,” he whispered. 

            “Gone?  Where did she go?”

            “Apparently Paris.”

            “Paris?”

            “That’s what it said in her note.” 

            She took off for Paris without so much as looking back…Already, I’d begun composing the story I’d tell the others, but then I saw Eric kneel down and rest his hands on Vera’s shoulders.  I caught the terror in his eyes.   “I’ll be back in one hour.  The big hand will make one circle around the clock.  Not too long, right?”  He spoke quickly, as if he could build with his words a fort no grief could enter.  But children always know.  Vera clung to him and sobbed.  Even Joel and Peter came over to stare with alarmed curiosity.

            Over coffee in one other’s kitchens, we floated theories about Rebecca’s disappearance.  Most of these centered on a secret lover.  Didn’t we all dream of sitting in a Left Bank café with some dapper Jean-Pierre?  About this we agreed: she was a terrible mother to have done such a thing.

            I might have left it alone, chalked it up to the unfathomable mysteries of the human heart and forgotten her entirely.  But one afternoon, while the boys were napping, I went out to the common storage space beneath the stairs to look for the gifts I had previously hidden for Peter’s birthday.  Crouching there, I retrieved the items I had stashed in a shopping bag—a toy truck, a picture book, a rubber ball—but I couldn’t find the clown doll I had also purchased.  When I looked in a second bag, stuffed behind our neighbors’ box of Passover dishes, I found not the doll but a stack of ten or more composition books.  I believed at first the books were mine.  I had filled dozens of such books for my college courses, transcribing my professors’ every word about the Krebs cycle or the atrocities of Robespierre.  By doing so, I believed I was freeing myself, fact by fact, from the narrow expectations that had confined my parents’ lives.  But when I moved into the light and opened one of the notebooks I found not my own tidy print but a script so sprawling and wild it burst beyond the lines on the page.

            March 26, 1954.  Weltschmerz.  Literally, it means world-pain, but Professor Redl told me it is the distance between the world as you want it to be and the world as it really is. Why doesn’t everyone feel this?  How can one have a brain and not feel this gulf?

            Professor Redl?  On the journal’s inside cover, I found printed in somewhat neater block letters:  The Journals of Rebecca Zaperstein, November 1953-July 1954.  Then one of my boys called me back, and I had to leave everything under the stairs.

            When Eric stopped by to ask if I could watch Vera again while he taught class, I could have pulled him aside and told him about the journals.  But I did not.  I did want to part with them yet.  I was curious.  I was nosy.  I was what my mother used to call a kokhlefele, a meddler.  That afternoon, while Joel and Peter napped, I went back under the stairs and pulled out one of the notebooks.  I read hurriedly, hunched with the flashlight, poised for the sound of footsteps.

            September 14, 1953.  Mama was wrong.  Barnard is no different from anywhere else.  I have nothing in common with the other girls.  All they care about is finding a husband.  By now I should know better.  Very few people care about books and ideas, which are as essential to me as air and water.

            I had little sympathy for rich Barnard girls.  I myself had worked six days a week as bundle girl at Abraham & Straus through my years at City College; I’d studied for exams during my lunch hour.

            October 17, 1953.  I have never been one to cry but these days I am crying all the time.  Today I was reading Wordsworth and I felt such a strong yearning for the kind of quiet he said is necessary for one truly to perceive the world.  I wish I could be happy with what I have in front of me: the leisure to read and write and think.  But it is my curse to want more, to yearn for something higher, something I can’t even name.

            One afternoon, Eric stopped me in the hallway with a brush of his hand.   “Did she ever mention another man?  A lover?”

            “No.  Never.”

            “But you and she were friends.”

            Friends?  I recalled Rebecca’s blank, incredulous voice.

            Three mornings a week, I watched Vera so Eric could teach his seminar.  I bundled up the children so they could play outside after a snowstorm.  I made play dough for them out of flour and salt.  But like a drinker who wakes each morning with the best intentions to stop and loses his resolve by lunch, I left the apartment every afternoon with my flashlight to read more from Rebecca’s journals.

            November 5, 1953.  Today is my birthday.  I am eighteen.  I feel nothing about this because all my life I have felt old.   

            January 15, 1954. Come out with us, my roommates keep telling me. You’re so pretty, they say, as if that has anything to do with it.

            A woman with her head on straight: that was how I was always known.  And I would have described myself in much the same way.  It seemed I’d been born knowing there was a gap between our ideal vision of the world and its untidy reality; the matter had never caused me great pain.   But in the process of reading Rebecca’s journals, I began to mistrust my own balance.  Were my own bonds flimsier than I knew?  Was my contentment about to shatter under more rigorous scrutiny?    

            January 28, 1954.  I asked Professor Redl why he thinks modern thought begins with Descartes and not with Locke or Hobbes, and he explained that Descartes applied rigorous science, in essence, to “doubt-proof” his ideas and that he treated knowledge itself as a measurable property.  I told him I find Descartes bloodless and he said Montaigne will be my reward.

            February 13.  When I asked Professor Redl why he gave me a B- on my paper, he told me I had under-explained the Mind-Body Problem.  He told me I took too modern a view in my discussion of it and did not adequately look at the question of faith.  He said he always grades hard on the first paper and he was especially hard on me because he knows how much more I can do.    

            March 20.  Professor Redl said to be careful of falling too much in the thrall of Schopenhauer.  He warned me against confusing alienation with freedom.  He said refusal is seductive but it takes much more rigor to arrive at a genuine, soundly reasoned yes.

            March 31.  Professor Redl speaks the most beautiful French.  When he read aloud in class today, all meaning vanished in the music of the language.

            April 4.   Where does desire dwell?  I’d imagine Descartes would say in the body, along with hunger, thirst and the need for sleep, but I cannot imagine it as just a physical impulse, at least not for me, since in my (limited) experience there is always the mental element, which, though unrelated to bodily sensation, I have felt as strongly as anything in my body.

             April 16.  Eric was right about Montaigne.  I see what he means about his startlingly modern aesthetic.

            Had they already crossed the line that normally separates professor and student, or had Eric simply begun to occupy a more intimate place in Rebecca’s mind?  I, too, had fallen for several of my professors, not because they were especially handsome, but because they had introduced me to the suppleness of my own intellect.  Although these crushes were not rooted in the physical, I noticed every physical aspect of those men: the slant of their handwriting, whether or not they wore wedding rings, the rhythm and sonority of their speech.  It was men like Eric who affected me the most, the serious, unyielding ones, whose terse words of praise kept me nourished for weeks.

            June 16, 1954.  Today Eric took me to see the sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.  A revelation!  I sat for an hour just looking at “Bird in Flight.” Eric is like the sculptures of Brancusi: very spare, abstracted, but underneath writhing with a wild force.  We walked back through the park talking about how art is a much more powerful medium than language for expressing the complications of human perception.  Suddenly we realized that fifty years ago today Leopold Bloom walked through Dublin’s streets.  Eric bought me a rose to commemorate.

            July 7.  Making love is absurd and freeing and profound all at once.  I pity all those girls their preoccupations with rings and respect and reputations and who owes whom what.  

            July 19.  E. and I talked today about going to Paris.  We could just go, he said.  He said I shouldn’t worry about finishing my degree.   I will learn much more just reading and being sentient in the world.  He said in Europe men and women live together all the time without the formality of marriage.  To be free!  To read!  To walk!  I said yes!  We drank wine to celebrate.

            August 27.  Pregnant.  I can’t believe my body betrayed me this way.

            August 31.  I talked to Eric about getting an operation, but he cried when I even mentioned it.  I love you.  I want to marry you, he said.  These are the words other girls wait their whole lives to hear.  Even though it was 95 degrees out, I began to shiver.  I couldn’t stop, not even when Eric put his arms around me.

            September 12.  City Hall wedding.  Grotesquely fat clerk, Professor Steinsaltz as witness. We went out for lunch afterwards, but as always I felt too sick to eat.

            February 27.  E. took me shopping for baby things.  The layette. The lady kept piling things on the counter and no matter what she showed him Eric just smiled and acquiesced. By the time we were done we had so many bags we had to take a taxi home.   At home I let him unpack everything.  Afterwards he just stood and stared at me as I lay on the bed.  He asked, are you not happy at all about this?          

            April 13, 1955.  Home with baby.  Feed her, change her diapers, try to comfort her when she cries.  These things should be simple but she stiffens and screams after her bottle and there’s nothing I can do to soothe her.

            Vera colored at the table while Joel and Peter built houses from blocks and then torpedoed them with toy airplanes.  Unconsciously, she stuck her tongue out when she colored, as if reaching for some bit of knowledge that dangled just beyond her.  When I went over to see what she was drawing, she covered the paper with her hands and twisted her body toward the wall.

            One day, though, she came over to me and tugged gently on one of my curls.  I crouched to let her twine my hair around her finger.  That was all she wanted, to twist my hair and watch it spring back when she let go. 

            May 3.  Tried to read “Ward 6” but kept loosing the thread of the sentence by the time I got to the end.    Comprehension swims within my grasp then V. starts to cry again.  E. says to forget Chekhov for now and concentrate on Vera.  He gets to continue with his work.  Am I supposed to give up everything just because we have a baby?

            May 6, early morning.  Up all night with V.  Every time I put her down, she cried.  I was the one who got up each time because E. has to teach class today.  He says I can sleep when she sleeps.  But she only sleeps when I hold her and yesterday when I fell asleep in the chair I almost dropped her.

            June 25.  Why don’t you take a walk, E. keeps saying.  Fresh air will do you good.  So today I put V. in the carriage and walked up to campus.  At first it felt good to walk in the sunlight, but I’d forgotten the semester was over and the place would be deserted. Still I sat on the steps of Milbank Hall and hoped to see anyone who might remember me. 

            July 1.  At dinner E. talks nonstop about his work.  He drones on and on and on, so in love with the sound of his voice.  I count the minutes until he’s done and I can wash the dishes in peace.

            July 16.  E. is angry that I no longer want to sleep with him but he is too much of a coward to have it out.  I cannot stand the feeling of his hands, his hunger, on my bloated body.  He is weak in the same ways I am weak.  I have no respect for him, no love, no affinity.

            “Have any of you read The Red and the Black?”

            “Ha.  That’s a good one.  I don’t think I have the brain cells anymore.”

            “I think Danny has some kind of inner alarm that goes off whenever I pick up a book.  He can be in another room, but the moment I turn the page, it’s ‘Mommy, Mommy.’”

            “It’s moments like that when I think putting them in Skinner’s box wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

            “Is it really possible to live on peanut butter sandwiches?  If so, Jenny will be living proof.”

            “I put dinner on the table and give everyone two choices: take it or leave it.”

            “Rebecca what’s-her-name would be rolling her eyes at this conversation.”

            “She’d only care if it were in a book written in French.”

            I said that.  Everyone laughed, but the satisfaction I got from laughing flickered and died.

            August 8.  The ring of flame around the burner, the knives in the drawer, the mouse pellets under the sink.  Escape beckons in every corner of the house.

            When Harry played with the boys, their shrieking laughter sounded muted to me, as if I stood apart, behind a wall of thick glass.  When Joel and Peter bickered, I barely heard their rising voices; I sat at the table, adrift in Rebecca’s words, until Joel hit Peter on the head with the birthday truck.  I shouted at him.  I dragged him by the arm into the bedroom and it gave me a small but terrifying satisfaction to slap him.  While Joel howled behind the door, Peter began crying, too.  I didn’t go to him.  I just sat at the table with a can of Harry’s beer.  Had I once been a hungry, nervous student at Bronx Science with my sights on medical school?  Peter crawled into my lap, wiped his face on my shirt, claimed his comfort.  All I could do was rub his small, hot back.       

            And there was Eric.  He had enrolled Vera in a nursery school, but every few days I saw him in the hallway, leading her by the hand.  How are you, I’d ask.  We’re getting by, he’d answer, but his face was abject.  Sorrow deepens some people’s beauty, and this was true of him.  His gleaming surfaces had been abraded, and I detected something passionate, almost devotional, about his grief. 

            How are you really? I asked him one day when he was alone, and he told me Vera had wakened several times in the night, calling out for her mother.  It’s very hard, I offered in reply. 

            Eric grabbed me and pinned me against the wall.  I braced myself for a slap.  I did not try to shield myself or shout at him to stop.  Whatever happened next would be the logical result of my trespasses.  He pressed himself against me and kissed me, with all of Harry’s ardor and none of his tenderness.  I felt Eric’s erection, but I understood this as a purely physical response, nothing to do with me.  His kiss was as good as a slap.  I brushed my teeth five, six times that day, but all day I tasted his smoky breath. 

            January 14, 1956.  V. began crawling today.  She looks like a crab with her left leg stuck out straight.  As she made her way across the floor she laughed her low bewitching chuckle. I know one thing: I love this girl.

            September 28, 1956.  Vera loves to hide her doll under a cushion or behind the window blinds.   She shrieks with glee every time she finds it.  I’m surprised at my own enjoyment of this game.  V. is thrilled to find her doll every time!

            February 12, 1957.  I see now that the answer to my survival is to live a divided life.  While I did not choose my current circumstances, I can accept them.  I can play the wife, iron E.’s shirts, proof-read his papers.  Meanwhile I can hold myself apart:  private, inviolable.

            May 3, 1958.  Our new apartment is sunny.  V. loves to run up and down the long hallway.  The extra bedroom will be my study.  I think I’ll hang white curtains in the window.

            July 18.  Today was a perfect, cloudless summer day.  Decided to take V. to the carousel at Central Park.  We walked all the way, and the air smelled of pressed linen.  She chose a white horse, and I took the black one beside her.  We rode the carousel three times.  Simple pleasure, what other people feel all the time.  Before we started back I bought us each an ice cream.  When the man handed her the cone, V. pressed her lips against it.  I love today, she said, and I told her I did too.

            Oct. 26.  V. and I played tea party and then we played school and then hospital.  When I finally told her I wanted to read, she lay on the floor and cried.  I locked myself in the bathroom but of course one cannot escape oneself.   

            December 3.  I hope to God E. never reads this.  V. horrible all day, whining about everything.  Dragged her shopping and when I was done she planted herself in the middle of the aisle and refused to move.  No matter what I said she refused.  Finally, I walked away.  She didn’t move.  I walked up to the door, but she kept standing there.  I waited a few more minutes then left the store.  I thought she’d come running after me but when I reached the end of the block she wasn’t there.  I watched the cars stream past thinking I should just go on; she’d be better off without me.  How do people do it?  How did Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary find the courage to do it?   Someone honked and I realized where I was and what I’d done: I’d left my daughter alone in a store.  I ran back and found her up front eating a lollipop.  She’d been crying so hard her eyes were red.  The clerk’s face was filled with silent accusation.   I hugged V. and told her I love her, I never meant to leave her.  On the way home I bought her an ice cream, but it just made her shiver to eat it.  A few blocks later she got sick all over everything.  Back home I cleaned her up, but I was not as tender as I should have been.   No one knows what it’s like to fail every day at the thing that comes so easily to everyone else.

            The journal ended here.  On December Fourth, Eric had come to me with the news that Rebecca had left.   I pressed my palm against her careening script and remembered how, at the park, she had sung just for Vera, how they’d shared their private dance.  I wished my touch could travel through those pages to offer her some measure of peace.  At the same time, I wanted to be rid of her.  I closed the notebook.  I left everything as I’d found it under the stairs.

            Back at the apartment, I’d left the front door wide open.  I rushed into the boys’ bedroom, where they were still napping.  I nearly fell to my knees to see them there, unharmed.  Sleep revealed the residual plumpness in Peter’s face, but in the past few weeks, Joel’s body had assumed lankier, more grownup proportions.  For almost an hour, I stood in the doorway and watched them sleep.  I could not stop drinking in their beauty, but I knew I had to wake them or else they’d be wild all night.  Finally, I roused each one with a kiss on his sweaty hair.

            That night, Harry and I sat together and listened to Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet.  When the yearning second movement came on, I took his hand.  I always loved Harry’s hands: their square, honest shape; the printer’s ink that ringed his nails despite his daily washing with a pungent soap.     I moved closer and inhaled his scent: the cleaning solvents, the metallic tinge from the type and slugs, the Schlitz beer he drank after work.

            “Let’s move this operation to the bedroom,” he murmured.  We unfolded our bed and began undressing as the Quintet ended.  We made love for the first time in several weeks and afterwards, I felt both absolved and chastened.  I had, in a manner of speaking, committed an infidelity.  I had been unfaithful to the person I had, until recently, believed I was.

            The next evening, I told Harry I was going out for a walk.  I put on my coat and boots and then retrieved the bag of notebooks from underneath the stairs. 

            Behind Eric’s door, swing music played.  My heartbeat was louder and more insistent than my knock.  The music went quiet, and a minute later, Eric appeared, in stocking feet.  His face looked bloated with sleep.  I could not place him in the same universe with his urgent lips and tongue two weeks earlier or the Glenn Miller he had just shut off.  One of his toes poked out from a hole in his sock.  I could smell the spirits on his breath.

            He said, “What can I do for you after you’ve done so much for me?”

            I recognized but did not traffic easily in irony.  “Rebecca left some journals under the stairs.  I just found them.  I thought you’d want to know.”  I held out the bag.  My voice was as fast and nervous as a child’s.

            Eric took the bag, and everything else fell away, all his cleverness and courage and rage, everything except the sorrow that was always present in him, like the bass line in a song.

            “I looked all over the apartment for these.  She wrote in them feverishly, you might say obsessively.  After she left, I looked everywhere for them and when I couldn’t find them, I assumed she burned them.   It seems like something she’d do, doesn’t it?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “No, of course not.  Why would you?”

            I began worrying the skin around my fingernails.   “Anyway, I thought you’d want them.  I knew they were hers because she wrote her name in the front.” 

            Eric didn’t register this evasion.  He was muzzy with inebriation.   “She was only eighteen when we met.  Yearning and intense.  The kind of student professors wait for and dread a little.  The material was difficult, but she thrived on the difficulty.”

            “I wish I’d had the chance to know her better.”

            His laugh was a strangled yelp.  “You can reach her at the poste restante.” 

            I smiled, baffled by the foreign words.  I still wanted him to think highly of me; I wanted to be able to think highly of myself.  “Come over for supper sometime.  You and Vera.”

            He rubbed his eyes.   “Marvelous idea.  Thank you.  We will.”

            Not long afterwards, Eric and Vera moved out.  The same uniformed movers arrived, but this time they made the trip in reverse.  They whisked the furniture down the stairs to the van double-parked outside.

            I told myself I had done the right thing, giving him the journals.   While many of the passages had to have caused him pain, the pain would be resolved with time, whereas his not-knowing would never be resolved, and he and Vera would be stuck in a perpetual state of waiting. 

            One thing was clear:  Rebecca loved Vera as best she could.  Didn’t they have the right to know? 

             That spring, a young woman began taking Vera to the park.  We couldn’t help staring: this new woman was tall and full-bodied.  She glowed with sunny good health.  She helped Vera climb to the top of the slide and cheered her on when she slid down.  She looked like a Swedish film star, a completely different species from us. 

            Vera had a pail and shovel for digging in the sand.  She now played as children do, ferociously and without any trace of self-consciousness, until the blonde, whom we’d secretly named the Big Swede, called her home.

            One afternoon, Eric Redl appeared in the park.  His hair was trim again.  His eyes caught mine, but he maintained the smooth, impersonal look of a man whose desires were being satisfied.  I stood with the other mothers when Vera ran over to hug him.  We watched him swing her around and we watched him kiss The Big Swede on the lips.

            He didn’t let the grass grow, we said to one another.

            Over time, many of us, the old guard, the Collective Unconscious, have spoken of our children’s earliest years.  We have spoken of our fatigue and boredom and the aspect of performance, which is one of motherhood’s dirty little secrets, and of the loneliness we felt even in one another’s company.  We entered a more confessional age, and so we confessed: our rage and despair and lust and envy, our abortions and affairs.  From time to time I thought of Rebecca and her courage to write the unspeakable, and I thought of Eric and the secrets we never should have shared.  Although I always thought of her with regret and good wishes, I never spoke of finding my dark double in those pages until now.

            Many of us live in the suburbs where we swore we’d never set foot and also have condos in Florida.  Many of us are dead.  Harry died last year, and although people say the pain does ease, I am still waiting for this to be true. 

            I continue to live in the old building.  After a period of decline, the place is full again with children.  The mothers, and a few stay-at-home fathers, use the same park as we once did, near the Cathedral.  On warm days, I like to walk over there, although I’m nearly invisible now, a woman of eighty, sitting alone on the bench with my cup of deli coffee.  I watch the children playing—the wild ones, the preternaturally kind ones, and the silent observers—and their parents watching over them: all of them beautiful, preening, fragile.

At a quarter to six, Kennen Cass begins his day on the roof of an eighteen-story building.  After he gauges the speed of the wind (ten miles an hour from the southeast) he pauses to look out over the city of Vancouver, the predictable grid of its streets, right angles and parallels converging just before the Canadian horizon.  At his feet tiny red suns blaze in the windshields of a dozen cars that speckle the gray plain of a parking lot.  Up in the heights of the city, away from the heat of the pavement, the breezes brush coolly by, strained through his outstretched fingers.  Kennen straightens, lifts his chin, inhales twice, and jumps.  Three and a half seconds later the air cushion blossoms up around him.  He sinks down, opening his eyes in time to see the sky disappear into the yellow folds and then spread out overhead again like a gauzy stain.  He exhales.  Efficient hands reach down and bat away the bright plastic billows, clearing a space for him to stand.

            They want the shot again.  Assistants rush in to reset the nets and cameras, and Kennen walks to the corner stand to buy the Times and a coffee from a tired-looking man who stands behind stacks of newspapers thick with headlines.  Before Kennen finishes the first few sips, they want him back up again.  They’re rushing through the takes; the director wants another one while the light still filters through the skyline at an acute angle and a bloody red still suffuses the air.  Kennen pours his cup out on the sidewalk; the coffee will be cold by the time he gets down to the ground to reclaim it.  He strides off toward the hotel where he’ll spend the next two hours jumping and falling.

            This entails four more run-throughs and then a fifth jump that is not strictly necessary but they have the time and the director likes to play it safe.  (The phrase is one of the man’s motifs.  He is without irony.)  By the time Kennen reaches the roof for his final leap, the city is stirring, a gradual accretion of vehicles and bodies like thoughts collecting and struggling into momentum.  Doors open and shut far below him in countless synaptic flurries.  A cluster of observers has congregated along the perimeter of the movie set, faces tilted upward to witness his descent from the sky.  The small gathering of them shines blandly up at him like coins, and he notices then from their golden cast that the portentous quality of the early-morning light is quickly dwindling away. 

            Kennen looks at them once, not again.  He lines up his toes along the edge of the roof, that sharp right angle pressed tight against the emptiness of open space.  A few seeds, somehow blown miraculously skyward, have taken root in the grit of the cement, and Kennen steps around the spindly plants with care, trying not to crush them with his feet.  He stares straight down, chin to his chest, to the yellow target below him, crosshatched to a center, that very specific point in the universe he must strike and not miss.  He fixes his eyes upon it, just for a moment, and then launches himself breathlessly outward and down.

                                                                                                 *

            No one really believes the stunt double will misgauge his jumps, that he will plummet to his death, be run over by the wheels of a cargo truck or a train, that his parachute will malfunction.  Still, Kennen knows that the film crew and bystanders hold their breath while he’s in the air.  It seems to be a universal superstition:  bracing for the unthinkable keeps it at bay.  By withholding their exhalations they pay homage to the possibility of disaster, their helplessness in the face of it.

            In the first half-second of his fall, he knows something is amiss.  He has miscalculated the speed of the wind, which has gained strength and amplified the updraft, or perhaps he dragged his legs in the push-off.  He should be upright, leading with his feet, but he is not.  His body tilts; he feels the weight of his chest pitching forward, pulling his head down with it.  He should see the sky.  Instead, he sees the ground.   Balconies, flowerpots, window-washers, clouds, flicker between his knees.  He does not know what he is headed toward.  His arms swim easily through the insubstantial air, grasping for something – anything – he knows is not there.

            As he hits the air cushion, he retches up a burning puddle.  For several seconds his body can neither draw in nor expel air, so he simply lies stunned in the suffocating nylon mesh that enfolds him.

            After a minute one of the lighting assistants appears in his peripheral vision, leans over, and slaps him on the back a few times.  “Man,” he says, “your life must flash in front of your eyes whenever you do that kind of shit.” 

            At last, at last, Kennen breathes out.  Somewhere nearby the director raves about the flailing and uncontrolled quality of the fall, how spectacular, how much he loved it and Kennen realizes then that not one of them understood anything was wrong.  He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and swallows the bile back down.  “Not really,” he says.  And he climbs to his feet.

                                                                                  *

            After that they’re done with him.  Kennen is free to buy brunch, to check out of his room, hail a cab, board a flight back to Los Angeles.

            As he waits in the checkout line at the airport he thinks ahead to his next job, a stunt that will require him to hang glide into a landing on the roof of a Ford Explorer.  The filming is almost a month away.  Kennen had plans for this four-week interim of freedom, but now he cannot remember them.  He shifts the strap chafing his collarbone and, before he can restrain himself, he sighs so heavily that the woman in front of him glances back and then steps forward pointedly as if he’s just done something obscene.  Kennen moves up and stares at the back of her head daring her to turn around and say something, but she does not. 

            Strangers brush past and each jostle against his elbow causes Kennen’s teeth to clench.  He shrinks to the side in an attempt to ward off the unnecessary contact but to no avail.  Somewhere behind him a toddler shrieks a shrill articulation of delight and the startling sound lingers painfully in his eardrums.  As he looks around, he observes how the florescent lights cast stark shadows that relentlessly underline each irregularity, no matter how faint, on every face.  They have all been waiting for so long, Kennen thinks, for days, for years, in some grey time zone – it’s like seeing what the future will bring and it will not be kind to any of them.  He cannot bear the ugly repetition any longer so he casts his eyes to the floor, holds them there, and watches the incremental progress of his feet across the tiles.  And still the people continue to bump on by.    

            Even after he enters the confines of the plane and folds himself into the window seat he cannot relax.  Every joint in his body aches.  All those projecting bones – his heels, his elbows, his shoulders – they articulate the pain of decades of landings.   Each one mumbles its own distinct complaint.  Someday, they remind him, he will have to stop.

            Not until the plane glides onto the runway and the acceleration of takeoff presses him into his chair – his body again in the grip of physical forces beyond his control – does Kennen think through the last fall of the morning, recalling that salty taste of panic in his mouth, and only against his will.  Close calls are a requisite part of his work; he tries not to let them stay with him.  The sooner the details fade away the better.

            But the words spoken by the lighting assistant ring in his ears.  People have expressed that cliché to him before.  He supposes it could happen; he knows that the brain can work at astonishing speeds.  He can’t guess what those dying people see, what pattern the flicker of moments might create as they cascade down upon one another.  It seems too much to hope for, still, he has always thought it might be something unspeakably beautiful.  All he remembers from this morning, though, is the sharpness of the light and the air passing between his fingers with a thin, almost slippery ease.  Nothing else. 

            At the sound of a faint chime, Kennen shifts in his seat.  He slept longer than he realized and he has dreamed.  As with most dreams, his are nothing like life.  They resemble paintings: everything in them flat and still. 

            The Californian landscape rises beneath him, becoming ever more complex the closer it comes.  The flight is almost over, the wings of the plane now low enough to cast shadow blades upon the earth. 

                                                                                         *

            When he disembarks at LAX, Elizabeth is waiting for him, fresh off her own flight from New York.  Her luggage sits at her feet, and she rests her chin on the knobby top of her cello case watching passengers stream along moving her eyes from left to right but not turning her head.  Her hair is looped up into a messy knot and pastel crescents underscore her tired eyes, but it doesn’t matter.  Even in Los Angeles, land of the false and the beautiful, men and women turn their heads as they pass her by.  It wasn’t until Elizabeth began to grow up that Kennen realized that extraordinarily lovely people share the same fate as the deformed – the inability to travel through the world unnoticed even for a second.  The flawless quality of her symmetry makes her as much of a freak as a man with flippers for feet.  When Kennen introduces her to his friends and colleagues, here’s my daughter now, their heads snap back.  They look again in disbelief. 

            He wonders what it must feel like and how much Elizabeth knows.  Surely she must.  The two of them have never discussed it. 

            She disentangles herself from the cello and embraces him. 

            “How was your flight?”  Kennen shoulders her bag with his free arm and she hefts her unwieldy instrument. 

            “Terrible,” she says.  She has been waiting for this question.  “The woman next to me was absolutely certain we would never make it here.  Halfway into the flight we hit some turbulence and I had to hold her hand the rest of the way.  I kept patting her head and saying, shh, there, there.” With her free arm she reaches up and brushes Kennen’s thinning hair, demonstrating. 

            “Poor thing.”  Elizabeth’s ease with people always startles him.  She certainly did not acquire it from him.

            “I hope you’re referring to me.”

            “Of course.   There, there.”  He pats her shoulder and manages a small grin before he turns and glances around for an exit.  “Let’s find a cab and get the hell out of here.” 

            He doesn’t have a chance to really look at her again until they are settled into the taxi and hurtling along a congested freeway.  She stares out through the scratches and smudges of the window, all eyes, then smiles when she sees him watching her.   

            “You miss it at all?”

            She tips her head.  “I forget how bright it is here,” she says.  “Even with the haze, you know?  There’s so much color.”  She looks away again.  “I can’t believe I didn’t remember.”

            Kennen stares out past her profile.  He has no idea what she’s talking about.

                                                                                             *

            By eight-thirty they’re home, bags dropped on the stones in the foyer, drinking wine out of glasses so large that the rims dig into the bridges of their noses when they tip them for the last dregs.  Elizabeth sits like a little girl when she comes home, legs hanging over one arm of the chair, her long skirt wadded between her knees.  After they open the second bottle of pinot, after Elizabeth has determinedly steered the conversation through the fall program of the New York Philharmonic, the eccentricities of guest conductors, and the dissolute nature of brass players, there is a moment of silence.  Kennen cautiously asks about her mother. 

            “She’s fine,” Elizabeth says.  “Working on another book.”

            “Another book on loving yourself.”  Kennen whirls his wine; it almost slips over the edge.  He calls Harriet a charlatan.  If this hurts Elizabeth she doesn’t give it away.  She drops her gaze to her lap; he catches the twist of her half-smile not meant for him, gone as soon as she looks up again. 

            “You might try reading one some time,” she says. 

            “Oh, oh.”  He settles back in his chair and raises his half-empty glass as if in a prelude to a toast.  “Here it comes.”

            “I’m just saying…”

            “Let’s hear it.”  In the distance the Pacific rushes in, rushes out, a soft blurring sound. 

            “Thanks.  I only have so much breath to waste.”  She runs a hand up and down along her forearm and sighs. “I’ve come to terms with my limitations.  Cello playing only.  I don’t try to preach to the resigned.”

            Kennen’s head is fuzzy.  That expression is not correct, he knows, but the right word fails to present itself as it should.  His eyes wander across the darkening windowpane in front of him as if they might somehow capture the phrase and pin it there against the slippery glass but it eludes him, sliding away again and again until finally he gives up and lets it go.

            “Talk to me.”  In her last syllable he catches an undertone, a huskiness to the long e that threatens to undermine the lightness of her mocking command.  She clears her throat.  “It’s how this works, you know.  Now that I’ve talked, you’re supposed to tell me something.   Something I don’t know.”  She reaches out and fills her glass.  “Tell me how the business of death-defying is going.”

            “Oh, it’s going along, I suppose.  Same old, same old.”  As he stares out into the accumulating dusk, Kennen feels the weight of the day taking shape in his chest, his headlong fall turning into words that rise and press up against his soft palate.  But just as he opens his mouth he turns his head and catches a glimpse of her upturned face, bright as one of those careless bystanders’, and he thinks, no, better not.  So he shrugs his shoulders, tips his hand in a side-to-side motion and says nothing else.

            “Succinct as ever, I see.” With her fingernail she scratches at the suede upholstery covering her chair.  “The other day I  –”

            “So tell me.”  Kennen cuts her off.  “Why the cello?”  He’s startled by his own question and its inflection – too quick, too earnest – and before it even dies away he regrets it.  “I’m just curious, that’s all.”

            She sets her glass on the end table between them and stares at him quizzically.  “Why do I play?  I don’t know.  Why do you jump off buildings?”

            Kennen shifts impatiently.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  It’s not the same thing at all.”

            “I’m sorry.  It’s just – I’m not used to –.” He watches the chase of thoughts flitting past, one after another, in the subtle workings of her features.  “It’s just strange hearing you ask the question.  I wasn’t prepared.” 

            “Fair enough.”  Restlessly, he rolls his right arm around in its socket.  The shoulder hurts the worst.  He must have hit it coming down this morning. 

            Elizabeth laughs once – a flat sound – and swings her feet over the arm of the chair to floor in a fluid motion of skirt and legs.  “I’m cutting us off.” She stands and lifts the glass from his hand but she hesitates before she heads into the kitchen.  “Loving is too straightforward of a word, maybe,” she says slowly.  She studies the picture hanging on the wall just above his head and does not meet his eyes.  “It’s more like swinging both your fists in the dark and hoping –.”  A flush slips up her neck then recedes and she doesn’t leave a space for his response.  “I’m ready to keel over, Dad.  I’ll see you in the morning, OK?”   And she slides through the doorway and disappears.

                                                                                          *

            After his daughter climbs upstairs to bed (to dream about strings, to dream about fermatas, and the flash of bows under stage lights) Kennen turns out the lamps and roams stride by stride across the smooth floors in the dark, up and down the staircase.  The vaulted ceilings vanish somewhere up above his head; the walls recede and the corners startle him by leaping out like elbows to bring him up short, forcing him to turn. 

            His pacing brings him back into the living room.  Floodlights radiating from the neighboring houses fill the space with their strange bright exhalations, and even with the lights off the outline of the chairs and tables remain distinct, each form trailing a diffuse shadow across the hardwood floor.  From the middle of the room, he can almost discern the photographs hanging on the opposite wall.  Whenever Kennen looks at them he thinks about the stunt performers of seventy-five or a hundred years ago, the ones who performed without the air cushions, harnesses, and safety glass, before an era of health insurance.  Those men were proud of their broken limbs and concussions, talismans of their courage, however misplaced. The whole science that Kennen has learned by heart – all those points where the body can absorb shock, the way it can maintain speed, hold a straight line against the wind, describe a trajectory, roll away the force of a landing – those men disregarded utterly.  Clint Trucks, whose career came to a close not long after the invention of the X-ray, framed his own ghostly prints and hung them in his home for his visitors to admire.  Kennen purchased the reproductions almost fifteen years ago, not long after his divorce.

            He steps closer to examine them, trying to make them out for what they are rather than how he remembers them to be, studying the femurs and tibia.  Unless you know their origins, the framed shapes are nothing more than striking abstractions – lean white lines swollen with burls where the bones have broken then come back together again.  An orthopedist once told Kennen that after a bone breaks and knits together, it thickens and becomes stronger than before.  If that’s true, Kennen thinks, those men who survived a decade of work must have had skeletons that were nearly unbreakable.  His own would not compare so well. 

            At the sound of the ceiling creaking over his head, Kennen blinks, looks up from the planks beneath his feet.  His gaze has fallen; he’s been studying the cracks, running his eyes along the parallels as if the diagonals will reconcile themselves and come together.  When Elizabeth was born, Kennen promised Harriet he would guard what he said to their daughter about his profession and keep the subjunctive to himself.  There would be no hairsbreadths for Elizabeth, Harriet said, no narrow brushes or close escapes.  Well, he has kept his word although Harriet is now hundreds of miles away and will not know the difference.  Let no one say he say he does not honor those agreements into which he enters.

            A hot splinter of pain pulses once beneath his scapula and subsides.  Kennen turns away, walks slowly down the hall, and climbs the stairs as quietly as he can, one at a time, to bed.

                                                                                             *

            He awakens at six-thirty, later than he intends, to the vibrations of Elizabeth’s practice seeping up through two floors and under the gap beneath his door.  All he can hear in his bedroom are the high notes.   The low ones dissolve into the studs and drywall despite how forcefully she strikes them.

            They swell up around him, though, as he descends the stairs.  She’s playing in the front room, and Kennen pauses in the doorway to watch her. She doesn’t look up, and he isn’t sure if she realizes that he’s there or not.  The music broods like a dirge and then quickens – probably something nineteenth-century.  Schumann?  Brahms?  His ignorance is profound.  The pins are slipping out of her blonde hair; tendrils spill over her bowing arm, which churns, the sharp angle of her elbow thrusting in and out as if she is attempting to uproot a stone from the earth or bail herself out of an incoming tide.  The dusky tones swirl together, bursting into high splashes that slide over a brink and slip away. 

            Kennen means to steal off so as not to distract her but the inexorable momentum of the music holds him there waiting for the peak it strains toward.  Notes rush forward, the following swelling up before the preceding fade, filling the air like a watery rise in the depths of a stone canyon, a skyward surge toward the expanse of a diluvial plain overhead.  Crescendos cascade around him, phrases so clear that even their softest ripples pierce and ring across the membranous surface of his inner ear.  Beneath them, undertones churn in persistent iterations like murky currents crossing and merging, their pull strangely familiar. 

            Unable to stir he remains there, listening, his hands growing cold, his legs taking on weight.  He knows this piece, has heard it somewhere before – the score to a yawing drop panning out at his feet, perhaps, or a song played at his wedding years ago.   Or before that – the accompaniment to a stranger’s hand pressed on his sleeve at a funeral for a passing he has forgotten until this moment.  Or maybe the strains take him back even earlier – an afternoon in his infancy when he was left alone for the first time on the grass beneath an open window to watch the shadows fall through the leaves before the knowledge of the coming silence filled those resonances with sadness. 

            And finally she reaches it; her fingers slide along the neck of the cello, falling through octaves, reach their position and bear down.  They quiver under the strain, holding their arc like a breath, impossibly long, meting out the final low note, sustaining it, until its last tremors fade away.

            In a tidy flourish she pulls off the bow, but she does not glance up.  Sweat gleams in her collarbone.  She breathes hard.  When she shifts the instrument from her shoulder, she sees him for the first time and smiles, and he suddenly wishes that the joy in her look had something to do with him.  “There you are,” she says.  “Sorry I woke you.”

            He releases his hold on the doorframe and looks at his stinging hands.  The wooden corners have bitten blue welts into his palms, straight cuts that blot out the subtler pattern of his skin and impose an ugly new design against the grain.  Bringing them into focus causes the room beyond them to tilt precariously, perpendicular angles becoming acute, edges gathering shadows as if taking on dusk. 

            “Hey.” Elizabeth starts up from her chair.  The bow clatters against the cello and the instrument’s polished recesses resound with a startling depth.  In two strides she reaches him and places her hand on his shoulder.  “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”

            Kennen shakes his head.  “There are worse things to wake up to.”  He rubs his hands across his blue jeans and looks down at her face.  It contains an expression he has never seen before.  Beneath the concern and the tightness of her forced smile, he thinks she looks moved.  “No,” he says.   “It wasn’t bad at all, actually.  I guess I just forgot I was breathing there for a second.  You know, people get old and they can only do one thing at a time.” 

            She attempts to guide him toward the couch, urging him into a sitting position.  “Elizabeth, please – ” Kennen tries to extricate himself, but he has not yet recovered from the moment of vertigo and now she is both faster and stronger than he is.

            “This is ridiculous,” she says.  They are halfway across the room – how did she get him so far?  “What’s the matter with you?  Just sit down for a minute.”  The sofa cushions press against the back of his knees. 

            “One minute, Dad.  Just give it one minute.”  She pulls on his elbow but he continues to resist.  “If standing in the living room makes you dizzy, I really hate to think of you up on the edge of–”

            “Goddamn it, Elizabeth!”  He flings her arm away and she steps back and does not try to touch him again.  “There’s nothing wrong with me.  You don’t always have to make a big deal out of every little thing.” 

            He takes a tentative step and, sure enough, the world has regained its normal equilibrium, everything solid and steady.  He does not turn to look back at her, but as he leaves the room he tries to cast his parting words in a conciliatory tone.  “There isn’t anything here for breakfast so I’m going to go to the store – I was thinking omelets.  Is that all right with you?”

            “Whatever you want,” she says and the stiffness in her response pains him.  As he makes his way out the door, keys in hand, he hears her playing resume once again, a roughened and frustrated edge to the notes that was not there before.

                                                                                     *

            The route from his house to the closest grocery store runs almost entirely uphill, bending back around on itself east and then west in deference to the bluffs that overlook the Pacific.  Kennen has guided his Toyota around these parabolic curves more times than he can count with just a tilt of his arm on the steering wheel, not a thought in his head.  Now, however, something vibrates along his nerve endings like a delayed reaction, possibly a residual effect of his earlier lightheadedness that heightens his awareness of physical forces, the power of friction and velocity and speed.  The window next to him fluctuate with every car that hurtles past, metal masses separated by mere inches, there and then gone.  He stares at the asphalt churning in front of him, the sleek yellow dashes flowing past and concentrates on maintaining a constant margin of space.

            After half a mile, he has almost gained enough altitude to see over the roofs of the houses that jostle along the beach for the tiniest sliver of a view – a precious blue glint between fences over a three-car garage – to where a narrow strip of sand suns itself below.  The light catching and reflecting in his mirrors causes his eyes to smart and water, blurring the scene in front of him, and he brushes them angrily with the back of his hands, one and then the other. 

            So that he is what he is doing then – that hasty and irritated gesture – when, just above him, a flaming red sports car dips over the crest of the hill and collides headlong into him.  He swings his gaze around just in time to see the impact as it occurs: the sky breaking into shards, the red hood wrinkling, a spray of glass and sparks.  The centrifugal spin and the airbag exploding out from the steering column drive him back into his seat, and he feels the Toyota slipping out of the vortex into the open space where the ocean shines. The vehicle strikes the guardrail, which resists, bows, tears away with a metallic sound, screws and solder shuddering defeat.  He feels the earth slither out from under the rear tires; caught on the edge, the car hangs, wobbles, wavers in a strange equilibrium like that between hope and despair.

            No film could capture all these excruciating, these astonishing details, each one faceted with a thousand others:  the clouds snagged in the sparkling blue fragments of the passenger window, the parenthetical grass blades fluttering skyward, the filament jutting from a headlight gone blind.  A refrain sings through his head, five repeating tones, a piercing iteration so sustained that at first he thinks what he hears is just the sound of the crash ringing on in his ears.  But no, it’s a fragment of music from just half an hour earlier when he stood in the doorway and watched the early morning light burn a rim around Elizabeth’s head, a phrase he doesn’t even remember retaining. 

            Over and over the notes bear down, rise, then descend again, the pattern breaking off before it resolves.   Each time the sequence begins anew Kennen remembers to take a breath.  With each inhalation sharp pains radiate outward from his sternum along the fragile branches of his ribs, thousands of microscopic fibers conflagrating in spreading rings like a grass fire.  Flames flicker in the gloom behind his eyelids.  He opens them.  The sun catches in his lashes; he blinks furiously and bright spangles flash and scatter everywhere he looks.  Beyond that everything is dark.

            But when he lifts his head and focuses his dilated pupils, the other driver emerges slowly in the haze.  She’s a young woman – about Elizabeth’s age – although her pale and unexceptional face in no way resembles his daughter’s.  And yet the shadows from the interior of her car distill the strange girl’s features – the hollows beneath her cheekbones, the flush of her lips, the square angle of her jaw – into something exquisite in its own right.  Her head thrusts back against her seat cushion as if she is straining toward a surface for air.  Then she opens her eyes; she watches him through the empty space where their windshields existed mere seconds earlier. 

            The woman stares on and on as if she wants to speak and would if she only could while those notes burrow further and further into him, rising in volume, threatening to overwhelm him.  He wants to close his eyes again, but he can’t bring himself to look away from her.  There’s something so knowing in the gaze fixed upon him that Kennen wonders if she can’t hear it too somehow, that maddening irresolution.   If he could only get out of this car, he might know for certain.

            How many times has he found himself on a brink, ready to pass over the edge?  Kennen estimates the time of the required motions and the effect of their momentum on the car’s sway – the kind of calculations where he holds expertise although it’s an imprecise science at best.  He thinks he might make it.  With his left hand, he flings open the driver’s side door; water or maybe sand lies below but he doesn’t spare a glance to find out.  With the dead fingers of his right, he fumbles with the clasp on his seatbelt.  It springs away easily under his touch.

            Kennen performs each movement with deliberation and care.  Not because he should but because he must – slowly the feeling in his extremities is ebbing away. With each second that passes he is astounded.  The Toyota should already be on its way down, and yet here it stays – oscillating in a terrifying pitch – but still it is something.  He can reach out and grasp a post of the guardrail and, one slow inch at a time, he can pull himself free.  The effort forces the blood back where it needs to go and he feels his fingers and toes again aching along to the same tempo that drums in his head. 

            This should be painful, and it is, but it isn’t so terrible.  That’s what Kennen wants to tell her, so he lifts himself up and struggles slowly across the pavement and sandy topsoil to the mangled sports car.  Jagged teeth of glass still hang in the driver’s window making it difficult to fit his hand in, but with a bit of effort he reaches through, brushes his palm across the young woman’s clammy forehead, and pats her damp hair while she closes her eyes and sits very still, waiting.  From where he stands, just back behind the edge, the view is astonishing:  the effusive air, grains of sand taking flight in the wind, the water stretching across an expanse of miles.

            Now that he’s here, he can’t think of how to ask the question or to describe what he knows.  It isn’t what he expected, it’s not the way anyone else guessed, flashing not right, not even coming close, but rather each second of his life unfurling at once.   It’s as if the ocean’s every brief and fluid fold – every blazing peak and shaded trough – has paused before him and somehow he can see each of them, now one at a time, too many to count, and now all merging together in startling coruscations of light.  Strangers gather somewhere in the background and all his words are failing him, dying soundless and insufficient on his dry lips.  So Kennen offers her the first sounds that come to him.  Shh, shh, he says. There, there.

Under her straw hat, Evelyn broke off the brown seedheads and dead stalks winter had left and heard the answering machine pick up inside her house.  She’d programmed it so Kitty Wells’ maple syrup voice melodically invited the caller to please use the password, just say the words of love.  Evelyn rested her weight on her palms, like an infant in a crawl, as she heard the Radiologist’s voice.

“This is Dr. Sawyer?” the voice said girlishly.  “Evelyn McNair can give me a call at–”

“Want me to get that for you?” Barry yelled out through the screen.

“No.”

“It’s the doctor!”

“That’s okay!”

“But it could be—”

“I’ll call her back later!”

Barry came out the door in his bare feet, walking gingerly over the gravel, coffee mug in hand.  He squatted beside her and pulled out a weed.  “Is there something you aren’t tellin’ me?”

“Everything doesn’t have to be told.”

“I’m gettin’ a lot of no’s today.”

Earlier that morning, she’d refused his offer to put his own voice on her answering machine.

“You don’t live here,” she’d said, reaching into her kitchen cabinet for a coffee mug, then shutting it closed just-so, “but thank you.”

“Just trying to protect you from the crazies.”  Raising his thick gray eyebrows, he’d retreated a step and held his calloused palms between them as if to fend her off.

“That’s how it all starts.”  She cinched the belt of her flannel robe around her thickening waist.  The robe still smelled of their mutual sweat, and she was naked beneath it–a sight she herself did not like, but Barry had said he appreciated a younger woman.  She was 60 to his 65.  He called her honeyrumped and sweetfaced, and whenever she mentioned a part she didn’t like (the sagging skin under her arms or the blue veins in her thighs), he’d roll up her sleeve or her pants leg and start kissing her there.  With his dimples, a person wouldn’t think he’d once carried an M60 through the jungle, except that he still did his military push-ups every morning.  About the rest, he preferred not to speak.

“How what starts?”

She’d folded her arms, sent him a glare.  “It.”

He’d lifted his own coffee mug between them, sipping, but did not appear discouraged.  When she sat down at the table next to him and spread out the newspaper, she allowed him to touch her fingers lightly, then squeeze, before she reclaimed her hand to turn the page. 

Crouched among the dead stalks now, she avoided looking at him.

“I don’t think you need to know everything.  I don’t even think you want to.”

“Oh I want to,” he said.

*

She’d felt the lump in her breast a few weeks ago, checking herself in the shower as she did on the first of each month.  Her mother had had a bout with breast cancer, though in the end she’d died from a heart attack, so Evelyn knew to be careful, and she got herself to the doctor right away.  There had been one indeterminate but worrisome mammogram, and this was the second.  She hadn’t mentioned either to Barry, nor to her grown son, Bart, nor even to her women friends.  Why worry people if there was nothing to worry about?

Inside her cotton sweatshirt now, she could feel the fabric against the two nipples she still had.  On the other side of the board fence, as if nothing disastrous was happening to Evelyn, her friend and neighbor Joan, a college professor one year from retirement who lived with three Siamese cats, discussed politics.

“I love Hilary,” Joan said, in what Evelyn knew to be her phone voice.  “They say she’s a heartless bitch, but what’s she supposed to do?  If she was any more emotional, they’d say she was a bubblehead.”

Whatever else was going on for Hilary Clinton, she at least appeared to have two excellent breasts, as did Evelyn, despite the reality of gravity–though now, a sagging breast seemed far better than none at all, and none at all better than death—especially now that she’d finally, after years of dreaming and mooning over country-western music, gathered enough money to retire and move into cowboy country in central Washington, from the bleak hog-raising flatlands of Minnesota; yes, she was in the great State of Washington, where she was closer to the drama of mountains and rivers, the plenty of vineyards and orchards, as well as the fruit of her womb, Bart.

In the yard, Barry touched her fingers, apparently unbothered by the dirt under the nails, grimed into the skin.  “I want to know all about you.  Every inch.”

“You got enough to worry about.”

He raised his eyebrows.  “Like what?”

“Getting the hay in.”

“Not today.  Today I rest.”

“Well, I’m operating on a need-to-know basis.”

“That’s okay.”  He broke off some brown stalks, dug up a bindweed with the screwdriver, but she could tell he was hurt.  “I’ve been there before.”  He tightened his lips.  “Can’t say I like it, though.”

“I’ll be right back.”  She went into the house, turned on the answering machine, and played back the message.  Dr. McNair wanted her to call back. 

She dialed the number.  When Evelyn explained herself, the receptionist said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but the doctor will have to talk to you herself.  She’s in surgery right now.  What time can she reach you?”

Evelyn had never, after a mammogram, had to wait for a doctor’s call.  She knew it was bad.  She sat down at the kitchen table, holding her head in her hands.  Her cat, Loretta, twined about her ankles.

It was as if that morning’s dream had been some kind of warning.  “He was right there,” she’d said to Barry when she’d awakened to the vibrations of the cat’s purr penetrating the blankets between them.  In her dream, Bart stood next to the bed trying to say something, but Evelyn hadn’t been able to hear him above Barry’s snoring.

“A course.”  Barry had tried to pull Evelyn closer.  Evelyn didn’t give.  She didn’t want to dislodge poor Loretta, who’d lost an eye but miraculously survived her encounter with something she’d run into (coyote or dog), not long after Evelyn had moved in.

“It was the same feeling I had right before the tornado—” Evelyn began.

“You say that flag across the way just kept flyin?”

“It did.”

“While everything else—”

“Wrecked.  The wind blew so hard they found a piece of straw embedded in a tree trunk.  That’s not in the dream, now, you know.  That’s the truth.”

“Piece a straw?”

She pointed a finger off to the side.  “Like it was an arrow.”

“Shrapnel.” 

“Guess you saw your share of that.”

He stiffened, but as usual, evaded the reference to his service.  “You were saying about the feeling—’”

“Without that tornado, I’d still be ignorant.”  It was a complicated story, but she’d explained to him that fifteen years ago, the tornado that had taken the roof of her house in Owatonna, Minnesota, had also revealed receipts and telephone records that had given away her husband’s numerous infidelities.  “I was taught to trust people,” she’d explained.  “So it came as a pretty good shock.”  She snuggled closer to Barry.  “Maybe that’s what disasters do.  They wake us up.  Without it, I’d still be playing the fool.  But as for the dream—”

“Well then I’m gonna call it the perfect storm.”  Barry had kissed her so deeply she’d forgotten about the cat and moved her elbow, sending Loretta off the bed with a yowl.

At the kitchen table, phone silent beside her, Loretta now on her lap, she heard the screen door open.  Barry’s feet padded across the carpet.  She felt his hands on her back.

“There’ll be daffodils any minute,” he said.

“I hope I’m here to see them,” she said.

Barry sat down beside her.  “You better tell me what’s goin’ on.”

She shook her head.

*

What if the Radiologist called and she didn’t answer it?  Then she’d never find out the results.  Would it be like the tree falling in the forest—if there was nobody there to hear about a malignant lump, could it still do harm?

If she didn’t get the news, she wouldn’t have to break it to Barry or her son Bart, who worried about everything anyway, but lately of course had more than enough with his wife Shirley stationed in Baghdad.  Everyday Bart looked at a website that could tell you exactly how many new dead and wounded American soldiers there were.  Not too many, Evelyn thought, compared to over a million Iraqi deaths blamed on the US invasion, but none of those was the mother of her grandchild.

“You shouldn’t be looking at this stuff,” Evelyn had told Bart last time she was there, setting Iris on his lap to distract him from the computer.  “It doesn’t help Shirley.”

Poor Bart, old enough now to have the hair thinning on top of his head, had taken up his daughter and held onto her the way he used to do with the yellow blanket she remembered his father taking away from him when he was six years old.  “I need to keep the whole truth in my mind.”

“Why?”

He shrugged.  “Part of living.  Part of knowing I’m alive.”

“The living are as true as the dead.”

“I’m aware of that, Evelyn.” 

She’d gotten used to it she guessed, but still hated the fact that he didn’t call her Mom.  He’d started using her first name right after she’d left his father.  She still remembered Bart with those braces on his teeth saying it was far better, as he put it, to see your parents as individuals than as the inhabitants of roles.  The inhabitants of roles.  Like a role was a little burrow and they were moles blindly making their way down the tunnels.  About the same time as he started calling her Evelyn, he also began to write poetry and listen to music she thought was downright ghoulish.  She blamed his girlfriend, Marly Southard, though she was grateful, too, that Marly’d been so wild she couldn’t stick with one guy, so Bart had finally let his hair go from the Mohawk and curl around his ears, and then he’d found Shirley, who seemed to Evelyn a good, faithful woman despite the fact that she’d ventured thousands of miles away, but that–of course—wasn’t her choice.

*

On the radio just then, the song went to Merle Haggard.  Barry made a face, but didn’t ask her to change the channel.  He was a rock ‘n roll fan, Led Zeppelin among his favorites.  Not Evelyn.  When she was younger, with her curly dark hair and eyebrows against her pale (and some said sweet-featured) face, people who knew country music often said Evelyn looked like Kitty Wells.  Barry didn’t know “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” until she put the earbuds on him and played him the song.  He’d nodded politely but eyed with suspicion the life-sized stand-up cardboard Clint Black by her entryway.  “You sure you don’t want to hold out for a cowboy?  We got plenty of em around.”

She had intended on a cowboy when she moved West, but when they’d sat on the folding chairs where she’d met him, at the Red Cross waiting to donate blood, she’d moved into easy conversation with the big-shouldered easygoing dimpled man who’d given up his morning because he had the blood type of a universal donor, and pretty soon she’d forgotten all about the cowboy idea and given Barry her phone number.

Much later, at his house, she’d asked, “What if you wake up in the night thinking I’m the enemy and let me have it?”  She’d pointed to the unloaded rifle next to his bed, ammo in the drawer of the bedside table.

“What if you wake up mad thinking I’m your ex-husband and cut off my dick with a butcher knife?”  At her house, he’d pointed to the pepper spray in her dresser drawer and the carving knives in the kitchen.

It was hard enough to trust a man when you were sixty years old with two healthy breasts, but with one going south, maybe she should just be calling it off.

“Don’t you have someplace you have to be?” she asked Barry, who was sipping his coffee carefully, as if waiting for her to speak.

“Are you tryin’ to get rid a me?  ‘Cause if you are, I’m happy to go.”

“What do I really know about you, anyway?”

He shook his head as if to clear it.  “Huh?”

“You don’t tell me diddlysquat.”

“You know enough.”

“I know you grew up here and inherited a hay operation.  I know about a few women you’ve been with in town.  But I don’t know a thing about what you did in the war.”

She knew she was treading on dangerous ground, but it was better than thinking about her own mortality.

Her neighbor and friend Joan had said she didn’t see how Evelyn could trust a guy if she didn’t know whether he’d killed boys younger than Bart, children Iris’s age, mothers like Shirley.  If he wasn’t going to explain what had happened in Vietnam, all that was left for her were images of bloodied heads on stakes from Apocalypse Now or magazine cover images of women and children’s bodies thrown into ditches during the My Lai massacre.  Of course, she’d argued with Joan, it was equally possible she was kissing someone who’d soiled his pants and run the other way in combat and couldn’t shoot a can if it was six feet tall, or much better, kept his body between the villagers at My Lai and harm.  “My ex-husband was a conscientious objector, and look what kind of a partner he was,” she’d said.

“What’s past is past,” Barry said. 

“I wish what was present was past,” she said.

“I don’t know how to help if I don’t know what it is.”  He rubbed her shoulders.  “What can I do you for?” he joked.

She thought of him faithfully riding the tractor in the hay field, turning the mown green blades to dry, then operating the baler.  She liked it that he was a native Westerner.  The Kittitas Valley was famous for timothy hay, which was shipped to Japan, the country that had had some of the worst of war, but where today Barry’s hay was fed to dairy cows who turned it into butterfat while—the sound of a small plane flying overhead made her think of it–new bombs were dropped on Iraq.

How must people down here look to the pilot—mere dots inside the neighborhood’s maze of board fences on top of what once had been a big, flat hayfield?  The horizon to the north was dominated by the Stuart Range—she’d learned the names of the mountains when she dreamed over maps in Minnesota.  They were snow-covered, toothed, magnificent as the Grand Tetons.  A mile to the west, buildings clustered in the small town of Ellensburg, where wine tastings had become as common as beer swilling, and university professors drank coffee next to cowboys.

She raised her chin, watching the sky out the window.  If some machine was up there taking infrared photographs, would the lump in her breast be visible?  If cancerous, would it be growing and dividing even as he watched?  So close to her chest cavity, maybe it would look like a mutated heart.  One that was immune to the password Kitty Wells sang about—one that grew on bad genes and fear instead of love.

“Maybe it’s lunch time,” she said to Barry. 

She got up to wash her hands, then made them each a turkey sandwich.  In silence, she chewed each bite, savoring the silky mayonnaise and the tart dill of the pickle.  She wiped her mouth and washed the dishes before she looked at the telephone again.

You lived your life, you thought love was seeing only the good in people, but when the sirens went off, you had to expect a big blow.  She’d been home with Bart, thank God, and got into the basement in time when the twister hit Owatonna, but they could hear it—a sound just like they said, something like a train engine–and after that, Bart, always a worried kid, withdrew even more.  They’d had him to specialists, counselors.  He’d got into drugs for a while.  He wasn’t good at holding a job.  But now he was a damn good father, though of course he had Iris to the doctor when the little girl so much as sneezed.  Still, he was there with the child day after day.  Not running around with other women as his father had been.  He sang lullabies to the little girl that Evelyn had sung to him.  She’d even caught herself humming one to Barry the other night.

“Sweetness,” he’d murmured in his half-sleep.  “That takes out the sting.”

“Look,” Barry said, looking into his water glass.  “About Vietnam.  Let’s just say I saw some things I don’t want to think about, and I did some things I wished to God I hadn’t.  It was wartime.  It leaves a sickness in me that I try not to think about too much.”

“How do you know if you don’t say anything—you know, get it out, it won’t turn“–with cancer on her mind, the word came naturally–“malignant?”

“It very well could,” Barry said.  “I’ve seen that.  A person has to find his own way, though, and this is mine.”  He pushed his plate away, took a long swallow of water.

“Tell me one thing,” she said.  “And then I’ll tell you mine.”

He looked around the room, as if trapped.  He sighed.  He stood up.  “I can’t do it in here.  Let’s go outside.  Let’s walk.”

They went out the front door into the neighborhood of new houses in which Evelyn lived.  They passed a couple teenagers shooting a basketball into a hoop that had been placed on the curb by the side of the road.   It was a nice day, and several of her neighbors were out walking their dogs.  Evelyn and Barry waved to them.  They turned onto a gravel bike path that had once been a railroad bed, and after a few minutes, finally, they were alone.

“My stories are like a lot of what you hear,” Barry said.  “The same kind of shit people are probably going through in Iraq, where you can’t trust anybody.  Kids, women, old people.  Any of em might blow you up.  So you had to kill people that—“ his voice broke, “—people you’d been taught to protect.  People who looked completely harmless.  The way to live was to kill.”

“Do you know how many you killed?”

“Three,” he said, without hesitation.  “Three up close, that I can’t forget.  A woman and two kids.  They were coming at me—I could tell they had something.  They were going to do something.  A bunch of us fired on em.  Not just me.  But who knows which bullet—

“All I know is, after that, I was done.  I wouldn’t shoot anybody.  I was a danger to everybody.  And when you get that kind of reputation, you feel like you’re not a man.  They put me in another unit.  I got some medic training.  I saw lots of awful things there—guys with guts falling out, missing limbs–but at least I was on the healing end of things then.  I didn’t mind any of the blood and guts.  I thought I deserved it, after shooting those—  Every man I helped, I thought how much I wished I could’ve saved the lives I took.”  His voice was thick.

Evelyn tried to take his hand, but he wouldn’t hold on. 

“I’d rather not have told you any of this.  It’s just ugly.  That’s all it is.”

She looked down the trail at the wide sky, the green of the fields stretching out on the edges of the new suburbs.

“I probably have breast cancer,” she said.  “I don’t know how far it’s spread, but I’m sure that’s what the doctor is calling me about.”

“Jesus, Evelyn.”

“Compared to what you’ve been though, it’s not much.  I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

“Well,” he said.  He reached for her hand, and she let him have it.  “We’re a pair.”

*

The receiver had taken on a life of its own, sinking into her lap.  Barry had stayed while she took the call, but she’d asked him to go in the other room so she could be alone while she talked to the doctor.

“We’ll have to go in and see,” Dr. McNair had said, meaning cut into her, look inside the breast tissue, maybe remove the breast entirely.  “We don’t know how far it’s spread til we’re in there.”

Evelyn closed her eyes.  She heard the buzz of a small plane again.  The wind had not yet started to blow, so later, she could turn the water on the lawn, set the timer, move it around til the wind came up again.   A bee had come in, causing Loretta, lying in a sunny spot on the rug, to raise her head, watching with her one eye while her tail twitched, before she jumped into Evelyn’s lap. She imagined Barry humming “Stairway to Heaven” while he sat next to her in a folding chair at the hospital holding her hand.  He’d let them jab a needle into his vein if she needed the kind of blood he had.

She went into the next room, where Barry waited at the kitchen table.  When he saw her in the doorway, he got up and put his arms around her.  She let herself slump into his chest. 

“Guess I don’t have to ask what you found out,” he said.  “Even the cat’s upset.”  Loretta was twining around their ankles meowing as if in distress.

“You didn’t sign up for this,” Evelyn said.

“If you want me to be here, there’s not a wind big enough to blow me away.”

“It could be a rough ride.”

“I’ll be a cowboy,” he said.

She remembered this:  The time she stepped onto the roof of her childhood home in San José, the time she felt the tilting shingles under her feet as her father held her tiny hand in one of his and kept his other hand broad and strong at the small of her back.  Katherine was five, and her brothers, eight and ten, had been throwing a Frisbee across the back lawn while she sat on the cement slab patio and toed the soft grass with her sneakers.  “You’re too young to play,” they’d said.  She watched with some resentment the disc spinning back and forth in the lowering sunlight as they all waited to be called in to dinner.

It was the end of August, 1961, and the air in California was still and full, broken only by the distant chirr of power lawnmowers.  In a week, her brothers would begin school again, and she would be left behind.  Katherine missed her brothers when they were off.  Even if they treated her like a pest and left her out of games, she still liked to study what they were doing, plan what she would do one day when she was their age. 

The backyard was narrow and completely fenced in by six foot lengths of cedar running along the property lines, separating it from similar backyards on either side and behind it.  As the boys grew bored, they began to throw the Frisbee in elaborate curves out over the fence and back into the yard.  They called to Katherine to watch, then spun it up at a steep angle so that it descended right back into their hands.  They tried for diving catches, leaping catches, they sprang straight up and grabbed the Frisbee between their legs.  Katherine felt a little happier they were at least including her as an audience.

Then her oldest brother tried to curve the Frisbee over the roof, and it caught on the low peak and skidded against the wooden shingles and came to a rest three feet from the gutter.  The two boys looked at each other.

“Who’s going to tell Dad?” the older one asked.

“I didn’t do it,” the younger one said.

Katherine’s oldest brother looked at her, as though considering the possibility of including her in the blame somehow.  He looked up at the roof, hoping for a sudden gust of wind.  Then he trudged into the house through the sliding glass patio doors.

After a minute, Katherine heard the side door to the garage open and saw her father appear through the gate, carrying a wooden ladder over his shoulder like a heroic fireman.  The tips of the ladder were swaddled in cloth fixed with tape, and he laid the ladder gently against the eaves above the stucco siding.  Then he scaled it nimbly, bent forward as he stepped from the ladder, and stood up against the sky, high as a tower.  He was taller than anyone Katherine had ever seen, and now, on the roof, he looked colossal.

He walked easily over to the Frisbee, tossed it down, then shaded his eyes with a flat hand.

“Hey,” he said.  “You can see a blimp from here.”

There was something special about seeing a blimp in the early sixties.  Only a few blimps were in existence, all owned by Goodyear Tires, and unlike airplanes that appeared only as vapor trails, a blimp flew low and lazy and dreamlike.  It took up a piece of sky, like a planet you could visit.  And it usually had a message, in electric lights across the side.  When they saw a blimp, they would all gaze as it floated toward them, and Katherine would wait impatiently for the moment when her father would clear his throat and state “Here’s what it says…”

“Is it coming this way?” the older brother asked.

“It’s going toward the bay.”

“Can we climb up?” the younger brother asked.

Her father hesitated.  “Keep one hand on the ladder at all times,” he said.  “And let me help you over the edge.”

Katherine’s older brother scrambled up and within seconds was standing next to her father.  Her middle brother climbed to the top of the ladder, then waited until her father grasped his hand strongly before he stepped out.

“Don’t stand close to the edge,” her father warned.  “And don’t forget you’re standing on an incline.”

“Daddy,” Katherine said.

“You’re too small to come up,” her older brother said.

Her father looked down at her.  She stood next to the ladder, twisting on one foot, hoping to be taken up.  She could see her brothers, watching the blimp, and she looked in the same direction, but she could see nothing but empty sky.

Then her father was climbing down.  “Promise me you’ll be careful,” he said.  “I don’t ever want to see you hurt.”

“I promise,” she said.  It was an easy promise to make.  She didn’t really believe she could be hurt with her father near her.

He picked her up and placed her on the fourth rung, then climbed up behind her so that his body sheltered her.  He helped her to the next rung, then climbed up one himself.  Rung by rung, she rose up.  Her older brother’s head loomed over the edge of the roof.  He seemed an obstacle at first, but then he held his right hand out to her.  Her middle brother was sitting on the roof as an anchor, holding her older brother’s left hand in his.  The sky grew larger as she reached the top of the ladder.  She took her brother by one hand, while her father held her other hand, and with a step she was on the roof.  The wooden shingles crunched and felt oddly fragile, even under her soft-soled Keds.

Her father stood beside her, and she felt utterly safe as they all watched the blimp meander to the north.  Katherine could see some lighted lettering on the side, even though it was far away.  The lights were flashing on and off, and would show up better in the twilight and early evening.

“Here’s what it says…” her father said.

They all looked at him.

“It says, the Watson family is ready for dinner.”

Her two brothers objected.  Katherine smiled and looked about.  The view from high up was new and different.  Stretching to the north, to the west, to the east, there lay a plain of roofs, all low-peaked shingled roofs like her own.  The roofs extended as far as she could see, humping up and down, an uneven shingle prairie, until the roofs no longer belonged to distinct houses but simply blended in with each other.  Here and there, the green crown of a tree broke the line of weathered cedar wood in the still-recent housing tract, and the Coast Range rose to the west.  But it was mostly roofs, a landscape of roofs, with a slow blimp floating free above them.  Had the person who drew these streets on a map imagined this strange landscape?

She heard the patio door slide open, and her mother call that dinner was ready.  Then the voice stopped.

“Where is everybody?” her mother asked.

                                                           *

See her now:  In the late afternoon, Katherine parks her ten-year-old Saturn in the driveway of the same house.  She stands, forty-seven years old, fifteen pounds heavier than when she was twenty, highlights in her blondish hair, dressed in colors of rust and green with long earrings of silver and onyx dangling in the late sun of September, 2003.  She takes from the car two plastic sacks of groceries and walks to the front porch, concrete with a peeling wooden park bench filled with odd potted plants sheltered by a low overhang.  From the eaves, there hangs a redwood sign her father had custom-made in Felton that reads Peaceable Isle.

When she walks in, she feels that odd sensation of being a teenager again, walking into her old living room.  But also the sensation of being her mother.  Her mother always disliked the way the front door opened right onto the living room, with no entry foyer that would allow her to put down her bags, hang up her coat, and not track right over the carpet to get to the kitchen.  Katherine finds herself displeased in the same way.  She walks in with groceries now, not schoolbooks, and she feels oppressed by having to decide what to make for dinner.

Katherine had moved into her father’s house ten months earlier, in debt, with a missing husband, with Betty, her disdainful daughter of seventeen, and with Carter, fifteen, becoming secretive and withdrawn.  An events planner by profession, in charge of organizing the annual user’s conference for BPI, a software firm in Milpitas, but unable to plan for the events in her own life.  Her own mother dead when she was her son’s age, absent and therefore eternally wise and silent, always keeping to herself some bit of guidance that would have kept Katherine from error.  Her father, a Pearl Harbor survivor, still living in the house that he had bought with a V.A. loan after the War, now eighty and beating back lesions every three weeks with chemotherapy. 

When she moved back in with their father, her two older brothers were delighted.  One brother was working in story development in Los Angeles.  The other was a college professor in Ohio.  They had moved on, they were successes, blight had not touched their well-fashioned lives.  The national mourning of 2001 they wore lightly, and neither had a child in the Army, or nearing eighteen years of age.  They had moved on, and looked back at the house on Catesby Street as old and squat and not the kind of place they would ever live again.  And she wondered if her brothers didn’t think sometimes that it had all fallen into place rather nicely:  her missing husband, her need for a place to live, their father’s need for a caregiver, the tract home that was all paid off with low property taxes.  She was the daughter, and she was convenient.

Now she hears her father, Henry, rumble from the sunken den.  “By God, who is that in the house?”  He is up and walking toward her before she can put down the groceries, wearing one of his bright Hawaiian shirts covered with flowers.  He likes wearing Hawaiian shirts, and shirts open at the throat with a silk scarf, and a beret to hide his hair loss.  He takes her in his arms and hugs her roughly, as he often does.  Then he turns her loose and looks at her.

“You’re losing too much weight,” Henry says.  “You’re wasting away.  Soon there won’t be anything left of you.”

“Ha,” Katherine says.  “I feel like a water buffalo.”  She has been trying to stay a size 8 for years, sometimes coaxing her weight down so that she can fit her clothes and sometimes finding her weight floating up so that half her wardrobe is too tight.  When she is thinner, she tends to buy clothes that are brighter in color, cornflower blues and turquoises and aquamarines.  When she is forced into the rack of tens, she finds herself buying plainer stuff, beiges and creams and blacks.  Her closet looks like a struggle between her aspirations for how she should look and her frequent admissions of defeat.

“You have a secret admirer,” Henry says.  “Water buffalo or no.”

He points at a gift-wrapped box on the dining room table.  Katherine crosses to the table, picks the box up, shakes it.  Something shifts inside, heavy and muffled.

“Not a bomb, is it?”

“Hope not.”

“This was on the front porch?”

Henry shakes his head.  “It was right there.”

It takes Katherine a moment to process what her father has said.

“He broke into the house?”

Henry shrugs, nods.  Katherine sits down heavily.  She picks up the envelope, the paper thick and textured, and flipped it to look at both sides.  Her name is on the front.  She slides a finger in and rips it open.  The card slips out, a romantic card with heart and flowers and the Eiffel Tower on the front.  Inside, it reads “I’ll be seeing you in all those old familiar places” and it is signed “Love, Scott.”  There is no phone number, no address.

Inside the box is a small, expensive, cut glass bottle of perfume. 

“So he’s back,” she says.  “And this is what he thinks is a good way to get back in touch.  Break into the house and leave gifts.”

Henry sits down opposite his daughter, at the same table where he had once sat with his wife to talk over what to do.  The table has a cloth spread over it because it was old and the finish worn through.  It is a solid maple table, the first part of a maple dining room set he and his wife began but never completed.  He has never wanted to replace the table.  He once thought about refinishing it, but never quite managed to do it. 

“What do you think we should do?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Katherine says. 

She lifts up the bottle of perfume, looks at the label.

“Passion,” she says.  “Incredible.”

                                                           *

Scott Claussen, Katherine’s husband, had run through their money, including retirement accounts, investing in Internet startup companies.  It was that time in Silicon Valley.  Every day, there were stories about twenty-four year olds who had made millions overnight.  The largest legal creation of wealth in history!  Scott read and re-read these stories, and convinced himself that those kids didn’t deserve all that money, certainly not any more than he did.  He began to feel old at forty-eight, as though he had been born twenty years too late, as though the golden opportunity had somehow skipped his generation.

He found his first investment through some cassette tapes he listened to while doing the Stairmaster at the gym.  It was an Internet store that would grow through word of mouth.  Each store owner would have a portal which would offer name brand products at rock bottom prices that could be drop shipped from a secure location.  Name Brand.  Rock Bottom.  Drop Shipped.  Secure.  But the real genius was that each storeowner could sign up additional storeowners.  If you had a friend or neighbor who needed a Sony television, you could ask them to buy it through your store at a better price than they could get at Target.  You then asked them if they would be interested in owning their own store.  As they began to sell things, some small percentage of their profits would come to you.  And as they signed up storeowners, you would get a percentage of their percentage.  If you were in on the ground floor, the profits would soon be tremendous.

With each store you bought, you also received a number of shares in the company.  Pre-IPO shares.  Scott listened to that on the tape as well.  Pre-Initial Public Offering.  And when the IPO came through, and each of your shares was suddenly worth thousands, you would read about yourself in the newspaper.

Scott listened to the tape as he worked out, taking one of the elliptical trainers in the big front windows and wearing classic black Ray Ban Wayfarers so that he would look good from the parking lot.  The words Name Brand, Rock Bottom, Ground Floor, Limitless Potential, hypnotized him.  He bought one portal, and then another, since he couldn’t buy more shares in the company without buying more portals.  Katherine never paid much attention to the financial statements, and didn’t notice when the balances began to go down.  She trusted him for that.

They had moved to a new house in a development called Oak Commons in 1999, where Carter and Betty, their son and daughter, could go to better schools.  Betty was beginning high school that year, so it seemed like the right time.  The house had a two story front foyer that opened onto a great room with a fireplace and vaulted ceilings.  The master bath, on the ground floor, had a Jacuzzi tub with a garden view, and the bedroom had a walk-in closet large enough to sleep in.  They were able to sell their first house for three times what they’d paid for it, and they had a down payment and money to spare.  Scott told Katherine they were being smart, could afford it, and deserved it.  And she trusted him for that as well. 

While waiting for his stores to make good, Scott began to make other investments.  There were always tips in Internet chat rooms, and he decided that buying lots of different recommended stocks was a way to be safe.  If even one hit it big, it would make up for dozens of losers. 

Then, early in 2002, he was laid off.  He had an engineering degree from Chico State, but for many years he had worked in the marketing side of a company that created software to teach people how to use computer programs.  The company had been acquiring other firms that sold training software, expanding into online education products, and reporting record profits.  But when clients began to reject the standard three-year license deals, and competitors cut prices, it turned out the record profits were an illusion.  Sales orders had been booked on products still in development, defective products were returned and the returns never recorded, phony invoices were created by sending orders between fax machines in the same office.  The company announced that revenues were down one third from the previous quarter, and marketing personnel were the first to go.

That same year, Scott and Katherine were hit with a huge tax bill.  There were penalties for withdrawing funds from retirement accounts, but Scott had decided that the penalties could be easily paid for with the profits he would be making.  He asked for one extension for filling out their income tax, and then another.  He spent time at an outplacement firm, posting resumes to Monster, Career Builder, Hot Jobs, and also checking his investments.  At the end of each three-month extension, the actual value of the stock he had bought was less. 

Scott tried to avoid telling Katherine until he at least had found another job, but a job offer never materialized.  His engineering skills were considered out of date, and his marketing skills tainted.  When he finally told her, he said one option was to sell the house.  It turned out there were no other options except bankruptcy.  They had refinanced once to pay off credit cards and a car loan with home equity, and there wouldn’t be much from the house after the bills were settled.  And Katherine refused to go into bankruptcy with a man who was so ready to hide the truth from her because he was convinced he knew better.

Scott disappeared soon after the house closed, before Katherine could move forward with a divorce.  The studio apartment he’d rented in Cupertino, one small box among many others overlooking a small landscaped commons, was empty after a month.  He’d left the house on Catesby Street as a forwarding address, and for months, overdue bills for electricity and gas came, red lettering on the envelope stating 2^nd Notice or Final Notice.  Katherine wrote not at this address on the envelopes and left them outside for the letter carrier.  Sometimes she wrote He’s not here and I don’t give a damn where he is.  Other times, she wrote If you see him, say hello, he might be in Tangiers.  She was certain he would turn up sooner or later. 

                                                           *

Scott had gone back to a barely remembered time of his life, a phase that was over before he even met Katherine.  In 1974, he’d enlisted in the Navy just in time to aid with the evacuation of Saigon, and after his hitch he put in a year working aboard combat support ships as an Able Seaman with the Military Sealift Command.  He’d been aboard a fleet oiler in the Indian Ocean in 1979, when the Iranian hostage crisis struck, and had spent months servicing aircraft carrier battle groups.  Some part of him was disappointed that no action was taken, that he hadn’t come back with stories to tell.

The attacks on New York and Washington coincided with his investments dwindling toward zero.  After he lost his job, he began to follow the military buildup in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, the same waters he’d sailed in twenty-three years earlier.  He visualized the aircraft carrier battle groups converging on the region, and wondered if the same great names were there that had been there in 1979:  the Kittyhawk, the Nimitz, the Enterprise.  And he visualized the fleet oilers, like the ship he’d sailed on, standing off over the horizon, ready to rendezvous at dusk to fill a carrier’s vast tanks with jet fuel, while fighter jets swarmed overhead to provide cover. 

The war in Afghanistan resolved itself quickly, according to reports.  But the war in Iraq, foretold in newspapers and magazines and network news, was just ahead when he had to admit to Katherine how much money he had lost, how much they owed, what a mess he’d made of things.  He was broke and living in a one-bedroom apartment.  He was unemployed.  He saw the age of fifty looming, a narrow doorway to a narrower corridor.  He was still seeking a life of consequence.  And he found a website for the Military Sealift Command.  With battle groups in the Indian Ocean indefinitely, he knew there would be a need for experienced seamen.

                                                           *

Katherine received the first letter from Scott soon after the war began.  After that, they came weekly.  Scott’s letters described the long hours of work, the nights when they stayed at the refueling rigs until dawn with an aircraft carrier to port and a destroyer to starboard.  They described the empty sea between refuelings, the kinds of routine maintenance he was always occupied with, slushing the rigging, chipping rust and painting with red lead and a top coat.  They described the sunsets over the Indian Ocean, and how bright the stars were at night, the sound the ship’s wake made as it spread out from the stern.

Katherine wrote him back and told him that he should under no circumstances consider himself welcome to stay at her father’s house.  It wasn’t his home.  She wrote that she hoped he would stay safe, and settle somewhere nearby when he came back, so that he could stay involved with the children.  Money was also a problem, since her father had to keep most of his money for his own medical expenses, and she’d like to be able to help with college for the kids. 

His letters back didn’t acknowledge her letters at all.  He told of watching a helicopter hover over the ship’s flight deck, forward of the bridge, and lower canvas bags of mail, and pick up bags of outgoing mail.  And he told of his hope, as he watched, that the mail contained a letter from her.  He didn’t mention that she’d written him that he wouldn’t be welcome.  It was infuriating.

Then, in August, the letters stopped.  A week went by without a letter, and then another week.  Carter was getting ready to begin high school, seeming a little adrift since they’d had to move.  Betty had graduated and moved to Aptos, living with her boyfriend in a house owned by his parents, waiting tables at a small Szechwan restaurant on West Cliff Drive.  Henry had his chemotherapy sessions.  Katherine didn’t notice that weeks had gone by without a letter until the month turned and she stopped to wonder if he was well.  The news coverage of the war rarely showed ships, but she thought she would have heard if a support ship had sunk.  She watched CNN several nights in a row but didn’t see anything.  There was news from the Middle East, but it was contradictory and confusing and didn’t tell her anything about the man she was still technically married to. 

After a few days, she forgot to wonder about him.  A phone call would come, sooner or later, and he would be over his big adventure, and they would settle some things.

                                                           *

Most afternoons when he felt well, Henry had lunch with a regular group in the Garden Spot Café at the Blue Skies Bowl, a bowling alley surrounded on one side by subdivisions and tract homes and on the other side by the Western Horizons Shopping Mall.  The Blue Skies Bowl was built in the early sixties, the name chosen to appeal both to those ‘Blue Sky’ families moving to San José to be part of the aerospace industry and to those older residents who remembered the Irving Berlin song from the Bing Crosby movie.  After four decades, the bowling alley was slated for demolition, to be replaced by townhouses and condominiums, and the regulars at the café had not yet decided where they would gather once it was gone.

In the café, Henry had a Reuben or a hot pastrami sandwich, bad for his heart, he knew, but since his prostate was going to kill him first it didn’t matter much.  The group he met there were all of an age more or less, some city workers, some in real estate, one who had managed the produce section at a Safeway.  They were veterans, all had served overseas during World War Two.  They weren’t the sort who joined the VFW or the American Legion, but they held that time in common, and though they didn’t discuss it amongst themselves, a number of them gave talks about the War through a Veterans-in-the-Schools program. 

Henry’s prostate cancer wasn’t the first in the group, and probably wouldn’t be the last.  A man who liked a dirty joke, Al Dayton, told them all that it was the pissing that first let him know he had a problem, the pissing and the backaches that weren’t just the routine.  And he said he finally understood a limerick he’d laughed at as a kid:

There was an old man from Stamboul

Who soliloquized thus to his tool:

            “You stole all my wealth,

            “You ruined my health,

“And now you won’t pee, you old fool!”

Henry found the gift box of perfume one afternoon when he came back from The Garden Spot.  He knew it wouldn’t be hard to tell that nobody was home.  He kept his Buick LeSabre in the driveway, since the garage was filled with things he’d never thrown away, and he drove the few blocks to the bowling alley.  When he was younger, he had enjoyed the walk, but the chemotherapy left his feet swollen and tingling, like a thousand small knives were cutting into the soles.  Neuropathy, he was told.  And so he began wearing oversized slippers with rubber bottoms and driving over.  Anyone could see that the driveway was empty during the day, anybody could see when the house was vacant.

                                                           *

Katherine had thought about support groups when Scott left, but she decided against it.  There were probably support groups for women whose husbands had blown all their money on Internet stocks.  She was sure of it.  But there wouldn’t be support groups for women whose husbands had run off to sea at the age of forty-seven.  Pretending they were twenty-five again.  That’s not normal.  Running away to sea.  The whole thing seemed archaic.

When two days passed since the perfume was left, and Scott didn’t try to contact her like a normal human being, she decided to try to catch him in the house.  Perhaps they could talk to each other like adults.  Her father insisted that she take him with her, and so she left work at noon and met him at The Garden Spot.   She liked seeing her father sitting at the same round table in a vinyl-lined booth in the corner.  He always seemed perfectly content there, happy that his little haven hadn’t yet changed, happy to meet old friends, even if the talk was no longer about problems with business or the kids and now centered on doctors and medical bills and retirement accounts. 

Henry stood up when Katherine came in.  “See?” he said.  “I told you an attractive young woman was going to be picking me up today.” 

The other men laughed and asked Katherine to sit down, join them, have a cup of coffee, but she told them next time, when she wasn’t so busy. 

 They left together in his Buick.  Henry still liked to be the one driving.  When they went in for his chemo treatments, he drove to the oncology unit and they took his car, even though they both knew that she would be driving back after he’d had the shunt in his chest hooked up for three hours.

They saw an old green Plymouth Fury in front of the house. 

“Look at that beater car,” Henry said.  “You think he’s driving that?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” Katherine said.  “But I guess I’ll find out.”  She flipped down the sun visor and looked at her hair in the mirror and grimaced.   

When she moved back into the house, she had to adjust to opening the front door.  During the years of living on her own, and then with Scott, she had evolved from just walking in as though she still lived there, to giving a quick knock and then walking in, to ringing the doorbell and waiting for her father to let her in.  After moving back, it took her some time to be able to simply open the door.  At first she felt some reluctance about it – she didn’t want to admit that, yes, she had moved back home at the age of forty-seven, and those other houses and apartments she’d lived in were only temporary.  But after months of unloading groceries or walking in with two briefcases and bracing the screen door open with her hip while she fumbled with her keys, her resistance vanished with the press of the everyday.

Now, absurdly, she knocked three times before turning the key, as though Scott had some rights over the house she was entering.  She patted her hair once more and opened the door.

                                                           *

Scott had been at sea longer than he expected.  Baghdad fell in May, and he thought that the aircraft carriers and their battle groups would soon head for their home ports, and his own ship would make the long voyage back to Subic Bay, in the P.I., and he could get paid off and back home.  But after May, the carrier groups stayed in the region, circling around, and he heard they were still flying sorties day and night.  And his ship stayed in the area too, having its own massive tanks refilled by a commercial tanker out at sea.  The only land they saw in months was the coast of Oman, which looked like a giant sand dune to Scott.  They sailed east out of the Arabian Sea only after another oiler came out to relieve them.  The nearest he’d been to Iraq was hundreds of miles south.  The war continued on without him, without the promised end.

The first thing Scott did after he flew in to San Francisco was buy a car.  He knew his credit was short.  He didn’t have a bank account.  He had no place to live.  But he had six months wages, almost twenty thousand dollars, in cash in a pouch hung around his neck.  He picked the Plymouth Fury because it was the biggest thing on the lot.  It reminded him of something his father would have owned, with a hood that stretched out long in front of the windshield and covered a V-8 engine, sharp lines and square corners, a roar when he turned the key that the dealer couldn’t guarantee was not due to a faulty muffler.  The vinyl top had peeled, and the metal underneath showed rust, but the air conditioning worked, and the radio was tuned to KNBR, the San Francisco Giants station, and the utter rightness of sitting in a big car listening to the pre-game show in late September sold him. 

Scott’s insurance had expired, but the dealer arranged to sell him two weeks worth of coverage through the Internet, so he could get off the lot and have something until he got settled.  Then he took off on Highway 101 and headed toward the Santa Clara Valley, San José, home.

He checked into the El Rancho motel, about ten miles from where Katherine was living with her father.  The El Rancho was one of a few old motels, built along freeways in the fifties in California, that had survived into the age of franchises and centralized registration systems.  He took a room on the second floor, paying for a week in cash.  The room had heavy plastic drapes covering a single window, a sheet metal box that controlled both the heat and air conditioning, a lowboy chest of drawers with a twenty-three inch T.V., and a king-sized bed. 

Scott had only a large duffel bag for luggage, and he threw it onto the dresser, kicked off his shoes, and fell back into bed.  He breathed in and out deeply, softly, trying to feel he was at a homecoming, trying to feel he had accomplished something, trying to feel he was in control.

The following afternoon, he drove by the house on Catesby Street.  The driveway was empty, though he noticed one oil spot that looked fresh.  Katherine probably still hadn’t repaired the oil leak in her Saturn.  The blinds were drawn, and the aluminum frame windows were cracked open.  That told him the house was probably empty.  The lawn was a little ragged, and the rose bushes along the side of the house were growing tall and awkward, with spindly sprays of faded blossoms hanging down, and the other shrubs needed pruning.  There was work he could do. 

Next to his father-in-law’s house, someone had bought two of the old ranch houses from the original subdivision and razed them, and was erecting a two-story house in their place.  This had happened since he left.  The house was already framed up and sided, and it pushed out close to the property lines on both sides with a steep-pitched roof towering over everything else on the street.  Scott looked at it as he drove by slowly, wondering about the square footage, the number of bathrooms, the number of bedrooms.  But he had no doubt, he was looking at a million dollar house.  Once a house was grand enough to deserve that title, any further precision about the actual price seemed superfluous.

At the end of the block, he turned the Fury around and cruised back by his father-in-law’s house.  He envisioned rising from the land a house even larger than the one being built.  And he thought that if the old slab house could be torn down, or if a fire should strike it, it could be worth a fortune.  A fortune.

Scott left for an hour and came by one more time close to five.  A Buick LeSabre was in the driveway; his father-in-law was home.  Scott looked at his watch.  He knew his father-in-law’s habits, and he knew he had been at the Garden Spot all afternoon. 

The next day, Scott parked the Fury right in front of the house, so that anyone who saw him would think he had nothing to hide.  A narrow walkway alongside the garage where the garbage can sat led to a gate into the fenced backyard.  A single-paned, aluminum sash window opened from the sunken den onto the cement slab patio.  It was simple to jimmy the screen – the aluminum bent easily, and he would re-shape and reinstall it before he left.  He grasped the window frame and hoisted himself up, ducked his head through and put a foot down on a black sofa before stepping onto the floor.

The house was weirdly quiet.  He had been in his father-in-law’s house many times, but never alone.  He took two steps, then stopped.  His steps seemed loud, loud enough for someone outside to hear him, and he sat down on the edge of a step and took off his shoes.  In his stocking feet, he made a round of the house, crouching down near any windows that faced the street.  He saw that Henry remained in the master bedroom.  His wife’s room held objects he knew from their own room together.  A wooden tree that held bracelets and necklaces, a frame screwed to the wall with earrings hanging from it, three bottles of perfume, a small lamp shaped like a tulip.  There was nothing from Betty.   She must have moved out, as Katherine said in one of her letters.

He wondered whether Katherine slept in the upper or lower bunk bed.  Both of them were neatly made with bedspreads that probably dated from the time she’d lived here as a girl, purple chenille with a fringe of small dangling balls.  He lifted a corner of the bedspread on the top bunk carefully and saw that there were no sheets underneath.  The bottom bunk had sheets, and Scott smiled, pleased with himself.  He sat down on the edge of the bed, and swung his feet onto it, and lay still. 

He felt the house breathing all about him.  The stillness that earlier had seemed weird and threatening now felt warm, enveloping.  He didn’t feel like a sneak or a thief.  He felt like he was right where he belonged.  He felt he could go to sleep peacefully here, and wake up peacefully.

His watch beeped, and he opened his eyes.  He had set the timer to remind him when he had an hour left before he had to go.  He made the bed carefully, so that the bedspread was arranged identically to the one on the upper bunk, and he went into his son’s room.

There was a twin bed on one side of the room and a cheap computer desk in the corner.  Nothing on the walls except a poster with a saying by Chief Seattle that he remembered from Carter’s room in their old house.  He looked in the closet and didn’t see anything that would let him know what his son had been thinking or feeling while he had been gone.  Just jeans, t-shirts, a windbreaker, sweatshirts.  One sports coat that he wore to church, with a clip-on tie attached to the lapel.  Scott made a mental note to teach Carter to knot a real tie as soon as possible.

He looked at the computer on the desk, a bulky Dell in black plastic.  There might be more of Carter’s mind in the computer than anywhere else.

He looked at his watch.  Then he tiptoed back to the den, put his shoes on, and replaced the screen, pushing it back into shape.  He left by the back door, walked back out to his Fury, and drove back to the El Rancho.

The next day, Scott entered the house the same way.  He went to Katherine’s bed and lay down for half an hour.  Then he went into his son’s room and turned on his computer.  As the screen brightened, he got down on his knees and looked at the back of the computer tower.  They still had dial-up Internet service.  At their house in Oak Commons, they had always upgraded to the fastest possible service as soon as it was available.  For the kids.  Was this a measure of how Carter was suffering?  Slow and outdated Internet service?

He clicked on Explorer to look at the favorites, what was bookmarked, what sites had been recently visited.  There were a couple of sites related to Shakespeare.  A school project.  Scott nodded approvingly.  He opened up Word and looked at the documents Carter had recently written.  There was one on The Tempest opened last night, probably still in progress.

He began to search through other documents on the hard drive.  He didn’t admit it, but he was looking for something about himself.  Some kind of journal, a letter never sent.  He was searching for the profile he formed in his son’s imaginative horizon, the dark cutout figure of the absent.  He wanted to know he was missed, and he wanted to know exactly how he was missed, the quality of his son’s regret for his departure.  He felt he didn’t know his son very well, felt he had only completed the forms and ceremonies of being a father.  If he knew how his son missed him, he might know how his son needed him to be.

When his watch beeped again, he had found nothing, and he had to shut the computer down.  On his way out, he stopped where keys hung from a row of hooks and found a ring with a number of similar keys.  One fit the back door, and he took it with him.  He could make a copy and return it before anyone noticed.

Scott continued in this half-life for several weeks, occupying during the day the space his family would occupy at night.  He came every two or three days after replacing the key, so that his car wouldn’t become too conspicuous.  He grew comfortable with the routine.  The house changed about him as he spent time in its rooms, mellowed into a warm, familiar place.  He left his Fury, walked around the back, opened the door, kicked off his shoes.  He glanced at the books on his father-in-law’s desk in the den, looked at the catalogs and magazines that had come in the mail since his last visit.  He peeked inside the refrigerator, always pretending to himself that he might want a snack of some kind, always pretending that he wasn’t really hungry. 

He circled back continuously to his wife’s bed and his son’s computer.  In other places, the bad moments could suddenly rear up, force themselves before him with their awful presentness:  the way he’d managed to lose money, the way he’d been laid off, the way he felt when he received the tax bill and knew that he couldn’t hide anything from Katherine.  But he found, when he lay in the lower bunk, where Katherine had slept a few hours earlier, his mind quieted.

At his son’s computer, he felt more urgency.  He was continually hunting for how Carter felt about him.  He read school papers Carter had written six months ago.  He visited the websites Carter had been on.  He tried logging onto his son’s email a number of times, thinking that somehow he would guess the password.  But it all remained obscure to him.  He wanted to find something magical, like a golden key in a children’s fairy tale, which would let him into the tower.  So that when he saw Carter again, they could share a perfect understanding. 

On a hutch by the dining room table, there was always a stack of unopened mail addressed to Katherine.  Offers to open new credit card accounts, offers to transfer balances, envelopes full of coupons, bulk mailers promising to help you lose weight, promising a face cream that made wrinkles disappear, promising an herbal supplement that would cure the terrifying diseases that threatened you.  There were statements from credit cards, unopened bills.  Scott began to rifle through the envelopes on every visit, shaking his head when he found the same unopened statements in the pile after three days.  This had always driven him crazy about Katherine.  He didn’t understand why she couldn’t just open up junk mail right away, glance at it, and toss it.  He didn’t understand why she couldn’t just open up a credit card statement when it came, instead of waiting, as though the amount due was going to go down if she let it ripen a bit. 

After three weeks, he found in the pile a bank statement addressed to himself, forwarded from the address in Oak Commons.  He had finally opened a bank account and deposited the thousands of dollars in cash he’d been carrying, and he’d used the Oak Commons address since it was the address on his driver’s license and passport.  In Katherine’s hand, he saw ‘not at this address’ scrawled.  He pocketed the envelope.  He was at this address, even though she didn’t know it yet.  He wondered if she would notice the missing envelope, and found himself hoping she would.

Two days later, he found a credit card statement of hers that had been opened but remained in the pile.  Carefully, he slid the statement out of the envelope and scrutinized it.  He saw where she had shopped last month, the kinds of things she had spent money on.  Clothes for herself, clothes for Carter, school supplies, new tires for the Saturn, gasoline.  It all added up.

Then he saw that last month, she had paid only the minimum on the balance.  That was crazy.  She had never been good at managing credit.  That was something else that had always frustrated him.  They were going to have to sit down and talk over how to manage money.  He found himself beginning a conversation with her right there, completely convincing her of the need to pay off balances every month, the foolishness of considering clothing ‘an investment,’ the vicious cycle that the credit card companies were sucking her into.  The responses he imagined from her tended to be questions he was able to answer, and she never brought up the fact that he’d cashed out their retirement accounts.  The entire conversation was very satisfactory.  So satisfactory that he promised to pay part of her balance if she would change her ways.  And he wrote down the payment address and her account number.

Her obvious need for him made him feel like he was already part of the household again.  They had just been having such crazy schedules that they had hardly seen each other.  But that was something they could work on, spending more time together, quality time.

When he left, he forgot about paying her bill and instead drove to Macy’s to buy perfume.  A woman about Katherine’s age was behind the counter, and he told her that the perfume was a gift for his wife, that he gave it to her only on special occasions, like their anniversary.  She misunderstood, and thought that their anniversary was coming up, and he found it easy to go along with her mistake, so easy to talk about their twenty-third anniversary, two children (teenagers, you know), a cozy house.  As he talked, it all sounded right and good, and he loved the approving smiles she lavished on him.  When he left, she said “She’s gonna love it,” and even though he had been telling her lies, he believed she was speaking the truth.

The next day, he left the perfume, gift-wrapped, on the dining table.  Something was going to happen now.  He was sure of it.

                                                           *

After Katherine knocked, she opened the door.  The living room was empty.  She glanced at the kitchen and down into the den, but he wasn’t there.  She had expected him to be waiting for her.  What else could the perfume have meant but a desire to meet.  And the knocks on the door were a way to alert him, so that he’d be standing, ready to talk. 

But he wasn’t standing, ready to talk, and as she paused in the kitchen, she grew furious.  Everything about the way Scott was going about this was so typical.  He could never be open and up front about anything.  He always expected things to fall into place, expected Katherine to fill in the gaps in their relationship, and then he turned passive and whiny when something went wrong.  He hadn’t told her about their money troubles up front because he thought she’d just know somehow.  He avoided agreeing to a divorce because he would rather have things work out, and then disappeared after losing his job without telling her that he was leaving.  When she was young, that attitude that something magical would happen for them was enchanting, but now it just pissed her off.  And his bright idea of breaking into her father’s house was just a way to provoke her into recognizing his presence and his right to be here instead of being an adult, a man, and taking some god damned initiative.

She stalked into Carter’s room.  Nothing.  Then she looked into her bedroom. 

Incredible.  He was sleeping on top of the bedspread of her bunk.  As she stood in the doorway, he stirred but didn’t open his eyes.  She had seen this face in this attitude thousands of times over the years.  It occurred to her that she had seen this face asleep more than she would ever see any other face in her life, more than either of her children, more than any new love she might find.  This face would stay at the gates of her dreams.  It was still a handsome face, sharp black eyebrows and a straight nose and a jawline that somehow evaded the sagging fleshy wattle that came to men in their forties.  And his body seemed tauter, as though some months at sea had tanned him like leather.

Then she thought of his card – I’ll be seeing you in all those old familiar places – and here he was, in that most familiar place, without even bothering to ask, without even bothering to say hello first.  It was too much.

She snatched the pillow from the upper bunk and hit him across the face with it.  He sat up, startled, and she smacked him again.

Sitting outside in the Buick, Henry witnessed a miraculous sight.  There was his son-in-law, bursting out the front door and running with his arms raised about his head.  Followed by his daughter, splendid in her anger, raging after him with a pillow in both hands.  When he slowed to try to speak, she whaled away at him, buffeting him about the shoulders, until he finally broke into a run for the Fury.  He locked the doors and started the car with a smoky roar while she beat upon the driver’s side window.  As the Fury pulled away, she raised both arms, like a goddess rampant and triumphant.

The big Egyptian appeared suddenly. Arm extended like a sentry, palm held up – halt! -  the man blocked Harold on the sidewalk, glaring as though the mere sight of the American made him angry. Harold was hurrying to catch his bus, which he knew would be crowded with Asian workers, some carrying tools and buckets. The prospect of the grimy bus – he kept a handtowel in his briefcase to wipe off the seat before sitting – reminded Harold he’d promised Annie he’d have a car by the time she joined him. Except once over there, he’d found traffic so wild, the idea of driving in it a terrifying prospect, he’d never seriously considered buying a car.

So Harold was considering how he’d get Annie around town – city buses, like the one he took to campus, had small segregated women’s compartments at the rear, out of the question for Annie – and realizing he’d be doing a lot of wrangling with Bedouin cabdrivers, when the Egyptian stepped in front of him with the blocking hand. Had Harold committed some offense against local etiquette, some other crazy thing? At seven in the morning the next prayer call was hours away, it couldn’t be that.

“Sorry,” Harold mumbled, making to go around. But the man moved with him, hand out, blocking. Harold stopped and took a look at the guy: classic Egyptian features, full but well-trimmed beard, tall and husky enough that, with a suit and an earpiece, eyes scanning the crowd, he might’ve been a bodyguard protecting a visiting Egyptian leader. But President Mubarak was nowhere in sight, the big frowning man wore a green smock over loose pantaloons, and Harold, a retired teacher from Scheuertown, Pennsylvania, was an unlikely assassin.

The big Egyptian and the smaller American clutching his worn briefcase were in front of a row of shops on palm-tree lined Khazzan Street. The Arabian capital city’s morning traffic – expensive German sedans, beat-up Bedouin pickups, minibuses stuffed with workers – raced by a few feet away.

The big man launched a torrent of Arabic, ending with a question, definitely a question. The fingers of the outstretched hand implored: answer me! Harold, in spite of long evenings with his Arabic textbook before Annie’s arrival, could make nothing of this harangue. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he said, trying to smile nicely. It only sparked another tirade. A customer leaving the pharmacy nearby regarded the two warily and went around. The blocking hand inched closer. Reflexively, Harold stepped back – and collided with another passerby, a local dressed in the modern style (loafers instead of sandals, neatly-pressed robe, headcloth arranged up off the ears); he patted Harold’s shoulder, apologized in English (“So sorry!”), already moving past.

 Harold seized the man’s arm. “Please,” he gestured at the Egyptian, “ask what he wants.”

The local and the Egyptian, taken aback, stiffened, then exchanged greetings – Salaam Aleikum! – shaking hands as though Harold had just introduced them. The local asked a question, and the big man, suddenly abashed, answered meekly, an employee answering his boss. The local listened, nodding sympathetically, shooting Harold a reassuring glance: don’t worry, we’ll straighten this out.

Looking past the pair, Harold spotted his bus at the intersection. When the light changed, it would halt at the corner, then lurch onward – without Harold. He’d have to take a taxi, all because of this big lunk and some ridiculous misunderstanding.

The Egyptian, growing impassioned again, seemed to be begging for understanding – wouldn’t you be outraged? A pair of tall Sudanese with tribal scars on their cheeks stopped to listen, giving Harold fierce looks before moving on. The blocking hand had moved away, emphasizing points made to the local. At the intersection, the light changed. The inspiration came suddenly. Harold raised his arm, pointing into traffic. “Khatar!” he cried – danger! – the word popping into his mind from his phrasebook. The other two, startled, looked that way, and Harold sprinted past for all he was worth.

From the doorway of the bus, Harold glanced back, half expecting to see the Egyptian in pursuit, but the man stood at the same spot, arms hanging, looking more dejected than angry. The local, nearing the corner, flicked his headcloth and shrugged: don’t blame me!

A moment later, from his seat halfway back in the bus, Harold looked out and saw the Egyptian approaching. The big man raised his hands, imploring. Safe inside, Harold did something, like his sprint to the corner, inconceivable in his previous life in Scheuertown. Face pressed to the window, he gave a wide grin and, fingers wiggling, a mocking little wave. As the bus lurched away, the dwindling Egyptian raised his fists, shaking them furiously, not at Harold alone, it seemed, but at the sky, at everything.

The bus lumbered through the old city, passing Soudah park, a verdant rectangle amidst the drab, sand-colored buildings. Harold’d taken Annie to the park just the day before, and that memory added to his jubilant mood as the bus turned onto a wide boulevard lined with gleaming modern buildings, fountains, and palm trees. But the image of the Egyptian – the angry face, the blocking hand – lingered. Probably some beef about US foreign policy, something from TV or the papers. The wisdom Harold had acquired in his months there was that you navigated around such people, like steering a boat around snags in a river, which, in fact, he’d done pretty well just now. At least Annie hadn’t been there – the last thing he needed was some loony Egyptian frightening her away!

Putting his hand in his jacket pocket, Harold was briefly puzzled to feel a folded square of silky cloth inside. Then it came back: the black abaya he’d bought for Annie in case she got hassled at the airport… the image of another unhappy face replaced the Egyptian’s: Annie, in the exit from customs, scanning the arrival hall for Harold, beside her a soldier with a machine-pistol ensuring she didn’t run off on her own. Harold had waited for several hours in the crowd of locals in robes and foreign workers in orange coveralls, policemen all around, everyone jumpily eying each other.

“Find husband, bring him,” an old hand at the office had imitated a customs inspector telling an arriving wife, her passport held until she returned with her man. Or the husband’s name was read over the loudspeakers, which was why Harold, besides keeping an eye on the exit, had been straining to hear the address system’s every squawk, mostly so distorted he couldn’t tell what language it was.

But there was Annie. Spotting him, his wife of twenty-some years made a brusque gesture: get over here, buster! Hurrying over, he sidestepped her attempt at a serious hug (it just wasn’t done in public here) and followed the soldier in, dreading a bureaucratic snarl, the wrong signature or stamp. But after a glance at Harold’s residence permit the official waved them through.

Moments later they were in a taxi speeding into the desert night. He made no comment on how Annie was dressed, a short-sleeved blouse and bluejeans, to his new eyes a tad too formfitting. In his pocket, folded into a compact square, was the black abaya, the garment most Western women wore draped around their shoulders in public to appease the mutawaa, the religious police. A matter Harold had never quite managed to bring up with Annie. Luckily – no fanatic had challenged Annie’s immodesty – he hadn’t needed to take the abaya out.

They rode in silence into the sprawling capital, well-lit highways branching off in every direction like necklaces of light. Annie seemed hurt at Harold’s standoffishness, but as they entered the city she peered out the window with interest. Harold was realizing something that, focused on the abaya and other worries, he’d seen but not really grasped: the pleasantly chubby wife he’d left in Scheuertown was noticeably slimmer, had a toned-up look that could only come from constant workouts. Annie’d talked about it for years but never managed to stick to it. She’d also cut her hair short, shorter than ever in all their years of marriage.

Harold’s months in Arabia were among the most momentous in his life. He’d imagined Annie continuing her humdrum existence in their old house in Scheuertown, but it seemed those months had been equally momentous for her. She was still angry when he left, he knew that, for the first time he now imagined her anger, far from diminishing in his absence, actually intensifying as she worked out each day, pedaling furiously on the stationary bike, focusing on Harold like a boxer visualizing his opponent when he punches the bag….

In the lobby of Harold’s apartment building, they happened upon Larry and Marcia, an American expat couple in their mid-thirties, waiting for the elevator. After the silent taxi ride, Harold was grateful for the encounter. Marcia was the only other American woman in the building and although she was fifteen years younger than Annie, he had high hopes the two’d be friendly, especially since Marcia seemed so well adjusted to Arabian life. Indeed, tall and slim, one hand on a two-wheeled grocery cart, she stood smiling at Annie, unaffected by the long-sleeved, high-collared abaya she was wearing, covered in black but for a few inches of jeans peeking out below. After introductions the couples chatted about Annie’s flight and the travails of arrival.

“We better take our groceries upstairs,” Larry said finally. “But we’ll have you over soon.”

“We were just at the supermarket where you’ll probably do your shopping,” Marcia said.

“Really,” said Annie, and Harold knew instantly that the new, slimmed-down Annie wasn’t inclined to what the old Annie called biting my tongue. “In that getup I thought maybe you were returning from a Halloween party.”

“I see you won’t be coming over after all,” said Marcia, eyes flashing.

“Now, Marsh,” Larry chided, but when the elevator came, they got in while Harold and Annie waited – too much luggage for everyone to fit, Harold said.

Upstairs, Annie unpacked, hanging clothing in the large closet beside Harold’s few things. He hung his jacket, the abaya still folded in the pocket. Watching her move about, put things in the dresser, inspect the bathroom, he was suddenly overcome with fatigue, as though a narcotic had kicked in, more tired from his anticipation of her arrival than she by the long flight.

“I…I’m going to have to sleep,” he said, as Annie, nightgown in hand, headed for the bathroom for a quick shower. His short-haired slimmed-down wife stopped as though derailed – that’s the welcome I get after hours of planes and airports? – then sighed and said, “Okay, Harold.”

That morning in class, in the back of his mind Harold looked forward to having, for once, a tale to tell the guys during office hours – not, as he’d expected, about an incident at the airport with Annie, but about the loony Egyptian. He imagined himself imitating the big man, holding his arm out – halt! – taking Frankenstein steps. The guys’d be in stitches – a couple times his students clearly wondered what Teacher Harold was grinning about. But when office hours came that afternoon, the colleagues at their desks around the teachers’ room, drinking coffee, sharing the latest rumors, Harold visualized himself sprinting down the street and it no longer seemed funny. In fact, it seemed pathetic: scared little newcomer Harold, running away. He kept quiet about the Egyptian.

A couple colleagues took off early, leaving the others to cover if Dr Amoudi, the Vice-Dean, popped in to make sure the foreign teachers weren’t slacking off again. Harold had always done his obligatory daily office hours – why rush home to an empty apartment? Until recently afternoons had been too hot for his walks in the city anyway. He’d imagined leaving early once Annie arrived. But that morning, groggy with jetlag, she asked when he’d be back, and he’d said: “We’re in the office ‘til four.”

Tony Hewett, a thin, white-haired Brit, had the desk across from Harold. Hewitt, always in vested banker’s suits, was the department’s oldest hand; even other veterans asked his world-weary advice on navigating the bureaucracy. Nearby, at a desk wedged against the photocopier, Dan from Iowa, in his first job fresh out of grad school, sat typing at one of the office’s two computers.

Hewitt was holding forth about a colleague who’d been fired after one of his diplomas turned out to be a forgery. “Not a soul would’ve known but for a fit he threw in the Snake Pit” – Hewitt’s code for the personnel office – “about his housing allowance. That roused the sleeping vipers: hang on, let’s give this noisy bugger’s file another look.” Hewitt peered at Harold as though he was the one getting another look. “He was on a flight out within the week. Decent enough chap, really, only trying to leave the past behind.”

Hewitt, a chainsmoker, lit a cigarette and regarded Harold skeptically. “Very American idea, isn’t it? New start, frontier, Wild West sort of thing.” He leaned forward, his piercing blue eyes implying this had direct application to Harold. “Here in the Wild East, the past is always with us, like the poor according to the Pope. We’ve all got a past, a scandal, a defect perhaps, otherwise we’d not be here. I always ask about a colleague: Why’s he here? What’s he hiding?”

Young Dan looked over, grinning at another of Hewitt’s droll monologues. Harold felt as though a rubber-tipped arrow was quivering in the middle of his forehead – bullseye! Hewitt took a long pull on his Dunhill and smiled, suddenly sinister looking.

Harold had the impossible conviction: Hewitt knows. He saw himself back at Scheuertown High, in the hallway, wrestling with that smirking student, Blarty, the weasel-like girlfriend reaching to pull Harold’s hair, around them a circle of students, rapt, as though watching some special performance. Even now, Harold didn’t remember the moment he’d snapped – one minute he was trying to retrieve the gradebook that had disappeared from his desk, certain it was inside Blarty’s bookbag, then he was coming to with a jolt, atop Blarty’s chest. Nor did he have any memory of flinging the girlfriend into the lockers. Roger, the former principal, Harold’s boss for fifteen years, wouldn’t have forced him into retirement. Roger stood up for his teachers. Unfortunately, in the two years after Roger’s departure Harold had never cultivated his replacement, had never hidden the fact that he didn’t take the new principal – barely thirty-five, a kid really, spouting silly educational slogans – all that seriously….

 Hewitt couldn’t know, no-one here could. It hadn’t appeared on Harold’s application, or in his recommendations, which showed him as a perfectly ordinary early retiree, bored with sitting around the house in Scheuertown, taking a job abroad. Hewitt couldn’t possibly know.

“I can’t imagine what I’d be hiding, Tony,” Harold finally managed. “I wouldn’t know about anyone else-”

“Oh quite,” said Hewitt, with a devilish smirk, “I was speaking generally.” He looked at Harold with an expression of shock. “My dear man, you can’t have thought I was referring to anyone personally?”

“Of course not,” Harold said.

“What on earth could young Dan here possibly have to hide?”

“Nothing,” said Harold under Hewitt’s ironic gaze. “Nothing at all.”

The girlfriend told the new principal her boyfriend had stood up for her after Harold tried to extort sex for a passing grade – the sliver of truth being that both Blarty and the little witch (she’d actually pulled out a clump of Harold’s hair) were on the verge of failing Harold’s American History class and needed to do something. The idea that Harold’d want anything to do with that repulsive creature was beyond laughable, not that it prevented the excuse for a principal from taking it perfectly seriously (“I must be evenhanded here, Harold, you do see that?” he asked in their last meeting). Annie’d always said she believed him, had reassured him repeatedly. Yet he found her studying him as though examining an object fallen from space. Suddenly together in the big old house all the time, they led separate lives. Annie in the family room watching TV (or, at least, sitting with the TV on), Harold in the study reading ancient history, his new passion.

Both daughters came home for Easter and held whispered conferences with Annie around the house. Harold wasn’t invited and when he passed conversation ceased. Young Angela peered at him much as her mother had: who is this man? The older daughter, Cindy, a grungy geek in college, now a sharp dresser and hard-headed high-tech salesperson, explained the facts of life.

“Did you know mom’s thinking of applying for jobs around town? Menial stuff or as a greeter? Her friends advise her to kick you out and sell the house. The bills keep coming, your savings are disappearing. I can help with Angela’s tuition, but you’ve still got a few years on the mortgage and the school district isn’t paying your health insurance anymore.” She gestured at the thick volume open in Harold’s lap. “You can’t sit around reading Gibbon for the rest of your life, daddy.”

A couple days later – in the last issue of his subscription to an education journal – he saw the ad: teachers, attractive tax-free salary, Arabian Peninsula….

Over there, restless in his apartment, the long evenings and weekends – even Gibbon unappealing – Harold wandered the streets. Not the gleaming new districts but the old town, its marketplaces crowded with human types and costumes from around the region, its narrow streets drawing him in spite of occasional hostile looks. Walking those streets became his routine. Strolling there, passing palm trees peeking over crumbling walls, crooked lanes of mud houses with crenellated rooftops, he often felt on the verge of understanding something, nothing he could state precisely (much less in words that’d make sense to Annie).

There were still long hours in the apartment when he missed her. Things didn’t seem real until he imagined telling her. But in their weekly phone calls, his biggest fear was her suddenly announcing: I’m not coming after all, see you in Scheuertown during summer vacation, and he never quite got around to mentioning things that would only upset her anyway. What if, when she came, she hated the place? He couldn’t make her feel what he did in the old city, but he could try to make sure nothing went wrong once she arrived.

That first weekend in his apartment, it became clear Annie’d come with a prosecutorial agenda, above all the question: why hadn’t he fought for his job instead of meekly taking early retirement? At the time, stunned by the entire turn of events, she’d accepted Harold’s arguments that it wasn’t such a bad deal, better to avoid lawyers and lawsuits. Apparently, brooding during his absence, during all those hours working out, she couldn’t get past that question: why didn’t you fight them? Harold had no new answer. Okay, she’d finally say, what’s done is done, but later she’d bring it up again. Sure, the checks he’d been sending home had ended their financial problems, but at what cost? He was here in this awful place, if she stayed it meant giving up everything else in her life: daughters, house, friends. If only he’d fought for his job….

He’d never told Annie how relieved he’d been to be forced out. In the last few years at Scheuertown High, students had paid about as much attention to him as to some nut holding forth in the city park in summer, like picnickers oblivious to someone mumbling as he stumbled past. His students slept, talked on their cellphones, texted, listened to headphones, while he went on about Valley Forge or Gettysburg. He’d developed the habit of fixing his eyes on the clock high on the rear wall, talking to that clock, sometimes so focused on it he came to with a start when the period buzzer sounded (no doubt why he hadn’t actually seen Blarty snatch the gradebook).

 Three days after the incident, officially on paid leave, in a conference room with the boy principal and the lawyers (one from the teachers’ union plus a local Republican worthy on the school board), Harold was astonished to feel an immense joy welling up, as though he were a prisoner unexpectedly paroled, when he understood they were forcing him to retire. But even as he struggled to hide the elation surging to burst out, he knew Annie wouldn’t understand.

Now, facing the new Annie, he simply stated, lowkey, his case for Arabia: colleagues of mine’ve been here for years, have a tolerable life; we can, too. A slow life, with time to get to know each other again. It’s too late for my old job, but I can get through two or three years here, save a lot of money. Then my pension will start, the house’ll be paid off.  Even after listening to him lay this out, once he paused, Annie’d start up again: if only you’d….

A day and a half of that, cooped up, felt long. A stroll to get out, to stretch their legs, show Annie the neighborhood, seemed natural. Harold worried about unpleasant incidents: any stray fanatic, deciding to enforce public morality, could walk up and announce: ‘Your wife must cover.’ He still hadn’t brought up the abaya, folded in his pocket. Sunlight streamed through the windows as the noon prayer call echoed from nearby mosques. Annie listened wide-eyed to the sound, huge, raw. Harold reflected: it was the day of worship, shops were closed all afternoon, the one time in the week hardly anyone was around. “How about a walk?” 

“I was wondering what a girl had to do to get asked out around here!” Annie put on a light trenchcoat that, falling to mid-calf, approximated modest dress. Harold could have hugged her. Outside, they were nearly alone walking along usually bustling Khazzan Street. Harold pointed out the shops – the grocery, the Lebanese bakery, the butcher’s, the barber’s – all dark with their grilles pulled down. It was pleasantly warm for a walk, but there wasn’t much else to see. He didn’t want to take her through the old city just yet.

Then he remembered Soudah park a couple blocks further. On weekends the main section was packed with male Asian workers sitting on the grass, huddled together, laughing. The park’s northern end, behind high hedges inside wrought-iron fences, was a ‘family area,’ open only to women and children and their male relatives. Unaccompanied men were rebuffed at the gates. Harold had once earned a guard’s warning when he tried to peer inside.

“I could never go in by myself,” he told Annie as they walked up to the entrance. “You’re my chaperone.” She gave a puzzled smile, not appreciating his excitement.

A tall Sudanese guard stood at the gate. Inside, a gravel pathway snaked past a dozen benches, creating nooks where visitors faced the hedges, away from the path. In the center was a playground: swings, a slide, and painted, bobbing animals with seats. A kebab stand was next to a booth selling soft drinks and cotton candy.

Women and girls outnumbered the boys who played at the playground while the girls sat with their mothers. Half a dozen bored adult men sat scattered on benches, their wives in groups talking animatedly. Most women wore black, a few full veils; only Annie had her hair uncovered. Younger girls, some holding smiley-face balloons from the candy stand, wore frilly dresses and ribbons in their hair.

At the kebab stand Harold ordered Annie her first local food. As they stood eating falafels, a girl of ten or so, buying cotton candy, stared at Annie. “Hello, lady!” she said in schoolbook English, then ran off, giggling. Moments later, she was back, holding her hand out to Annie. “Please, lady, speak with mother my!” She led Annie over to two women and another girl on a bench. Harold clearly wasn’t invited and he looked about for a bench. Annie and her friends were joined by another woman entirely in black except for her face, a pale oval; she sat on a blanket facing them. Their conversation took off.

“Please, sir, to be seated!”  A man in a faded pinstriped suit, sporting a well-trimmed little moustache, beckoned Harold to his bench. Another abandoned husband, he was a retired Egyptian judge, now working in a local commercial court. Most cases, he explained, were foreign investors or workers suing locals for breach of contract. “Cases are simple in Egypt,” he said, “here they’re even simpler: the foreigner’s always wrong! But never fear,” he said, clapping Harold on the shoulder, “I guarantee any foreigner the right to lose a case in my court!”

Harold listened to the judge’s stories of locals fleecing foreign partners. Fifteen minutes later, he looked around, trying to pick out Annie’s trenchcoat, but every woman in sight was shrouded in black or dark blue. “Where’s my wife?” he cried, on his feet. 

The judge, evidently accustomed to recognizing covered wives, eventually pointed at a group of women. “There, I think.” Heart thumping, Harold made out Annie, enshrouded in a black abaya, being fitted with a headscarf by the cotton-candy girl. A moment later his piously covered wife spotted him standing there staring and waved both hands enthusiastically: look at me! Isn’t this fun? He waved back in a daze.

Annie’s girl linked arms with another girl and started dancing the steps of some Middle Eastern dance. The other women clapped their hands in rhythm, and Annie joined in. Vaguely saying goodbye to the judge, Harold walked toward the women as though floating on the park’s well-watered grass, giddy as he watched Annie clap with the others. After his endless fretting, here was his wife wearing an abaya, her new haircut beneath a headscarf, having the time of her life; in his pocket he felt the abaya he’d never dared show her.  It seemed so funny Harold was overcome with laughter. Gasping, he sank to his knees.

A boy approached, concerned: was mister all right? His laughter a breathless heaving, Harold wheezed “My wife!” and pointed at the clapping women, where Annie swayed with the others. The sight set off a new laughing fit. One woman ululated, the otherworldly sound adding to the unreality.

Suddenly, from around the park, angry husbands arrived. Arguments flared. The women talked back, with a tone of ‘are you serious?’ but before long wives and daughters were being hustled away. The men kept looking Harold’s way, and he had the bizarre impression their anger somehow focused on him.

He stood, his laughter fading to hiccups. Annie, beside him now, slapped his back. She no longer wore the abaya, but still had the scarf over her hair. “Was I that funny?”

“It wasn’t you,” he said hoarsely. “It’s hard to explain.” They headed out, nearly the last ones. The others had left as though fleeing a crime scene.

 “That was really fun, Har,” she said, taking his arm. “What a great idea to come here!”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.” They walked back along Khazzan Street. “Did they give you the headscarf?”

Annie reached up, surprised to find the scarf still there. “Why, I forgot all about it in the rush at the end…” She brightened. “But I have their address, they said it’s not far. I can return it when I visit.” She gave Harold a little smile. “They’re going to teach me bellydancing.”

“That should be fun.” As they came up to his building, Harold experienced a worry-free glow along with the odd sensation of having a chastely covered woman on his arm. In his pocket, he felt the silkiness of the folded abaya. For the moment he left it there.

In the afternoon bus home, Harold watched Soudah park go by and smiled at the memory. At his stop, squinting in the afternoon sun, he got out near the very spot where the big loony had stood shaking his fists. The sidewalk was busy with people trying to finish shopping before stores closed for late afternoon prayer. He’d promised Annie he’d pick up some groceries and headed into the little grocery store. Twenty minutes later, holding his briefcase and a bag of groceries, he walked past the pharmacy and the bakery. The prayer call sounded, fierce, mournful, as Harold passed the butcher’s doorway, where a man in a green smock was reaching up to roll down the storefront grille. A voice boomed, and Harold was grabbed and spun around. The big Egyptian, angry as ever, stood wagging his hand in Harold’s face. Whee? the man demanded, towering over him. Whee?

Harold felt anger rising – even he could take only so much – when he noticed the man’s smock, spotless that morning, now splotched with brown – no, reddish brown. He was covered with blood! And, in his left hand, a long knife, bigger than any household knife, not brandished, just dangling there.

At some level Harold understood the big man was a butcher. He worked in the butcher shop, which explained the bloodstains and his appearance there: he’d seen Harold passing and hurried out, knife in hand, as innocent as Harold leaving a classroom holding a piece of chalk. He wasn’t waving the knife, wasn’t threatening Harold with it. Yet Harold’s chest constricted, his heart pounded, the entire scene – the shops, the angry face, the wagging hand – flashed and bounced as though in a strobe light.

Harold turned and fled. Something grabbed his jacket but he threw his weight forward and, with a tearing sound, pulled free. He raced down the sidewalk, people moving aside, faces looming eerily, past his usual crossing place, down the long block until, abruptly, the sidewalk ended. He found himself facing plywood thrown up around a construction site. Traffic zoomed by right there, leaving no place to walk.

Harold looked back. The Egyptian stood in front of the butcher shop, hands hanging, nearly alone on the street. Then he turned and disappeared, inside the butcher’s apparently. Harold slumped against the plywood, catching his breath. Cars sped by. A pair of Yemenis in colored skirts jogged across, laughing at close calls. The hell with this! Harold decided, and ran through a gap in traffic. Horns blared, but he made it, and felt a surge of exhilaration. At the door of his building, he remembered the groceries, and quickly looked himself over: he was clutching his briefcase but the bag of groceries was nowhere in sight.

After getting off the bus, he told Annie, he’d come within inches of being run over by a speeding car. He’d fallen, tearing his jacket, so rattling him he’d forgotten to buy groceries. She readily believed him: “You’re so pale, Harold, I knew something was wrong the minute you came in. The last time you looked like that was, well, you know, the day of the incident…”

 “Dammit anyway,” he said, stamping his foot. “They drive like maniacs here!”

Annie understood that he didn’t feel like going out again. They’d go shopping tomorrow. Harold removed his jacket – his favorite – and Annie inspected the damage. It was torn from beneath the sleeve all the way down to the pocket. Then Harold noticed that the sole of his right shoe hung flapping, separated from the upper. “Damn that big oaf!”

“Big oaf?”

“The driver, I mean.”

“What’s this, Harold?” Annie was unfolding the abaya from his jacket pocket.

“I…I bought that for you… in case you wanted one.”

“You want me to wear this?”

“Only if you want to.” Seeing her face harden, he said: “Look, I almost got run over just now, can we talk about it later?”

“Okay, Harold,” she said evenly. “We’ll talk about it later.”

The next morning he walked to a bus stop blocks away from the butcher shop, and that afternoon got off at the same distant stop. At the apartment, Annie was waiting to go shopping. He led her a ways down Khazzan Street before crossing over and doubling back. She wanted some things at the pharmacy first. Afterwards, standing with her peering into the bakery window, he nearly jumped every time someone came out of the butcher shop further along.

 “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?” Annie was staring at him.

“Can we go to the butcher shop?”

“Uh, actually, that place has always looked unsanitary to me.”

“Didn’t you say they had good sliced turkey there?”

“Did I say that? It’s just… They have all these, you know, actual animals, with fur and eyes and tongues, hanging in there…like some zoo of the dead. It’s unsettling.”

She eyed him uncertainly. “I really wanted to get some sandwich meats. I don’t eat at the faculty cafeteria every day. I can’t exist on pastry and yogurt, Harold.”

“Tell you what,” he blurted, “you go in there, buy all the meat you want! I’ll get started in the grocery store on the corner. When you’re done, come find me!”

“But you said I shouldn’t go around alone, to avoid getting hassled by the religious police-”

“Not in the butcher shop. Don’t worry about the religious police in the butcher shop.” He patted her shoulder.  “It’ll be fine.” He hurried off as she stared after him.

Inside the grocery store, he pushed one of their small shopping carts along an aisle.

“Please, mister,” said someone with an Arabic accent, behind him. Harold whirled clumsily, sending cereal boxes tumbling. It was Saleh, a little Yemeni, the shop manager. He and Harold had become friendly, exchanging greetings and pleasantries. He regarded Harold with concern.

“Everything okay, mister?”

“Just fine, Saleh.” He picked up cereal boxes, replacing them. “Sorry.”

“No problem, mister.”

Saleh held out a grocery bag to Harold.

“Your grocery.”

“Excuse me?”

“From yesterday.”

Peering in the bag, Harold saw his groceries from the day before.

“I left these in here?”

“No, butcher bring. He find and bring for you.”

“The butcher?”  Harold asked dumbly.

“Yes, Egypt butcher. Big,” said Saleh, raising a hand high, “two of me. He bring for you.”

“Well…how nice of him.… Thank you, Saleh.”

“Welcome, mister,” said Saleh, backing away with a little bow.

Harold stared at the bag, then put it in his cart.

A moment later Annie arrived. “What’s in there?” she asked, pointing at the bag.

“Ah…I …I already paid for some things. Now I’m shopping some more.”

“Are you all right, Harold?” She gave him her inspecting look.

“I’m just fine. It’s hard to explain. Let’s just shop, okay?” He heard sharpness in his voice and tried to smile.

“Okay, Harold.” Further along the aisle, she said: “You were right about the butcher shop.”

“Oh?  It was unsanitary-”

“No, it was unsettling. One of the butchers, a big man with a beard, holding this big knife, ogled me the whole time I was there, like the mere sight of a Western woman made him angry. It was unsettling.”

“That does sound …unpleasant.”

“I almost gave him a piece of my mind, but it seemed best to avoid trouble. It’s more than unpleasant to be ogled like that. I can’t imagine getting used to it.”

“Well, there are some unpleasant characters here…we’ll avoid that shop.”

When they’d paid, Saleh held the door open as they left with their bags.

“Bye, mister! You can thank big butcher!” Saleh said, pointing down the street.

“Sure,” said Harold quickly, “no problem! Bye!”

“What did he say about the butcher, Harold?”

“Nothing, don’t worry about it.”

“He said ‘big butcher,’ that-”

“Annie”, he said, putting one bag down and grasping her wrist, harder than he intended, “you must understand, people say crazy things here, things that don’t mean anything! You just have to ignore it, okay?”

“This is the place you want me to stay?”

“Well, no…I mean, yes, I want you to stay, but…. Can we talk about this later, instead of on the corner with our groceries?” He picked up the bag and started walking.

“Harold, where are you going?”

“Back to the apartment.”

“Your building’s over there. Why are you going the other way?”

“I…I like to walk this way. It’s further, but…”

“You want to go for a walk carrying all these groceries?” She gave him a look, then took his elbow. “Come on, Harold,” she said, leading him toward the butcher shop.

“Ah…oh,” he mumbled, reluctantly going. Just then, the Egyptian came out.

“That’s him!” said Annie. “The one who ogled me!”

The big man strode toward them, hand held up: halt! Harold dropped one bag, grabbed Annie’s arm, backing away. Then he saw, in the man’s other hand, not the knife but a cleaver. He threw his remaining bag at the advancing Egyptian and dragged Annie with him. Her bag of groceries fell, spilling onto the sidewalk. “Run!” he cried, pulling Annie into the street, holding up a hand as he dragged her through traffic. Horns of speeding cars blared past them.

“Harollld!” Annie cried, but let him pull her along until they reached his building. There, she yanked her arm free. “Have you lost your mind?”

He pointed behind her. Down the block, now on their side of the street, the Egyptian was coming.

“But what does he want?” she asked, raising both hands to her face.

“Who knows? He’s a crazy Egyptian!”

Thirty feet away, the man strode toward them, face set with determination.

Harold pushed through the doors. “Quick, get upstairs, inside the apartment! I’ll lead him away.” Starting across the foyer, Harold saw the office of the manager, a local who wheeled and dealed in everything from cars to real estate. Various uniformed men, police or military, relatives and pals, often hung out there, lounging around with their shoes off, drinking tea.

The Egyptian loomed outside. Harold ran for the office. The manager and two other men, one in a khaki uniform with a gold star on each shoulder, looked up in surprise at Harold’s sudden entrance, growing more astonished as he rambled: “Egyptian! Coming! Help!”

Then the Egyptian was in the doorway. “Help!” cried Harold, dodging around the manager’s desk. At the sight of the locals the big man was suddenly abashed. Everyone stood, exchanged politenesses: Salaam Aleikum!  Aleikum Salaam!

The policeman did the questioning. The larger Egyptian seemed unable to look him in the eye. The officer turned to Harold. “What he did to you exactly?”

“Harassed me on the street! Yesterday! Today! With a knife! Look-” Harold started to point at the cleaver, but the big man’s hands hung at his sides, empty.

“He say you laugh at his wife in Soudah park.”

“Laugh? Me?”

“Yes. In park, you point at his wife and laugh. He want to know why.”

“Whee?” the Egyptian asked, glaring at Harold. “Whee?”

“He ask why you laugh at her,” the policeman said, “why his wife is funny.”

“But…I wasn’t laughing at her. I was laughing at…my own wife.”

The locals looked at each other as though this was the craziest thing yet, but it was translated. Suddenly the big man’s body was shaking, his face in his hands. The policeman put an arm around him, patting his shoulder. Speaking softly, he led the Egyptian out. The manager gave Harold an indulgent look and shrugged.

Harold shuffled out, lightheaded. Beside the door, Annie was leaning against the wall, listening. He started to speak, but seeing her face, he stopped, knowing nothing would keep her from leaving. Then he saw himself, returning from seeing her off at the airport, wandering the old city’s narrow streets in search of an inkling, of some glimpse of illumination.

Matt and Irene’s daughter Lizzie was away at a slumber party – an Astronomers’ Party, she and her friends called it; they were going to stay up late and record in their Star Books all the planets and constellations they could identify, and any flying saucers that happened to be in the neighborhood.  As far as Matt and Irene could tell, the sixth grade, under the eccentric guidance of their teacher Mrs. Kemnitzer, was spending one hundred percent of its time discussing the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the fact – so Mrs. Kemnitzer claimed – that President Eisenhower himself was a believer in life on other planets, though he wouldn’t come right out and admit it. 

            Or maybe it only seemed that way.  Lizzie tended to be obsessive in her interests, and Mrs. Kemnitzer’s Star Book assignment had caught her attention in a way Matt and Irene hadn’t seen since she’d thrown herself body and soul into the study of ballet.  It was possible that Mrs. Kemnitzer tossed a bit of social studies and math into the curriculum now and then, but if she did, there was no evidence of it.

            The thought of Lizzie out doing something creative and adventurous made Matt feel restless.  He was envious of his own daughter – when he was a child, the world’s imagination had not yet been captured by the notion of UFOs and life on other planets.  He could only imagine the collective fear and excitement Lizzie and her friends were experiencing tonight, peering up at the night sky that teemed with so much life and possibility.

            With Lizzie gone, the house was unnaturally quiet.  Sitting across from Irene at dinner, Matt felt strangely off-kilter, and he suspected Irene did too, both of them searching for topics of conversation the way they’d done when they were first dating and still shy with each other.  After dinner he tried to settle in with the evening paper, still feeling edgy, and saw in the movie listings that The Magnificent Seven had just opened at the Esquire Theatre. “That’s a movie I’d like to see sometime,” he’d said.  Irene, after a pause, said, “Well, it doesn’t start for half an hour.  We can make it if we go right now.  We can leave the dishes till later.”  He looked up from the paper, surprised.  Irene was a planner; she never suggested doing things spontaneously.  He couldn’t remember a single time in their entire marriage that she’d let the dishes go unwashed after dinner.

            Irene didn’t especially like westerns, and he assumed she’d suggested the movie just to be nice, because she knew it was something he wanted to do.  But during the movie, Matt cast sidelong glances at her, and each time she was watching with rapt attention, her eyes never leaving the screen.  He didn’t catch her yawning, or looking at her watch, even once.

            Afterwards, Irene took his hand as they walked out of the theater, and that was unusual too.  She’d always been uncomfortable showing affection in public, even when they were first dating.  “You know what would be fun?” she said.  “To go to Wong’s.  We didn’t have much for dinner.  Fried rice sounds good, don’t you think?  That barbecued pork with the hot mustard.  Egg foo yung.  I could eat an order of chop suey all by myself.  Are you hungry?”

            Irene had less interest in food than anyone Matt knew.  Sometimes he thought that if she didn’t have him and Lizzie to cook for, she would forget to eat half the time.

            The prospect of a late dinner out sounded fun, adventurous, something they never did.  “Starved,” he said.

            There was a big crowd, by their town’s standards, spilling out of the theatre.  The movie really had been exciting, and, as everyone walked out together, the air sparkled with energy, a rare occurrence in McClary, where the liveliest thing that usually happened on a Friday night was bored teenagers dragging Main, blaring Elvis out of their car radios and making nuisances of themselves.  But tonight it felt to Matt like he and Irene were on vacation in a big city, part of an after-Broadway-play throng.

            The other movie-goers seemed to have the same idea as Irene – a late dinner, a drink at the Tam O’Shanter, an ice cream soda at the Corner Drug Store if it was still open.  When Matt and Irene walked down Sixth Street toward Main, most of the crowd drifted along with them.  Matt was relieved that there was no one in the crowd he and Irene knew, no pressure to stop and make conversation.  It heightened the feeling of being in the midst of an after-theatre city crowd – bustling, comforting anonymity.

            The night was surprisingly warm for late September, and Irene wore a soft white sweater with pearl buttons – no coat, as though she’d known it would be a warm night.  Helping her on with it after the movie, Matt had been surprised by how soft the sweater was, like cashmere.  Irene didn’t bother much about clothes, and he hadn’t known she owned such an elegant sweater.  He couldn’t remember ever seeing it before. 

            The warmth of the night was a gift.  “It feels like being on vacation, doesn’t it?” said Irene, echoing his thoughts as she often did.  She squeezed his hand.  “You know how when you’re on vacation, and you only have a few days, the weather is so important?  Every day counts double because there are so few of them.  And when you have a warm day, or a warm night like tonight, you feel lucky.  Extra lucky.”

            It was as if those words – extra lucky – triggered something in Irene.  (But this he realized only later, thinking back after it was all over.)  She wrenched her hand free from Matt’s and darted ahead through the crowd, dropping her handbag.  That was how he knew something was truly wrong – Irene never let go of her handbag.  He’d teased her about it, the way she always clutched it to her as though afraid of being robbed.  She jostled people as she ran.  “Hey,” someone said, sounding angry.  And someone else said, “Watch where you’re going, lady!”

            In an instant the mood in the air changed from celebratory to annoyed, and then to something else.  Irene’s urgency spread through the crowd like smoke.  Matt’s eyes were on the man who’d said, “Watch where you’re going, lady,” and when the man looked up, Matt looked up too.  Just in time to see something fall from the sky. 

* * *

            The next day, Saturday, around five, Matt and Irene’s uphill neighbors Paul and Helen Brashler called within minutes of the evening paper’s arrival, as Matt could have predicted they would.  “I can’t believe this!” Helen said.  “You have to come up for drinks right this minute and tell us all about it.”  Matt knew, from the familiar flirtatious-but-determined tone in Helen’s voice, that there was no point in resisting.  Anyway, even if Helen hadn’t insisted, he would have said yes; Irene hadn’t wanted to talk about last night, but Matt thought it would be good for her to be forced to put her feelings into words.

            Usually it was Paul’s picture in the McClary News Herald, or Helen’s.  Paul was president of the Downtown Merchants’ Association, the Elks Club and a couple of lesser clubs, and he was a member of the City Council.  He was also a pal of Chuck Teeters, the News Herald’s editor, and Chuck often called Paul when he needed a quote.  Helen’s pretty face regularly graced what passed for the News Herald’s society page.  Everyone said Helen looked just like Natalie Wood.  Matt and Irene’s pictures had never appeared in the paper – Chuck Teeters was not interested in the doings or the opinions of a couple of underpaid social workers.

            The newspaper was spread out on the Brashlers’ wet bar when Matt and Irene arrived.  Irene’s picture was on the front page – though, with her face turned away from the camera, you wouldn’t know it was her without the caption.  Matt was in the picture too, in the background, looking a little foolish holding Irene’s handbag; somehow amidst the chaos, he’d had the presence of mind to pick it up from the sidewalk.

            Paul was already pouring their scotch and sodas.  “Why so camera shy, Irene?” he asked as he set her drink before her with a bartender’s flourish.  Paul liked making drinks for people; he often joked that if Brashler Furniture ever went bankrupt, he would apply for a job mixing drinks at the Tam O’Shanter.  He could joke about such things; Brashler Furniture was so successful that Paul could, and did, buy a new car every year.  He bought expensive presents for Helen, like diamond earrings and mink stoles.

            “I didn’t want my picture taken,” said Irene, and touched her fingers to her forehead.  “I told that reporter, but he did it anyway.  Are they allowed to do that?  To take your picture if you don’t want them to?”

            Irene had spent the day in the garage, refinishing a table she’d bought for two dollars at a flea market.  Matt had observed over the years that the furniture-refinishing was not so much a hobby for Irene as a retreat – she occasionally needed those hours of solitude in the garage, and tended to go there when she was upset or needed to think something through.  Sitting next to her now at the Brashlers’ bar, Matt smelled an odd, rather tantalizing, combination of paint thinner and Ivory soap.  She had a smudge of sky-blue paint on her cheek.

            “‘Accidental Heroine,’” said Helen.  “What a headline.  It just makes me furious.  It’s so like Chuck Teeters to be grudging.  Why can’t he give credit where credit is due?”

            “It was accidental,” said Irene, sounding irritated.  “There was nothing heroic about it.  It just happened.  Anyone would have done the same thing.”

            “No, they wouldn’t,” said Helen.  Her voice was louder and more impassioned than usual; Matt wondered if she was on her second scotch.  “I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read the article, and I think it’s a matter of who you are.  At times like that, it’s a matter of who you are.  Don’t you think so, Paul?  Most people would react by flinching and ducking and trying to get out of the way.  My first reaction would be that something was about to come crashing down on my head – a brick or a pane of glass.  Self-preservation.  That would be almost anyone’s first instinct.”

            “Helen’s right,” said Paul.  “I couldn’t have reacted the way you did, Irene.  Incredible reflexes.  Quick thinking.  Not to mention the bravery.”

            “Oh, I hate this, I hate it,” said Irene.  “Can we please talk about something else?”

            “And anyway,” Matt said, “it wasn’t like that.” 

            Everyone turned to him, curious, even Irene. 

            He felt slow-witted, only now putting everything together.  How easy it was for things to get distorted, for stories to change and shift.  Matt himself had been an eyewitness, and yet when Irene had said to the police officer who arrived so quickly on the scene, “It was just luck.  I was in the right place at the right time,” Matt and everyone believed her.  It had all happened so fast – time a jumble instead of a clear straight line – that Matt hadn’t trusted his own senses.  And when Irene’s statement to the police was quoted in the newspaper, set in print, that was that. 

            “What I mean is,” Matt said slowly, “you are brave.  I didn’t mean you weren’t.  But it wasn’t a reaction.  You didn’t react.  You acted.  You ran toward that building, Irene.  Before the child ever fell.  As if you knew what was going to happen.”

* * *

            In her white sweater, alone, running ahead of the crowd, reaching up and out, Irene had looked like a ghost in the dark.  There were gasps from the crowd, and shouting, though no one yet realized exactly what was happening.

            Matt ran to her.  He jostled people as she had jostled them, but now everyone drew aside to let him pass, as though he were someone official and important.  He arrived in time to steady her.  She leaned against Matt, regained her balance, stood straight, cradling the baby who’d just fallen from the sky.

            Not quite a baby.  A toddler, heavy in her arms, a little boy with black hair, staring up at her, stunned, and then, miraculously, laughing.  Infectious, gleeful laughter, as though this were some wonderful game.  Matt glanced up again and saw something in a second story window.  A face, maybe, or maybe just the flutter of a curtain.

* * *

            After Matt’s words, nobody said anything.  Even Paul, never at a loss for something to say, was silent.  Finally Helen, her eyes wide, said, “Maternal instinct.  That’s what it had to be.  I’m not a mother, so I can only imagine, but I’ll bet that’s what it was.  You’re a mother, and you had some sort of heightened sensitivity.  You felt something was going to happen to a child.  A kind of ESP that only a mother would have.”

            “I don’t believe in ESP,” Irene said, sounding annoyed.  She put a hand to her cheek, then rubbed it.  “Oh, lord,” she said, “do I still have paint on my face?  Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

            “We thought it was cute,” said Paul.

            “It is cute,” said Helen. 

            Matt agreed.  He had never quite gotten used to the fact that Irene spent so little time on her looks.  She was a pretty woman, but Matt himself sometimes forgot that.  It was possible that if Irene spent as much time on clothes and make-up as Helen did, and if she stood straight and proud instead of slouching, she would get noticed the way Helen did.  Helen probably couldn’t imagine what it would be like to spend so little time looking in a mirror that you didn’t know you had paint on your face.

            Irene glared at all three of them.  “Honestly.  I’m going to the bathroom to wash it off.”

            “She is a heroine,” Helen said softly when Irene had stalked off.  “She’s just being modest.  I can tell she doesn’t want to talk about it, but that child would have died if she hadn’t been there.  She did sense what was going to happen.  I have always known there was something extraordinary about Irene.  Right from the very beginning.  Haven’t I always said that, Paul?”

            Paul nodded, and Matt looked at them both in surprise.  It had never occurred to him that the Brashlers spent any time talking about them.  When he went out on their front porch with Lizzie after dinner to help her search for planets and UFOs to record in her Star Book, they sometimes looked up at the lights in the Brashlers’ showplace house above them, and listened to the splashing fountain in the Brashler’s reflection pool.  It had never occurred to him that the Brashlers would have any interest in looking down on their bungalow, their sagging front porch, or that the Brashlers thought about them at all except as the downhill neighbors who could be counted on to feed the cat when they were away, or to come up when they were in the mood for an impromptu drinks-before-dinner party.

            He wondered how the subject of Irene’s extraordinariness had come up.

* * *

             What happened after Irene caught the child in her arms was a blur.  Matt must have made his own statement to the police, though he couldn’t remember for the life of him what he’d said.  The reporter had arrived on the scene, breathless, badgering everyone with questions.  The frantic parents had shown up (Mr. and Mrs. Scott Chilcote, the paper said – a name that sounded vaguely familiar, but maybe not – McClary was such a small town that most names were vaguely familiar), and the child, Ryan, suddenly turned shy and scared, and buried his face in Irene’s neck, so that his own mother had to pry him away.

            “A fifteen-year-old babysitter, the paper says,” said Paul.  “They don’t give her name. Says she had no idea the window was open.  Says she just looked away for a minute.”

            “A minute’s all it takes,” said Helen.  She clicked her little gold lighter and gazed into its flame for a moment before she lit her cigarette.

            When Irene returned, her cheeks were scrubbed pink, but there was still the faint shadow of the blue paint smudge – she hadn’t been able to get it all off.

            “All I know is,” said Paul, “I wouldn’t leave a child of mine with a fifteen-year-old.”

            “Oh, Paul.  That’s easy for you to say,” said Helen.  “It’s easy to pass judgment when you don’t have any children.  When I used to babysit, I’d sneak boyfriends over, play music, dance.  I was so irresponsible.  It’s frightening to think about it now.  I’m lucky nothing like this ever happened to me.  Purely lucky.”

            “It’s true.  Parents always take risks when they hire a babysitter,” said Irene.  “Remember that grandmotherly woman we hired once when Lizzie was little, Matt?  We thought she’d be so reliable, and then she fell asleep on the sofa with a lighted cigarette and almost burned the house down.”  Irene stopped short, pursed her lips.  “Oh, please,” she said, “let’s do talk about something else.”

            “Look,” said Helen, pointing.  “The weather’s changing.”  She gave a little shiver, and her gold bracelets chimed.  They all turned away from their drinks to look out the sliding glass doors at the gathering darkness.  Matt caught a glimpse of Bunny, the Brashlers’ fat tabby cat, stalking something in the grass, looking wild.

            “Threatening,” said Paul.  He turned back to his drink, lit a cigarette.  The first drops fell against the glass. 

            What if last night had been like tonight? Matt thought.  There wouldn’t have been that restless, Indian-summer feeling in the air.  They’d have stayed home and watched “77 Sunset Strip” as they usually did.  There would have been no one to catch a child falling from a window.

            On the other hand, if last night had been like tonight, maybe no one would have opened that window in the Chilcotes’ apartment in the first place.  It would have been too cold and wet.

            Matt and Irene’s home, so much smaller and more modest than the Brashlers’, was cozier than the Brashlers’ on a rainy night.  Matt glanced at Helen, who was often alone in the evenings while Paul went to his City Council meetings and his Elks meetings.  A five-thousand-square-foot house was too large for one person, especially on a rainy night.  But Paul didn’t seem to going anywhere tonight, and that was good.  Helen wouldn’t be alone.

             “We should go, Matt,” said Irene.  “It’s going to start pouring any minute, and we didn’t bring umbrellas.” 

            “Have one for the road,” Paul urged, as he always did.  “It’s a short walk home, and we can loan you umbrellas.”

            Paul always hated to see his guests leave.  It was why he was such a popular host, the life of every party.  Even when it was just the four of them getting together for impromptu drinks before dinner, he made it seem like a party, and he never wanted it to end.  Matt and Irene had learned the hard way that they had to be firm with Paul.  Early in their friendship there’d been too many hangovers the next morning after that one for the road, and then another one for the road, just because they hadn’t wanted to be rude.

            “No,” said Irene.  “We really do have to go.  Lizzie’s home, and I don’t want her to be alone.”

            “Of course you don’t,” said Helen.  “I’ll bet you don’t want to let her out of your sight after what happened last night.  We understand.”  Paul helped Irene on with her coat.  A raincoat, Matt noticed, as though she had known the weather would turn. 

* * *

            Later that night in bed – the rain had subsided to a light pattering against the window that would normally have lulled Matt right to sleep – he said to Irene, who was working, or pretending to work, a crossword puzzle, “I’d forgotten about Mrs. Nash – that was her name, wasn’t it?  That grandmotherly babysitter when Lizzie was little.  She would have burned the house down, if you hadn’t had a feeling something was wrong and insisted that we cut our evening short and go home.  I remember that I was annoyed.  I thought you were being overprotective.  And then when it turned out you were right – well, I thought, what a lucky coincidence.”        

            Irene yawned and put aside the crossword puzzle.  “Yes.  I remember that.  The rain sounds soothing against the window, doesn’t it?  Good sleeping weather.”  She turned out her light.

            “But it wasn’t a coincidence, was it?” he said after a minute, in the dark.   

            He heard her sigh.  “You’re not really going to pursue this, are you, Matt?”

            “Maybe Helen’s right.  Maternal instinct, a kind of ESP only mothers have.  Except there’ve been other times.  That time we were going to drive to the coast for the weekend, before Lizzie was even born, and at the last minute you said you had a headache and we stayed home.  And the very next day the axle broke on the car on the way to the grocery store, and the mechanic said if we’d been driving any faster, both the back wheels would probably have spun off.  We said, how lucky we hadn’t been at the coast, on one of those winding roads high above the ocean.  You didn’t have a headache at all, did you?  You never have headaches.”

            “Oh, Matt.”  She sounded exasperated.

            “And what about the time Paul was telling us about the new salesman he was about to hire, and you suddenly warned him he should have the man’s references checked more thoroughly, and sure enough it turned out the guy had a criminal record.  I thought it was strange at the time – so unlike you to give Paul unsolicited advice about his business – but I thought, well, that’s just Irene being cautious and practical.”

            “If I’m so prescient, why do I bother to work crossword puzzles?  If I have ESP, I should know the answers already.  Why didn’t I know I had paint on my face tonight?  I’m tired, Matt.  Please let’s go to sleep.”  She turned over, her back to him, the way she did when she was angry.

            A year or so ago, Lizzie had gone through a period where she found it necessary to recount movie plots to Matt and Irene.  She would come home from the Esquire Theatre, breathless with excitement, and treat them to excruciating blow-by-blow accounts.  It seemed to be a universal phase children went through, and Matt and Irene indulged Lizzie as graciously as they could manage.  One of the movies, Matt recalled, featured a man who marries a beautiful young woman.  When the newlyweds give their first dinner party, and while everyone is enjoying cocktails in the living room, the beautiful young wife excuses herself to go and check on dinner.  After a few minutes, one of the guests discovers that the ice in his drink has melted and wanders into the kitchen to replenish it, where he witnesses the wife, who has not heard him come in, take the roast in its pan out of a hot oven with her bare hands.  She is a Martian!  Matt wished he’d paid more attention to Lizzie’s account of the plot at the time; he couldn’t remember now whether the guest had confronted the wife and been turned into a Martian himself, or whether he’d backed out of the kitchen and spent the rest of the movie wrestling with his conscience – should he tell the poor husband the truth and ruin his happiness, or should he keep his knowledge secret? 

            More likely the movie had ended with Martians invading Earth, and people running up and down the streets of their towns screaming.  Which was a shame, because the whole point of the movie, Matt realized now though he had not watched it, was that you didn’t know the person you were married to.  You didn’t begin to know the person you thought you knew.

            In the darkness, the minutes went by, and he waited.  Irene would either talk to him or she wouldn’t.  If she didn’t, they would both pretend to sleep, and maybe, eventually, they really would sleep.

            At last she rolled over onto her back – not towards him, but halfway, at least.  She sighed and said, so softly he had to strain to hear the words, “I don’t know if you can understand this, Matt, but the only thing I’ve ever wanted was to be ordinary.  To live a normal, average life.  And that’s what I have – a normal life.  And now I really am going to go to sleep.  Please don’t ask me any more questions.”

            It was the last time she was ever going to talk about it, he could see that.  “All right,” he said.  “I won’t.  But–”

            She sighed.  “Matt.”

            “I was just wondering about that little boy.  Ryan.  Do you think he’ll remember any of what happened?”

            “No,” said Irene.  “He’s so little.  Two, maybe.  They say you don’t remember anything before the age of four or so.”

            “How does anyone know that for sure?” Matt wondered.  “And who are ‘they,’ anyway?”

            “I don’t know.  But that’s what they say, so it must be true.”  He could hear the smile in her voice.  Then she yawned, and a few minutes later her breathing was so soft and regular he knew she was truly asleep and not faking it.

* * *

            There was no denying it; there had always been a rift between them, and as he lay there in the dark Matt marveled at how thoroughly and completely he had misunderstood the nature of that rift. 

            Of the two of them, Matt had always thought of himself as the one with the complicated inner life.  He was the daydreamer, the one who could lose himself for hours in books and fantasies, the one who went outside on the porch with Lizzie to gaze at the night sky and imagine other worlds, the one who often felt nameless longings he couldn’t begin to talk to Irene about.   Lizzie, he’d always thought, was more like him than like Irene.  It was always he and Lizzie stargazing, he and Lizzie listening to the plaintive, minor-key folk music they both loved, he and Lizzie collecting UFO stories to tell each other.  Always at such times it seemed that Irene sat apart, sewing a ballet costume for Lizzie or balancing their monthly budget, a faint frown of disapproval on her face, and he had felt angry at her willingness to settle for a world so small and ordinary.

            When instead it turned out that she saw things he and Lizzie could not begin to understand.  She saw, and didn’t want to see, whereas he wanted to see, and couldn’t.

            They would sleep through the night to the soothing sound of rain pattering against the window.  Tomorrow the McClary News Herald would have a new front-page story – nothing so dramatic as Irene’s accidental or not-so-accidental heroism, but something.  There was always a new story.  Tomorrow the world would be ordinary again, just the way Irene wanted it.  In the children’s stories Lizzie had always loved the most, a child went on a midnight ride, on a magic carpet or clinging to the wings of a fairy, and returned just as dawn was breaking, to an adult world still asleep and oblivious.  It was as though nothing had ever happened at all, except for a tiny bit of evidence – the corner of a silver star that the child finds in his pocket, or a small piece of moonbeam still glowing faintly.  Proof, if you wanted to believe.

            What would happen to the little boy Ryan?  Irene was probably right that his conscious mind would not remember.  His guilt-ridden parents wouldn’t bring it up – it was not the kind of family story anyone would be anxious to tell.  But Matt couldn’t believe that an experience like that could be erased so completely.  Maybe throughout his whole life, or maybe not for another ten or twenty years, Ryan would have flying dreams and never know why.  In the dreams, he was an adventurer, jumping from an open window, flying through the air, feeling nothing but exhilaration, landing at the end of his flight in the soft feather bed of a woman’s capable arms, never knowing there’d been any danger at all.

            And what about the babysitter, who would grow up with only a shadow of guilt instead of a huge weight that would haunt her for the rest of her life?  Wouldn’t she feel a chill now and then, especially on Indian summer nights, and think, What if?  What if?  Irene had saved her life too.

            Matt’s extraordinary wife, the accidental heroine, had a gift she didn’t want.  She knew that when you looked into the future, you saw death and disaster.  Who would have ever guessed that the present moment was so precious?  For now, Irene would think as she fell asleep at night, as she brushed her teeth, as she made dinner, as she watched Lizzie do her homework at the dining room table, everything is all right.  No one is falling asleep with a lighted cigarette in her hand; a car is not about to crash; a child is not climbing onto a second-story window sill.  Our bills are paid; our life is on solid ground.  We are safe, for now.

Picking up loose change — it was Henry’s idea.  An activity — not a crime, not even a misdemeanor.  And any sport that aroused his enthusiasm was worth playing.  It was so easy.  The stuff lay all around them.  It lurked under the mailboxes, and in the corners of the elevator, and on the sidewalk.  It could be fished from chair cushions at the movies.  Dorothy found oily coins in the gutter.  She washed them and sometimes polished them.  Once, in a diner, two quarters were lying on the counter near Henry.  Henry picked them up.  The counterman held out his hand.    “Those are mine, my tip from the guy before you.”  Henry relinquished the money.  On her stool Dorothy stared straight ahead.  Henry would have kept those quarters –would have stolen them.  Stealing was a crime.  Yet it was the counterman who looked ashamed … ashamed for Henry, maybe.

            The next morning she went downtown to do an errand.  On a busy sidewalk she  found herself plucking a purse from the gaping backpack of a careless young woman striding ahead of her.  The young woman was wearing a red knitted hat with a royal blue pompom.  Dorothy – who had owned such a hat, a lifetime ago — drifted sideways to a window display.  Heavens, she thought to herself, counting the money in the purse.  What are you doing.  Run after her, run after her.  Forty dollars and change.  Ahead, the pompom bobbed above the crowd of shoppers.  Dorothy stuffed the purse into her own handbag.  Take it to the police station, say you found it on the street.  Instead she entered the underground and boarded the trolley that would trundle her home.  Failing to hand the police a dropped purse was not a crime.  She could keep the thing; it might even be legally hers.  Or if she turned it in at the police station and that devil-may-care pompom didn’t bother to report her loss, the purse might devolve to Dorothy, the honorable rescuer of a found object.  Not until the trolley emerged from the underground into the light did she remember that she had not found the money.  She had swiped it.

            She confessed to Henry that night.

            “How much?”

            “Forty dollars, but even if it were forty cents …”

            “Some spoiled college girl.  Her daddy will make it up to her.”

            “Henry …”

            “Let’s try the horses.”

            The next day they took the train out to the race track and bet twenty dollars twice, and lost both times.  “So now you’ve made retribution,” said Henry in a merry voice.  They rode back in warm silence, holding hands.

            “Gambling is unreliable,” Henry pronounced that night.  “Picking pockets – that’s the solution.”

            “To what problem?” He glared at her, but she went on.  “Pocket picking takes training by a master, and Fagan’s been hanged.”

            “I’ll learn it on my own.  Remember how I used to play Debussy.  I can be light-fingered.”

            He’d made Debussy sound like Sousa, and he’d known that at the time.  Now

he reformulated the past – a habit of the elderly.  Morality too got reshaped, and ethics.  “Filching money from individuals is dangerous,” she said in a knowledgeable voice.  “Let’s bypass cash.”

            “Bypass?”  It was not a popular word.

            “Cash is useful only to buy merchandise,” she explained.  “Let’s go directly to the merchandise.  Stores.”

            He grinned at her. “What a girl I married.”

            She grinned back, but her heart was wilting.  This crumbling of old values must be a sign of dementia, mustn’t it.  Perhaps his was an encapsulated dementia, confined to mild misbehavior.  Maybe petty crimes would stave off worse senility.   She knew some poor old fellows who tried to fondle waitresses.

            Sometimes she still felt a craving.  Early in the morning, say, when dawn turned their gray walls an intense lilac she liked to think of as whorish.  Her hand would creep across the bedclothes like a blue-veined mouse.  He’d be sleeping on his back, which he wasn’t supposed to do because of the apnea.  Snoring, stopping, snoring, stopping.  She’d shake his shoulder just hard enough to make him turn over – away from her – onto his side.  Usually he didn’t wake up.  That was okay.  He needed what rest he could get.  He slept so poorly, waking frequently, finally waking for good — for bad, really: waking cranky and staying cranky until the lunchtime beer, which turned him cheerful for a little while and occasionally even amorous.  And so, sometimes, in the early afternoon …  But he always needed the pill, and they had to wait an hour, and she was dry no matter how much of that old lady’s gel she slathered on; she might as well just brush her teeth with it.  And at that hour the light pouring into the bedroom showed them plainly to each other.  The grooves on his face were often greasy.  His scalp was pale as an oyster under what hair was left.   Keratoses lay on her chest like pebbles.  Her own hair had never achieved whiteness; sunlight cruelly revealed its similarity to straw.  And if he were to kiss the hollow of her neck, which he had loved to do long ago, entering the silk purse above before the silkier purse below, that’s what he used to say – he’d find the hollow filled with loose, shuddering skin like crème fraîche.  And it took him so long to come, pounding insistently as his younger self would never have done; and it would have taken her even longer, probably forever; but, spent, he rolled away, leaving her chafed and sad.    Long ago, during the decade following their marriage, they’d had to snatch  pleasure between jobs and child care and the sleep they were always short of.  In the several decades afterwards sex was peaceful and considerate.  Even ten years ago they were still warm with each other.  But the best years were long ago, in college — parietal rules still in force, then; immoral behavior still punished by expulsion.  In college their problem was finding a site for immoral behavior.  They had a few favorite places.  The top floor of the University art museum, a storage space for painting and sculpture waiting to be repaired, where they kept company with dark Annunciations and cracked nudes.  The boat house down by the river – they lay under overturned canoes.  In early fall and late spring they visited the ocean, just a bus ride from school, its beach deserted by the end of the afternoon. 

              She liked to recall a particular October day.  The water, too cold for more than a dip, rippled in shades of Wedgewood and slate.  They watched it for a while.  Then he fell asleep.  She grew chilly, and the one beach towel they’d brought lay on his chest.  Carefully she slid it off, pausing to admire the auburn hair that curled there; then she wrapped her own body in the towel.  “Dolly,” he said, opening one morning-glory eye.  “You thief.  That towel is mine.”

            “Not any more,” and she was on her feet and running.  It took him a few groggy minutes to get up and run, too.  They ran across the length of the beach, half-naked boy chasing girl in bikini.  Her long brown hair, thick then, flew behind her: the striped towel waved from her hand.  She was headed towards a wall of low rocks that led from the road to the sea.  He’d catch her when she started scrambling over them.  Wisely she didn’t try to run further.  Instead she turned abruptly and faced him, and he thudded against her as if shot by a cannon.  She dropped the towel.  They stood in a panting embrace.  It wasn’t foreplay, really: it was simple hugging, love throbbing from one heart to the other.  When at last this exchange satisfied both, their thumbs entered each other’s waistbands; in seconds the lovers were lying on the sand beside their apparel.  Who cared if anybody  walked by.

            Soon afterwards they married.  They raised two calm daughters.  They traveled some, bought new books at the bookshop, made charitable donations.  As they aged they went on doing what everybody in their cohort did – paid the condominium fee, shopped for groceries, went to a movie and modest restaurant once a week.  They joined a bird-watching group.  They tended their ailments.  But they’d become too weary for travel, and their tastes in reading had narrowed – thrillers, now, and old novels: all available free at the public library.  They cancelled their subscription to the Symphony; they had an excellent stereo system at home, and the series cost so much.  Tuesdays were free at the museum, so they dropped that membership too.  They dropped the New York Review.  Staying au courant could break their fragile budget.  The pensions, the annuities, the long-term health insurance: all were sufficient; and yet – again like their cohort – they felt pinched.

            “I’ll try it first,” said Dorothy.  “I’m an experienced shopper.”

            At a convenience store Dorothy waited until she was the only customer.  Then she slipped a quart of milk into her reusable shopping bag and pushed the little cart to the cash box behind which stood a melancholy Mexican woman – no, indigenous: she had an Aztec face; she was ready to be plundered.  Dorothy turned her cart around and wheeled it to the refrigerated items and shoved the milk back into its case and removed it again and this time placed it in the cart.  She pushed the cart to the woman and paid for everything that was in it.

            She tried sneaking milk from the Russians, too.  Again her nerve failed.  A stout orange-haired woman stood behind a counter dishing take-out chicken and kasha, and her twin served up last week salads.  The whole place smelled of fish.  Dorothy thought helplessly of the suffering of these people, generation after generation.  At the cash register stood  a younger sister of the other two.  Dorothy took the quart of milk from her shopping bag and laid it on the counter with the rest of her groceries.

            At the 7-11 the cashier looked slightly feeble minded.  There was no way Dorothy would prey on him.

            Each time she told Henry she’d stolen the milk.

            His own effort had been a failure.  At a department store he put two pairs of socks into his jacket pocket and walked out.  But when he got to the subway station the socks were gone.  Somebody had picked his pocket.  Somebody who knew what was in it.  Somebody who had seen him pinch the socks.

            “We’ve got to work as a team,” he said to Dorothy.  “One the distraction, the other the sleight-of-hand artist.”

            She was silent.

            “Do want to run your own operation, Dolly?” he said, and chucked her under the chin.  “Is that what you want?”

            She wanted him, as he once was, but she didn’t say that.

            Department stores became their theatre of operations.  They learned on the job.  Some merchandise could be delicately edged off a counter by Dorothy while Henry and the salesperson discussed the similar items lying there for inspection.  In this way they acquired a pair of suede gloves, an infant jumpsuit, a pen, a small picture frame, a jar of imported chutney.  At the fine jewelry department she charmed a pair of man’s cuff links into the right sleeve of her coat.  Then, reviving the ‘tell me all about yourself’ smile of her middle years, she rested her left elbow on the glass case and invited the jeweler to tell her all about semi-precious stones.  Meanwhile she thrust her right hand into the coat’s pocket and left it there until first one link and then the other dropped from the sleeve into her curled palm.

            What to do with the booty?  Well, they ate the chutney.  The picture frame became a wedding gift.  They gave the infantwear and the pen and the gloves to Good Will.  Poor people would put them to use, not guessing their market value, appreciating only their utility.  Redistribution – that’s what Henry and Dorothy were engaged in, Dorothy told herself.  And although she worried about the immediate future of the duped salespeople she wasted no pity on the big stores themselves, who could swallow their losses.  Her sympathy centered on the agitated Henry.  His spirits soared immediately after a snatch but plummeted a few days later.  “We are not sufficiently exercising our talents,” he grumbled one day. “We should start thinking about banks.”

            “Maybe stagecoaches,” she said lightly.  “What shall we do with these beautiful cufflinks?”

            He shrugged.  “Good Will.”

            “Somebody will spot their value and fence them.  You should wear them, Henry.  To a party.”

            “When were we last at a party?  All we go to is funerals.  When it’s my turn – bury me in them.”

            “Okay,” she sighed.  “Banks, then.”

            He brightened.  “I’ll read up on alarm systems.”

            So off they went off to the library, arm in arm.  And there was the latest Le Carré, with a waiting list six months long, traveling like an ordinary passenger in the returned books cart.  Henry picked it up, also found a book about installing your own alarm system, motioned Dorothy to exit blamelessly through the theft-detecting turnstile.  Then he carried Le Carré to the same stile and handed it across to her — “You forgot this, dear,” — and returned to the desk to check-out the alarm book.  Such darlings, anyone who saw the pair might have thought.

            They read the Le Carré right away – Henry first – and then, early one morning, they slipped it into the library’s return box.  The book about alarms went in too.  “Too complicated,” said Henry.  “We need an expert,” he groaned.

            “We need a vacation,” she offered.

            “Where?” sounding sulky.

            “I mean … time off.”

            “To do what,” sounding exhausted.

            “The other day … I found our old birding glasses.”

            So they joined the birders again, and took some nice walks, and heard some lovely sounds, and made some new friends, and gradually went back to their old ways, thrifty but not stinted, careful but not stingy.  Honorable.

            The remission lasted several months.  Then one day they read of a luxury hotel opening downtown, and within it a number of high-end boutiques.

            ‘Let’s look it over,” said Henry.  “For old time’s sake.”

            “ ‘That old gang of mine,’ ” she sang.  “Can we declare our criminal career a success.”

            “Some of it was cruel.”

            “Cre-wel, also broidered,” employing new tangential, illogical speech she had recently developed.  It had alarmed him at first and now amused him.  “’By the pricking of my thumbs,’” she continued.  Quotations floated through her conversation as if dislodged from the walls of her brain.  She sounded learned until you noticed their irrelevance.  She often forgot where she’d put things.  Once he’d found her pocketbook in the freezer.

            They went downtown on a Thursday afternoon.  They broke their date for a movie-and-early-bird special with the Halperins.  They gave the excuse that they needed to meet with their financial advisor — an imaginary personage.  They got dressed up for the expedition, and Henry wore his favorite vest, a fiery red.  He had acquired it in a busy men’s store simply by taking off his raincoat, putting on the vest, resuming his raincoat, and walking out.  Dorothy’s hair was in a loose bun these days.  She wore a long flowered skirt and snug black jacket, both of which she had purchased some years ago.  She could have passed for a Renoir girl grown old.  She had no idea how eccentric she looked, Henry thought – or how beautiful.

            The large circular hotel lobby was beautiful too, in an austere way, all brown plush and rosewood.  In the smoking room, a nickel rested in an ashtray.  Smoking was not a crime here.  “Come, darling,” said Henry.

            “O my darling, O my darling,” she sang, and put the coin in her pocket.

            A corridor of glassy stores led away from the lobby: window after window of tempting things – leather bags, jade elephants, a pyramid of face creams.  “That substance promises the return of an eighteen-year old complexion,” Dorothy read aloud through the window.  “Complete with blackheads,” he promised.  Antique books, men’s accessories, luggage, timepieces.  A tiny place called Silk.  “There’s a Security Guard,” Henry remarked.  “Oh, look at that chess set.”

            But Dorothy had dropped his arm.  She was lingering at the doorway of Silk: scarves, shawls, handkerchiefs, even gloves, even belts.  She floated in.  “Are your worms kept in humane conditions?” she asked the saleswoman.

            “Madame?”

            “I’d like so much to see the scarf in the window, the one where blues shade into one another – yes, that one,” and the saleswoman cupped the item in her hands as if it were a baby and then laid it on the glass case as if it were a baby’s blanket.  She from her side and Dorothy from hers marveled at the colors of the chiffon.  The woman seemed sincere, but of course she could not feel the power of the blues, the way they called forth Dorothy’s seemly life: the ink of the river at night seen from under a canoe, the ocean’s  mauve at sundown; the blue-green of shore reeds, the silver of spray.  The brightness of Henry’s young eyes and the cloudiness of his aged ones.  Her bridesmaids’ gowns had been robin’s egg blue; here was that shade repeated exactly in this fluid fabric.  Here were the veins on her hands.  Here was the sapphire of the Paris sky at evening.  Here was the blue-purple shadow of one statue’s head on another’s paler back in that storage room at the top of the art museum.  Here was the cobalt ring of the glaucoma probe.  Here was the blue-gray ash that covered the nickel in her pocket. Last was the lilac of her bedroom at dawn.

            “How much?” said Henry from the doorway.

            “Five hundred dollars,” said the saleswoman.

            “Well, well,” he stammered, not knowing what to say next, wondering how much those damned cufflinks would fetch.  But he didn’t have to say anything or to fence anything; Dorothy was in charge.  She walked towards him, throwing the scarf over her shoulder as if to demonstrate its versatility.  On a hunch he turned sideways and she nodded and slid past him and began to walk very fast towards the lobby.

            “What? – Madame! – shit.”  The saleswoman came out from behind the case apparently hoping also to slide by Henry.  But he had turned again within the doorway.    His hands gripped its silvered glass jambs.  His legs were apart on the silvered glass threshold.  “Do not pass,” he intoned.  The saleswoman ran back to the case and pushed a button somewhere behind it and picked up a glass telephone receiver that had lain unseen on its glass cradle.  Henry, having given Dolly time to mingle with the crowd, began to stroll.  Then he saw her loping ahead of him, the scarf bunched over her shoulder; again it was playing the part of a baby.  He exchanged a glance with it, and walked as fast as he could, his pulse objecting.  He could hear Security tramping after him, not too fast – an incident of thievery would be poor public relations.  Dorothy reached the lobby.  Henry had almost caught up with the graceful sprite, her bun loosening, the scarf now floating from her hand.  She wheeled suddenly, and they collided, breast to breast and heart to heart.  Mouth met mouth too.  The scarf fell to the floor.

            Some people in the lobby looked up, as indifferent as aristocrats.  The Silk saleswoman edged past Security, dropped to her knees and crawled to the scarf and pressed it to her heart.  Then she stood up and walked away.  Security remembered something he had to do, and vanished.  Henry and Dorothy unstuck themselves from each other and left the hotel hand in hand and hailed a cab.

            “You should have seen those geezers going at it in my back seat,” said the cab driver later to his partner.  “Something like that, it gives you hope.”