“Former Prep Star Makes Lifesaving Catch” — that was the below-the-fold headline of the News Star two days later. My high school coach called the hospital to tell me good job, nice grab, and not long after that I went viral, became an Internet celebrity.

The video was shot with a camera phone by some morbid bastard. Kevin is falling headfirst to the ground when I enter the frame. I grab hold of his collar and flip him midair. There is contact not unlike a home-plate collision, and I stumble backwards, cradling Kevin to me as I fall. My head bounces hard against the shiny tile, and I go limp as a dead man. Kevin scrambles into Connie’s arms, and I’ve just started vomiting on myself when the video ends.

All told, I spent the better part of two weeks laid up in Glenwood Regional, wracking up medical bills that I’ll never be able to pay. My head turned out to be mostly fine, but grabbing hold of Kevin destroyed my bum shoulder, and believe it or not, I damn near lost the arm. They said I’d get better with rehab, but that it would be a long and painful and expensive road — and so I was already in a dark mood when the mall manager left a message on my cell saying, I’m really sorry, Mr. Spain, but we’ve canceled your lease. We just can’t have this kind of thing happening in Pecanland.

I was still in the hospital when Simon broke Monkey Mountain down and moved it to a storage shed somewhere by the interstate. Connie never called, never came by, and that told me everything I needed to know about us. I was discharged home to my dim apartment, and I spent a week popping Vicodin and watching soap operas before, late one Sunday afternoon, Simon came for me. He’d been trying to get me to start drinking again ever since I quit, but now when he saw the bottle of Old Crow on the coffee table, the empty beer cans clustered here and there, he just shook his head.

“Clean yourself up and get dressed, cousin,” he said. “We’re taking a ride.”

“The hell we are.”

Simon shrugged and sat down next to me on the couch. “I ain’t leaving,” he said.

“That’s up to you.” I looked over at him. “Where is it you wanna go anyways?”

“Connie asked to see you,” he said. “I told her I’d deliver you to her.”

“Since when do you talk to Connie?”

“Since now.” He stood up and killed the television. “We going or not?”

*   *   *

My arm was still in a sling, and so Simon drove me in his rattletrap Volkswagen to the batting cages out in the pinewoods west of town. He waited by the car as I walked out across the dusty parking lot. Connie was sitting by herself on the top row of the aluminum bleachers, and I was climbing to her when she glanced up from her paperback and saw me. I could tell by the look on her face that Simon had conned me. Nothing about her was saying, Joe, wow, I’m so happy to see you, baby.

“Hey there,” she said.

“Hey, Connie.”

She stood and we hugged in a half-assed and awkward sort of way — partly because of my sling, and partly because she obviously wasn’t too keen on touching me. “How are you feeling?” she asked, but her eyes were looking off behind me so I didn’t bother answering. I turned and saw Kevin penned up in one of the batting cages, swinging away.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get going in a second.”

Connie tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “What are you doing here?”

“Simon said you wanted me to meet you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand. He lied and I’m an idiot, that’s all.”

“I could have sworn I saw him this afternoon. I think he might have been following me.”

“Yeah, well, sorry for the hassle. When my shoulder gets a little better I’ll straighten him out.” I made to leave, expecting her to tell me to hold on, but she let me get halfway down the clanging bleachers without calling out, and so I climbed back on up to her. “Really?” I said. “There’s nothing you wanna say to me?”

“Take it easy,” she said. “Are you drunk?”

A few other parents were scattered across the bleachers, watching their children hit under the lights, and a blocky woman I recognized from the ballpark kept peeking back at us. I looked away and saw Kevin swing and miss at a pitch. A couple of boys were standing outside the cage and teasing him, saying he should try a slower machine.

Connie moved over and motioned for me to sit down with her. “Please sit,” she said. “Sit before you fall.”

“God forbid.” I heard the sharp plink-ping of an aluminum bat. Kevin had corrected his swing, and his friends were clapping for him now. The green batting helmet was huge on his head, and he looked like an evil Martian. Finally I sat down.

“He could have died,” whispered Connie.

“But then I saved him,” I told her. “What came before all that was an accident.”

“That’s not really true,” she said. We were both watching Kevin. He hit a line drive back to the pitching machine, and Connie clucked with approval. She couldn’t help herself. Her boy had his timing down.

“That’s really what you think?” I asked. “That I brought this on?”

She locked eyes with me. “Yeah, I guess that I do think that.”

“So that’s it?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s gotta be.”

Connie started to say something more, but then instead she squeezed my knee and began to pick her way down the bleachers to retrieve Kevin from the batting cage. They left together in a hurry, and eventually all of the batting cages had emptied. For a long time I stayed there, alone on the top row, listening as car after car crunched out of the gravel parking lot and onto the blacktop highway. Simon honked his horn let’s go, but I wouldn’t leave. I sat there and I waited, and then finally some invisible hand shut off the lights.

Theo Corrigan had it right — Kevin was indeed stranded on top of my mountain. He’d free-styled his way to the summit, and now, perched like a gargoyle three stories high, he refused to budge. I scanned the crowd that had gathered and spotted Connie at the foot of the tower, urging Kevin to be calm. The onlookers had formed a semicircle around her, like this was some sort of play that Pecanland was staging for them.

I pushed my way through and could see that Connie was trying her hardest not to cry. Her chin was quivering, and I wondered for a second whether this would be our moment at last — if now she would let me pull her close, let me hold her right there in front of Kevin and all those gawkers. I would kiss her on her forehead and tell her that I’d fix this.

But no. When I was almost to her Connie threw her arms up as if halting a hell-bent runner at third. “Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Simon went to fetch a ladder.”

I backed off and Connie hollered up to her boy. “Help is coming,” she said to him. “Okay, Kev?”

Kevin nodded slightly and then called back to her. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “They dared me.”

“I understand,” said Connie. “Just don’t move.” One of those tears she’d been fighting went streaking down her cheek, and she spoke without looking at me. “Where is that goddamn ladder, Joe?”

“It’s coming,” I said. “I promise.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I can’t believe you leave this stupid thing unattended.”

Though it wasn’t really true, I tried to explain that this was all Simon’s fault, that he went to the arcade without unscrewing the lower handholds to childproof the mountain. I told her this but could see that she wasn’t listening. Her attention was focused on Kevin, and so finally I just shut my mouth.

“Will you climb up there and be with him at least?” she asked. “Will you do that for me?”

I put my hand to my ruined shoulder. It would sometimes throb in stressful situations, and it was hurting me badly right then. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but actually I can’t.”

“You mean you can’t even climb your own mountain?” Connie shook her head. “Incredible.”

We were still waiting for Simon to show when Kevin made his move. “I’m coming down,” he said. “I can do this by myself.” Connie yelled at him to keep still, but he lay flat on his belly and began to inch himself off the edge of the tower. His small foot found a rough lip of fiberglass, and then he reached over and grabbed a handhold. He lowered himself further, and for a brief moment it seemed to me like the kid had it, that he’d be safe in no time — and maybe Kevin started thinking the same thing, because just then he looked down. Mistake. His knees betrayed him, bouncing like sewing needles as he struggled to keep firm purchase with slippery fingers and rundown Nikes. Rejecting the mountain, his body collapsed all at once. Connie screamed, and I felt my chest heave as that boy tumbled toward me.

After we had finished up, Connie lagged back to let the coast clear, and I walked alone across the parking lot to Applebee’s, figuring I would sip a Coke and watch the Cubs before heading over to relieve Simon. Lately I’d been hanging out in bars on occasion just to test myself. I hadn’t slipped yet, but there wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t miss the bottle.

As usual, WGN was showing the game, and I sat down on a barstool as the camera panned across the skyline of Chicago, a city that I have never even visited. The bartender brought me my Coke, and we watched the last few innings of the game together. Finally Derrek Lee struck out to end things, and I slapped my hand down hard on the surface of the bar. A soccer-mom regular looked up from her margarita, and the smiling bartender told me to settle on down. “What’d you expect to happen?” he asked. “It’s the Cubs, remember?”

*   *   *

I returned to the mall only to discover Monkey Mountain deserted, a handwritten Back in Five Minutes sign taped to its north face. I cursed and then found Simon where I expected to find him — towering like some freak scarecrow over the pre-teens in the arcade, pounding on the controls of an old wrestling game. I snuck up behind him and whispered in his ear. “Hey,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

I’d tried to make my words hiss, but Simon answered back without ever taking his eyes off the screen. “Had to take a short break, boss.” He grabbed at his crotch. “Needed to drain the snake.”

“What’s that got to do with you playing video games?” I asked.

“Just the one go,” said Simon. “Help me out. I’m getting killed here.”

I peered over his shoulder. Playing as the Undertaker, he was facing a pack of computer wrestlers in a winner-take-all Royal Rumble. I told Simon to hurry up and die, but when he offered me a couple of tokens I couldn’t resist. I took them and then joined his brawl as the wrestler Mankind.

The Undertaker was cornered in the ring, and I directed Mankind into the mass of wrestlers, distracting them just long enough for Simon to locate a folding chair. Rallying, the Undertaker laid waste to them all, turning the tide of the match until just the two of us remained, Mankind and the Undertaker.

“That’s your ass now,” Simon chirped.

I danced at the controls as he chased me around the ring. Cornered, I attempted a scissor kick but was brained with the chair. Mankind lay bloody and twitching on the mat as the Undertaker climbed the turnbuckle to finish me off. He came falling down on top of me, and Simon laughed. “And that,” he announced, “is all she wrote.”

Simon puffed out his sunken chest, and I swatted at the back of his head. Suddenly I couldn’t face the idea of another afternoon staring at a deserted mountain, thirsting for a beer, wondering if this would be the day that Connie finally told me we could stop playing this game of our own and try at being a couple. “Go again?” I asked.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Really.”

We were feeding tokens when Theo Corrigan ran into the arcade. Frog Face doubled over in front of us, exhausted. “Coach,” he gasped, “Kevin Simms is stuck on top of Monkey Mountain.”

Kevin Simms. Connie’s boy. I closed my eyes as Simon draped his arm over my shoulders. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’d better go and find us a ladder.”

At a quarter till two I left Simon in charge of Monkey Mountain and went off to meet Connie. I was cutting through Dillard’s when a flock of cosmetologists sauntered by in white lab coats. “Afternoon, doctors,” I said to them. “See y’all on the golf course.”

I’d been making variations of that dumb joke since setting up shop back in March, but the girls broke into makeup-cracking smiles all the same. “Hey, Joe,” they all sang to me. A tall and feathered brunette pulled at the bill of my Cubs hat. “So when you gonna let us make you over?” she asked.

I grinned and went on my way. Failing business or not, I loved the mall. The attention. Having so many people know my name again, even if most of them were annoying kids. For the first time in a long time I was feeling like I was back on the map — in the lineup, so to speak. Maybe I was just a joke to those pretty girls, the loser with the fake mountain and the have-fun-in-surgery clownings, but at least I wasn’t invisible anymore.

Of course the fact that someone like Connie would notice me was the biggest miracle of all, but I suppose that probably had a lot more to do with my teenage no-hitter than whatever she saw when she looked at me in 2009.

*   *   *

I ducked inside the unlocked Caravan, and Connie told me to hurry on up, slide the door closed before I let all the cool air out. For privacy she had spread an LSU sunscreen across the dashboard and — between that thin piece of cardboard and the tinted windows — the interior of the Dodge reminded me of that movie-theater moment after the houselights dim, the twilight before the film rolls. I blinked until Connie came into focus. She wasn’t wearing anything but her tight yellow tank top, and she had her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. The air condition was blasting, but it was still pretty hot. There was a smell like watermelons cooking.

“Hey there,” said Connie. “Making any money?”

I situated myself next to her on the bench seat. “Millions,” I said.

She kissed at my neck. “Things will turn, baby.”

I nodded and watched an old lady unload shopping bags into an ancient Cadillac parked in the next space over. Spying on that woman reminded me of one of Connie’s stranger pleasures — how she liked to straddle me when we made love, press her hands against the dark windows of the minivan and moan as clueless folks shuffled on by. I peeled off my Meridian Community College T-shirt and then struggled out of my Levi’s. We were kissing like Friday-night teenagers when Connie pushed me away. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but let’s give the AC a few more minutes.”

“All right,” I said. “I guess I can wait.”

Connie arched an eyebrow. “You guess?”

She stretched across me for her purse, removing the small box of Kotex where she hid cigarettes and condoms from her son’s prying eyes. Connie was on the pill, but she always insisted that we be extra careful. She placed a Trojan on my thigh before leaning forward to light herself a menthol, and then she hit some button that cracked open the sunroof above us just a few inches. That tank top was plastered against her back, and her spine ran like a mountain range beneath it. She smoked her thin cigarette while I fumbled with the condom wrapper.

“You told him yet?” I asked.

Connie sighed. “Come on, not now.”

“We’ve been at this for almost two months.”

“It’s complicated,” she said. “Kids are complicated.”

“But we can’t sneak around forever, right?”

Connie tapped the ashes from her cigarette into an empty can of Diet Sprite, then traced her fingers across the thick pink scar that snaked along my shoulder. Smoke ran in a diagonal stream from her hand to the narrow gap in the sunroof. “I need for you to be patient with me,” she said. “Cool?”

“I hear you.”

“I like you a lot,” said Connie. “I really do.”

“I like you too,” I said.

A bead of sweat rolled off the tip of my nose, and I caught it in my hand. Outside the whole world was baking, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether that minivan of hers would ever reach a comfortable 75 degrees.

The mall was busy with shoppers and buy-nothings, but it was still well past noon before I had my first climber. Bad sign. Yet another slow day for me and Monkey Mountain.

It was Theo Corrigan, my redheaded shortstop — strongest bat on the team, but ugly as a mud fence and sort of a kiss-ass. The boy approached, waving a five-dollar bill like it was on fire. “What’s up, Coach?” he squeaked.

“Hey, boy,” I said.

Theo was a regular customer, one of ten or so, most of them players on my ball club. We had our last game of the year a full week back — but maybe I’d said something to them all about climbing being a good way to stay in shape during the off-season. Business is business.

I took Theo’s money and then looked around for Simon, my one and only employee. Monkey Mountain sat at the dead-center crossroads of the Pecanland Mall, and that worthless, dropout cousin of mine had disappeared to somewhere. Finally I gave up on him and helped Theo into a climbing harness. Once he was all set I patted the side of my fiberglass tower. “Well,” I said, “what do you think?”

Theo circled the base of the thirty-foot tower like some kind of expert, and I waited, hands jammed into the pockets of my jeans. Monkey Mountain had three sides — red, yellow, and green — and at last Theo decided on red. I snapped a carabineer onto the front of his harness. “Knock yourself out,” I told him. “Ten minutes.” Theo began to climb and the automatic belay system kept his line tight. The grinning little monster was a puppet on a string.

While Theo climbed, I settled into a lawn chair and fiddled with my satellite radio. After a while the game came in clear as CD music, and I smiled. Chicago versus St. Louis, beamed live to Monroe, Louisiana. I don’t remember exactly when or why I started pulling for the Cubs; it’s just one of those things that is.

Theo hollered, “Watch this!” but I ignored him. I was listening to Alfonso Soriano work the count, gazing at the radio like I might make some difference in the outcome. Another pitch was fouled off when Simon came strutting over in his too-big clothes and his crooked hat. He folded himself into my other lawn chair, and I shook my head at him. “Remind me again what I’m paying you for?” I asked.

Theo was moving up the tower, and I watched Simon raise his skinny arms and begin tracking him with an imaginary shotgun. “Oh yeah,” he said, “you really got your hands full here, cousin.”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

Simon pulled a half-frozen bottle of water from the small ice chest that was resting between us. A drunken fan was on the field at Wrigley, and the announcers were flat disgusted. “Just imagine,” said Ron Santo, “that could be somebody’s father.”

Simon pointed at the radio. “Cubs?”

“Yup.”

He cracked the cap of his bottle and took a long pull. “Losers,” he said.

Soriano singled, and we were betting on whether Lou Piniella would have him try to steal second when I spotted Connie about fifty yards away, looking over at us from a table in the food court. Her son Kevin was standing off behind her, at the end of a long line for the ice cream place. Simon caught me staring at her. “There’s your trouble,” he said.

Connie smiled back at me. She was sitting with her brown legs crossed under a smooth cotton skirt. Her tank top was the color of lemons.

Simon whistled between his teeth. “You’re a lucky dude,” he said. “Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

“Mind your business.”

“Lucky,” said Simon.

Connie flashed two fingers low and I nodded. Two o’clock sounded good to me. Real good. She winked and I smiled even as Soriano took second base. Simon said pay me, and I handed over Theo’s sweaty five. Just then a bell rang from above, and I looked up. Theo had reached the summit, rung my cheap brass bell. “All right,” I hollered, “but time for you to come on down now.”

*   *   *

Three weeks after my twenty-fourth birthday, five years out of community college and in a hell of a tailspin, I’d somehow convinced a loan agent that a climbing tower in the Pecanland Mall would swing a profit. Eventually I would be proven wrong on that point — very wrong — but none of that was on the horizon that day five months ago when, clean and sober for the first time in a long time, I encountered my synthetic mountain spread out across the floor of a bankrupt climbing gym in Denver. On that crisp morning, as I loaded ten-foot sections of tower onto a borrowed gooseneck trailer, I finally convinced myself that it was possible for me to turn my life around. The next day, driving back to North Louisiana in my battered F-150, I raced freight trains across the high plains, watched in real time as a tired trucker jackknifed his Peterbilt. In the midnight parking lot of an Amarillo motel, I fought three drunken cowboys who were trying to climb the ass-end of my mountain. I was beaten badly,  of course, but this, all of this, made me feel very much alive. A week later I cut my shaggy hair and — though I don’t like being around kids all that much — I got back into baseball, my first true love. I started coaching Dixie Youth 9 & 10, and it was at Biedenharn Park that I ran into Connie Hawkins. Her team ten-run ruled my Cubs, and she sought me out in the dugout afterwards to ask if I was the same Joe Spain who used to pitch for West Monroe. “I was a senior when you threw that no-hitter,” she said. “You were a hell of a player.”

I’d been a freshman back then, and in fact a man once told me that I was the youngest player to ever throw a no-hitter in a Louisiana 5A baseball game. That was a long, long time ago, but I remembered Connie Hawkins all right. She was the girl with the Sebring convertible, the tan skin and the gold hair. The one standing on the fifty-yard line during halftime of the homecoming game, a bouquet of roses cradled in her arms.

“I think I remember you,” I said to her. “You dated Brad Simms, maybe?” Watermelons. I couldn’t believe that she still smelled like watermelons. I used to follow her in the hallway, sniffing, hoping to God that big Brad wouldn’t come upon me trailing after his girl.

“I married Brad Simms,” she said.

“Yeah?”

She smiled and then patted her flat stomach. “Didn’t have much of a choice.” She wasn’t wearing a wedding band and must have seen me searching. “Didn’t stick,” she added. “The marriage, I mean.”

Over by third base a lanky boy was throwing his glove high into the air and then catching it. Connie pointed at him. “That’s Kevin,” she said. “Our son.”

In the name of sportsmanship and no hard feelings both of our teams were headed to Johnny’s Pizza, and in a corner booth Connie and I shared a pitcher of root beer and talked baseball. She knew about my scholarship to the Mississippi JuCo, but not about my injury. I showed her the scar on my right shoulder and she said, Oh, you poor thing. I was letting my foot brush up against hers when her shy son Kevin told her that he was tired and ready to go home now.

In May our teams played again with the same result. The game was called at the end of the fourth inning, and as the kids shook hands Connie met me on the pitcher’s mound. She punched me in my good shoulder. “Man,” she said, “how can such a great ballplayer be such a bad coach?”

I shrugged and Connie smirked. It was an evening game, and so this time around the players would all be going home. Kevin asked Connie if he could spend the night over at friend’s, and she said, Sure Kev, you bet, without ever taking her eyes off me. The boy kissed his mama and then left us standing there alone. Connie leaned in closer to me. “You know,” she said, “I’ve got this DVD I’ve been meaning to watch. Maybe you wanna come over and watch it with me?”

She drove east in her minivan, and of course I followed close behind.

In its review of “The Southern Cross” — which won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference’s Bakeless Prize –  The Rumpus noted that: “With perceptiveness and deep intelligence, Horack inhabits a stunning range of characters young and old, male and female, black and white, and shows them entwined with each other, and inseparable from where they live. ‘The Southern Cross’ marks the arrival of an important new writer — not only a Southern writer, but an American one.”

Library Journal called “The Eden Hunter” “a visceral and authentic account of a distinctive character and his quest for freedom. For some readers, this work may bring to mind Charles Frazier’s ‘Cold Mountain’ or Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’ ”

His work has appeared in Oxford American, Epoch, The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine and many other publications.

A native of Louisiana, Horack is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

Visit him online at www.skiphorack.com.

“Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.”
–Richard Hugo

The sensation Tia experiences after crossing all those time zones, taking all those desultory naps, eating all those meals punctuated by all those unsweetened desserts, wiping her hands with all those hot washcloths offered to her from a basket, is less like jet lag than like a fever.

Is it possible to make herself attractive after fourteen hours on an airplane? No. But of course, before landing, she stuffs herself into the tiny bathroom, sniffs inside her hooded sweatshirt, spritzes herself with too much perfume, wets the top of her hair as if to make her ponytail sleek. Of course she swipes gloss on her lips and tries not to see her under-eye shadows. She stares in the mirror. She looks like death. She splashes water on her sallow face.

All week, she told everyone that she’d won a trip. The lie made no sense — Tia doesn’t win things. And besides, in this economy, who’s giving away plane tickets?

“A raffle,” she told her boss, who was also Charlie’s boss, which meant she had to be careful. She had considered saying “charity auction,” but with that one word, raffle, she painted herself passive; she was simply consenting to fate.

“A fucking raffle?” Charlie said over the phone.

“I’ll only be gone a week.”

“I don’t get it. Where will you stay? What if–”

“Some hotel. With the other raffle winners. I mean, I’ll have my own room.”

“But what if–”

“I’ll buy a calling card. You’ll never know I left.”

*   *   *

Two weeks ago, around the time she stopped wearing her engagement ring, Tia met Dominick at a birthday party on an enclosed terrace (working for a nonprofit means occasional pity invites), where everyone was fancy and no one knew whose birthday it was. By comparison, Dominick, with his spacious smile and loosened tie, seemed as carefree as a canoe. But the next night, on their first date, he kept checking his Blackberry.

Tia’s own cell phone (not a Blackberry) was stuffed deep inside her purse. Charlie had been calling frequently with updates: “We have the hospice bed set up in the kitchen. I’ve been lying with him in it. He doesn’t know it’s me.” And, “It’s snowing. I forgot how much it snows here.” And, “These nurses are celestial beings.”

When Tia imagined the hospice nurses, she saw Amish women. She wasn’t sure why she’d conjured the image, but she liked the sense of peace it brought her: translucent bonnets; long, dark dresses with puffed-up sleeves; Charlie lifting a synthetic skirt to run a hand up a pale, supple thigh, while snow fell past the picture window onto the frozen lake.

Dominick tucked his Blackberry into his breast pocket and looked at Tia hard. “Do you know what I do?” he asked.

Tia did know. He was an international bank’s Asian project manager. Although he was from New Jersey, he worked in Tokyo – but he was “doing business” in New York all week. Though she wasn’t sure what any of this entailed, Tia recognized money when she saw it. After all, that was her job: All day, she wrote letters, made phone calls, stuffed gift baskets, in hopes of procuring money from people with too much money.

“You told me,” Tia said.

Dominick chuckled, set his martini on his cocktail napkin, and leaned across the lacquered table. He had gray eyes that made no promises; neat hair; a wide, masculine face. His body was large, the kind that would gladly relax into obesity if he missed a few weeks at the gym. The night before, Tia hadn’t found him particularly appealing until he’d mentioned that he’d gone to Yale. “Do you know what I do?” he asked again. “I make things happen.”

When Tia laughed, she meant no harm. She thought he was joking. In fact, her laughter was forced because she didn’t find the joke funny. She stopped abruptly when she saw him flinch.

A tall waitress approached their table, carrying a wooden cruise ship. “Your sushi,” she whooshed, docking the ship between them. She made it sound sexual. Her lips were bright red and blindingly glossy.

“I didn’t mean to laugh at you,” Tia told Dominick.

“But you should,” he said, smiling, his earlobes turning pink. “I didn’t grow up with sisters, you know.” He smoothed his napkin over his lap. “Laugh at me! Please! Sometimes I forget myself. Sometimes I’m such an asshole.”

Part Two

Dominick’s hotel was shiny like a rocket ship. The television in the elevator showed a silent movie. His room was at least three times the size of Tia’s and Charlie’s studio apartment.

“My humble abode,” he said. Of course he said that. He yanked a metal chain and the blinds zipped aside to reveal glittery Midtown — the confident angles of skyscrapers, the red checkmark of approval on the Verizon building.

Tia heard her cell phone ringing in her purse. She took the call in the bathroom.

Charlie wanted to tell her about helping his father brush his teeth. “He was brushing in slow motion. So I had him sit on the toilet lid and then I took his elbow and moved it up and down. I thought I could remind him.”

Tia looked in the mirror. The long waves of her hair were tousled and blithe. Her eyeliner was smudged, but her eyes looked lit up. She thought of Dominick and practiced a sexy smile.

“But when I let go,” Charlie said, “he just stopped and held the toothbrush there. His body is shutting down… It really goes to show the truth about life. You’ve got no one but yourself.”

“I don’t?”

“Before someone taught him how to brush his teeth, he didn’t know how. And now at the end of his life, he’s back where he started. It’s all an illusion — people teaching us things, people giving us things. He just…” Charlie was crying.

Tia turned from the mirror. She sat on the cold floor and closed her eyes. She’d heard Charlie cry so many times in the past year, his tears now fell on the invisible tarp that had grown around her body. Sometimes when he cried (especially when he waxed poetic with hackneyed poetry), laughter welled up within her, threatening to spill out if she so much as drew a breath.

It was only when she was alone, when she was not bearing the weight of Charlie’s arms around her neck, that she would think of his father, or else she would think of her own father — a shy man who always looked past Tia’s head for her mother — or else she’d think of the fat woman at work who flirted with the boss, or of those depressing New Year’s Eve noisemakers that unfurled, then curled back into themselves. It was when she was alone and thinking that she felt an impossible sadness.

When Tia returned to Dominick, she perched primly on the arm of the loveseat. “I can’t sleep with you.”

Dominick tugged at the knot of his tie, then eased it off his neck. He extracted his collar stays and tossed them on a table. “Of course you can.”

“I just met you.”

“So?”

“I haven’t shaved my legs.”

“I’ll call the front desk and have them send up a razor.” He came to stand beside her, unwrapping the chocolate that had been left on the pillow. “I know you think I’m some kind of troglodyte–”

“Some kind of…?”

“Douchebag Wall Street guy.”

“Oh! No, I–”

“But I like au naturel girls. Chicks who go camping. Who masturbate without a vibrator.”

Tia giggled. Then she bit her lip. She couldn’t get a read on Dominick. She briefly touched her forehead to his sleeve. He smelled like clean, wished-upon coins from a fountain.

He popped the chocolate into his mouth. “God, that’s good.”

“I’m not really au naturel.”

“You strike me as a bit of a hippie chick.”

Tia shrugged. “I’m just broke.” She shook her head. “I can’t sleep with you,” she said again, remembering that past summer in Michigan, when Charlie’s father, batting away a clattering cough, had taught her how to fish. Of course, she said nothing to Dominick about reeling up her first perch, watching it squirm and flop on the hook. Or about how later that night, she had sobbed so hard, Charlie had taken her outside, found the bucket of fish they’d caught, and released them into the lake. The story wouldn’t have made sense anyway, after all the sushi she’d eaten. “I just … can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, Dominick.” But then she slept with him anyway.

Part Three

Even though Tia more or less moved into Dominick’s hotel room, ate room service for breakfast, let him take her salsa dancing; even though she didn’t know how to salsa dance, yet believed she was doing it correctly, simply because Dominick beamed down at her as he twirled her across the polished wood; even though she abandoned Brooklyn; abandoned the apartment that housed Charlie’s jazz record collection, and his family pictures, and his books about the afterlife; she dreamt each night of his father.

What did she dream? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he materialized — standing at the wheel of his motor boat, laughing through the white of his beard — and that Tia woke in a room where she knew no one, and it was dark, or else the sun was on the window, and she touched the man beside her, and he was soothingly warm with life.

*   *   *

On the seventh day, he would vanish. The night before, they held hands in bed, half-watching The Godfather.

“I know I’m supposed to love this movie,” Tia said.

“Everyone loves this movie.”

“Except me.”

“Yes! This is why I like you.” Dominick squeezed her hand. They were drinking champagne. A half-filled crystal flute rested on each nightstand. Dominick lifted his and studied it, then took a swig. “Gotta love the bubbly.”

“It’s all sugar.”

“I love sugar!”

“He dies in that garden,” Tia said.

“Everyone dies.”

Tia opened her mouth and then closed it. She had almost quoted from Reach for Life, the book Charlie’s father (and then Charlie’s mother, and then Charlie, and then Tia) had read just after the diagnosis — a book that discouraged clichés about the certainty of death.

Fight it. If someone tells you that you’re going to die, you tell your body no.

It wasn’t that Tia believed in the Reach for Life philosophy — she’d never believed wholeheartedly in any philosophy — but she was human. And American. She believed things when they served her.

“Japan has the world’s highest life expectancy,” Dominick said. “Land of the rising sun.”

“So where does it set?”

“Where does what set?”

“Well… which country has the lowest life expectancy?”

Dominick tugged her ponytail. “You’re too young to be so morose.”

Tia rested her head on Dominick’s shoulder.

Dominick set his glass down. “I should tell you something, Tia.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve never been in love.”

“You’re thirty-seven years old.”

“Well.”

“Soon you’ll be forty.”

“I just thought you should know. Anyway, if I ever do fall in love, I’m sure it won’t happen in Japan. I’m not into Asian chicks. You know those guys who are into Asian chicks?”

“I thought that was all guys.”

“But there’s a type of guy that only likes Asian chicks.”

“Oh.”

“See?” Dominick said. “You and I are birds of a feather. I’m not into Asian chicks. You’re not into The Godfather.” He scooted closer to Tia and kissed the top of her head. “Come back to Tokyo with me.”

Tia laughed. “Your flight leaves in nine hours.”

“You’ll meet me next weekend. I’ll buy your ticket right now.”

“I can’t just–”

“Don’t say no. I’ll pay for everything! I’ll take time off. We’ll travel around. I’ll take you to the sea.”

Tia thought of her job before she thought of Charlie. Of course, it was all braided together — the nonprofit, Charlie, the people they knew. Every morning, they rode the L train in, and then walked together to the office where they’d met when they were three years younger. So of course, she wouldn’t have been able to tell their boss the easiest lie — that Charlie needed her, that she was taking time off to go to Michigan.

“Don’t you have vacation days?”

Tia nodded. She’d been saving them in anticipation of the funeral. And also because she’d never been able to afford a worthwhile vacation. She thought again of commuting with Charlie, of how they read books now instead of talking, of how, inside the not talking, she felt that she understood death. She remembered hearing Charlie’s father’s prognosis, and then locking herself in the bathroom to cry — not because the cancer was terminal, but because she’d been planning to leave.

Dominick finished his champagne. “Live a little, woman!”

Tia brought his fingers to her lips. She wanted to see Japanese cherry blossoms, blooming and blushing. She remembered Charlie’s father on the boat last summer, saying, “Maybe a fellow could get used to death.” At the time, he still believed in Reach for Life, still joked about death as if it didn’t concern him, still thought doctors were just pessimists with stethoscopes. “I’m a creature of habit, and death is the ultimate routine.” Then he’d stage-whispered to Tia so Charlie’s mother could hear, “Maybe it’s a little like marriage.”

Part Four

In Tokyo, Dominick’s apartment building has art in the lobby — abstract oil paintings in shades of blue, expensive-looking porcelain vases, a shelf of antique books in a range of languages. There are doormen. There is a talking elevator that speaks Japanese and English. There are Europeans everywhere.

“Welcome to the youth hostel,” Dominick says when he meets Tia in his hallway. “Show me a country that’s not represented in this building.” He hugs her. He’s wearing a cable-knit sweater she hasn’t seen and stretched-out socks with no shoes. “Except Japan. No one here is Japanese, unless you count the workers.”

“You don’t count the workers?” Tia winces as soon as the words leave her mouth.

“Do you feel like you’re dreaming?” Dominick asks, pulling away from her, taking her suitcase, wheeling it into the apartment. “Transcontinental jet lag makes me feel like I’m dreaming.”

“Yes,” Tia says, trailing behind him. “It is sort of like dreaming.”

“The driver found you? Let me guess. He spoke zero English.”

“Zero.”

“Yup. That’s Japan. Well. At least he got you here.”

“He did,” Tia says. She is overcome by the sense that she will never say anything interesting ever again.

Dominick’s apartment is an immaculate and large two-bedroom with a full-sized living room, a kitchen, hardwood floors, and a toilet from the future. “Check out my view,” he says, holding out his arm to the large window in his bedroom.

Tia looks. Across the street, a Starbucks winks. It is early evening. The weather is gray. “Is it going to rain?”

“Not necessarily.” He grins and pushes his fingers through his hair. “Have a little faith.”

Tia takes his hand. “You’re so glass-half-full,” she says. It comes out sounding judgmental, though she meant to be flirtatious.

Dominick squints at the window, then pulls his hand away to draw his sleeves up to his elbows. “We’re alive,” he says to the ghosts of their reflections. “What could be better than that?”

*   *   *

They have dinner at a restaurant that Dominick declares authentic. It is clean and wooden and spare. On the walls hang intricate silk scrolls depicting birds on bamboo branches and fish struggling against heavy currents. They remove their shoes and sit at a low table on gold and red cushions. The menu is written in Japanese. A waitress wearing a kimono and slippers brings them each a cup of sake that has overflowed into a saucer. Tia lifts her cup and drinks half of it.

“Careful, cowgirl,” Dominick says. “Jetlag’s like a roofie.”

Tia agrees, if by “roofie” he means “influence responsible for shitty manners.” While Dominick orders in Japanese, Tia kills the second half of her sake and then slurps the pool of it from the saucer.

Dominick looks at her as if she’s licking ketchup from a plate. “I think those are dirty,” he says. “I don’t think those saucers get washed.”

Tia shrugs. “Lots of things are dirty,” she says, even though she hates when people make that argument, hates when people cry, “Five-second rule!” before diving to the floor for a fallen muffin. “The subway is dirty,” she tells Dominick. “And public bathrooms. Money. You can’t live your life worrying about germs. Life is short.”

Did she really say that? Did she really tell Dominick that life is short, as if she invented the maxim herself?

Dominick checks his watch. It is thick and silver and virile. Tia wishes they could go back to his apartment right now and have sex. It’s not that she feels aroused; rather, she wishes to distract him from her inexplicable loss of social graces. She reaches across the table to hold his hand — or, more accurately, to cover his fist with her palm — and smiles at the waitress when she shuffles over with more sake, and again when she appears with small crackle-glazed plates of unfamiliar food — slimy, brown pieces of something arranged like a pinwheel; transparent slices of fish; a cube of meat floating in a bowl of dark liquid.

Tia decides not to ask what anything is. She will be an adventurous traveler. That’s the way to live! She starts in on her third cup of sake, drunk and fuzzily aware of Dominick retreating from her. “Looks delicious,” she says, gesturing at the food with her chopsticks. She was hoping to sound cheery, but her voice is too loud, and her words run together like watercolor. She lifts a cube of beef with her chopsticks and promptly drops it on her lap. In Japan, Tia realizes, there are no napkins — just hot towels before each meal. In Japan, people aren’t messy. People are perfect. People are trained from childhood never to spill, never to drop things, never to look where they shouldn’t be looking.

“So,” Dominick says, clearing his throat. He touches the points of his chopsticks to his plate, making them line up before dipping them into a bowl and extracting a chunk of meat. “I know I told you I’d be able to take time off…” He transfers the meat smoothly from his chopsticks to his mouth. “But it’s actually impossible.” He concentrates on chewing for a minute, and nods thoughtfully, as if this is what’s important — chewing. When he swallows, he says, “This weekend hopefully. But tomorrow … the next few days … I’ll give you a map and a guidebook. I’ve got some great guidebooks. And you can check out Tokyo.”

Tia swallows something. She can’t remember what she put in her mouth, but she didn’t chew it enough and it lodges in her throat like a sob. She drinks her sake as if it’s water and stares at Dominick’s shoulders. How broad they are. How perfect his haircut is, as if he took classes at Yale on how to put his manliest foot forward. “By myself?” Tia’s voice wobbles around the food obstruction.

“Sure,” Dominick says. “Why not? You’re an independent woman!” He smiles at his chopsticks when he says it, and then sets them down and uses his fingers to draw back one side of his mouth and pick something out of his strapping, square teeth.

“So I’ll just…?”

“The trains here are like the subway. Look, a city’s a city. It’ll be easy.”

Tia hiccups. She is suddenly so tired, she feels sheathed in plaster. She tries to calculate what time it is in Michigan, but she can’t manage the math.

“And then I’ll come home every night and we’ll go out for great dinners.”

“Oh,” Tia says, finishing another cup of sake, looking longingly at the full saucer.

What are they talking about? She’s having trouble keeping track. Why are they eating dinner and discussing future dinners? What is she doing here, in this strange country with this strange man, who has never loved anyone; who moved to Asia, mid-thirties and single, to repudiate a whole continent of women?

*   *   *

The sex that night is like sex from a manual. It wears hospital scrubs. It carries a no-nonsense briefcase. Tia imagines them on a workbench, in a garage filled with practical tools. When they’re through, she is sober and irrationally awake.

“What’s wrong?” she asks in the darkness. She feels responsible for the mediocrity, as if she brought it here from her apartment. After all, she supplied the condoms, flew them across the world in her suitcase. (“The condoms in Japan are dollhouse condoms,” Dominick told her in an email a few days ago.)

“What’s wrong?” she asks again after a stretch of silence.

“I don’t know.” He’s tying a great American condom into a knot, looking like a sad balloon-animal-maker. “Nothing.”

“Are you annoyed that I got too drunk at the authentic Japanese restaurant?”

Dominick coughs. “Of course not,” he says. “I have to sleep. I have to get up so early.”

“Do you wish I didn’t come here?”

“I don’t wish that, Tia.” He pats her arm, then rolls across the sea of his king-sized bed.

Tia waits. Maybe he’s bluffing. But no. His breathing evens out and deepens. And then there is nothing for her to do but listen to the rhythm of it.

The jetlag feels like retribution — fingers holding her eyelids open while someone flicks her eyeballs. Tia lies there for hours on her back until the blackest part of night is drained of its pigment. She wonders if it’s reasonable to feel homesick on an all-expenses-paid vacation to Japan. She wonders if she should call the American Embassy while Dominick is at work, if she should find her way back to the airport and make him come home at the end of the day to an empty apartment. She pictures him finding the hangers in his closet, bare and swinging. She wishes she’d hung her clothes on his hangers.

Part Five

The Starbucks across the street is the cleanest coffee shop Tia has ever seen. At the counter, she points to a sweet pastry behind the glass — a small croissant glazed with what appears to be honey. She is groggy and can’t stop yawning. She doesn’t remember growing tired enough to sleep, but when she woke abruptly, the day was glaring and sunny, and she was alone in Dominick’s bed.

She finds a table and opens her guidebook.

She imagines telling this story at a cocktail party some day. “I met this guy. He flew me to Japan and lost interest in me the second I got there.” She imagines herself tittering quietly and sipping her cosmopolitan. She imagines herself as a person who titters, who orders cosmopolitans, who goes to cocktail parties with guests who are dying to hear her stories. She imagines herself as a person who doesn’t have to keep her best stories secret. She takes a bite of her pastry. It is only semi-sweet. She pushes it away, suddenly ashamed to be in a chain coffee shop that boasts eleven thousand stores in America. The important thing today, she reminds herself, is to enjoy her travels, to really milk this tremendous life experience, to quote the lucky kids she knew in college — the ones who strapped backpacks to their well cared-for bodies, who talked about how cheap the Eurorail was, who were programmed to warn, “If you don’t do it when you’re young…” as if they knew what it would be like to be anything but young.

*   *   *

In a sense, Dominick was right: A city is a city. The trains, with the help of the guidebook, are manageable. The flow of foot traffic is clipped and deliberate. The impatience is palpable. But there is a darkness to things, a shadow at a picnic. The women wear miniskirts with leg warmers pulled just over their knees, suggestive despite the blank easels of their eyes.

In Shibuya, which the guidebook deems “a fashion center,” Tia wanders into a bustling bakery where the cashiers work in red aprons with matching scarves tied over their hair. The customers hold trays and tongs, plucking pastries from great pastry piles. Tia breathes in and her mouth waters. She buys a pastry covered in powdered sugar and steps back into the street. Above her, a large digital clock flashes the local time in orange.

In Michigan, it is midnight. Charlie sleeps beside his father, hemmed in by metal rails. Or else he sleeps in his childhood bed, a Hospice nurse in the crook of his arm. They wake simultaneously and reach for each other, their skin the exact same temperature. Charlie kisses her collarbone. Her hair is caught up in a wispy bun. Her bonnet rests on the windowsill, tissue-papery in the glow of a moon.

Tia stands at the busiest intersection in the world. Just wait, the guidebook tells her. When the light turns, the people will fill the street. You will never see such a filling-up. Tia sucks in her breath, thinking of the tramplings at those religious pilgrimages as streams of poor people race toward God. For a moment, she longs to get trampled, flattened like a gingerbread man. A wind comes and blows her hair back. She lifts her face to it, waiting.

When the light turns, some people cross from each of the four corners. There are not that many people, really. Tia has seen more. In Times Square in the summer. On St. Mark’s Place on a Friday night. It is a watered-down crossing. A mini Mardi Gras. She looks up and sees a Starbucks. She unwraps her pastry and bites into it. The sugar, it turns out, is not really sugar, and her teeth close over a prune pit.

*   *   *

It’s late when she gets back to Dominick’s place. He is standing in the center of the living room, modeling a dark suit for a Japanese man with gray hair. “Hey! Thought you flew home or something!” he says to Tia. He grins as if it’s a stage direction.

The man says something in Japanese and Dominick lifts his arms and stands crucifixed in place.

“Nope. Still here,” Tia says, sinking onto the couch, which looked comfortable, but turns out to be as angular and hard as a coffin. She doesn’t want to tell Dominick the truth—that she got lost in the dumbest possible way, realizing a few hours after leaving the apartment that she never wrote down his address. To make matters worse, she quickly realized that Tokyo has no street signs. She stood on sidewalks and could have been anywhere. After a long afternoon and evening of playing frenzied language-barrier charades with pedestrians and cab drivers, she found her way back by magic.

The man feels the material under Dominick’s armpits, and then runs his palms over Dominick’s outstretched arms, shoulders to wrists. Dominick turns around and the man grabs the sides of the jacket and yanks down, chattering in Japanese, pointing to places on Dominick’s hips.

Tia feels a strong yearning to be the person trying on clothes, the person being touched. She would even like to be searched with a metal detector wand at airport security, or to get a lice check in the nurse’s office at her old elementary school. She wants to close her eyes and rest her weight on a person.

Dominick finally faces her. “So what’s the verdict?”

For a second, Tia doesn’t know what he means. She is suddenly quite sure that Charlie’s father is dead. She thinks of his white beard, of how thin his legs looked last summer as he stood at the helm. She remembers what he said the last time she saw him: “I like what you do for my son.”

“Well?” Dominick turns up his palms. In the dim light, his irises, which are normally gray, look as black as his pupils.

The tailor stands beside him. They are smiling at Tia, waiting. She leans forward and rests her elbows on her knees, as if to get a better look. She is so exhausted, the suit makes no impression on her. He could get married in it, or buried in it. He could go hang-gliding in it. He could mud-wrestle. Tia can’t imagine what it would feel like to have an opinion on a suit, but she parts her lips and inhales, like a person with the answer.

“Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.”
–Richard Hugo

The sensation Tia experiences after crossing all those time zones, taking all those desultory naps, eating all those meals punctuated by all those unsweetened desserts, wiping her hands with all those hot washcloths offered to her from a basket, is less like jet lag than like a fever.

Is it possible to make herself attractive after fourteen hours on an airplane? No. But of course, before landing, she stuffs herself into the tiny bathroom, sniffs inside her hooded sweatshirt, spritzes herself with too much perfume, wets the top of her hair as if to make her ponytail sleek. Of course she swipes gloss on her lips and tries not to see her under-eye shadows. She stares in the mirror. She looks like death. She splashes water on her sallow face.

All week, she told everyone that she’d won a trip. The lie made no sense — Tia doesn’t win things. And besides, in this economy, who’s giving away plane tickets?

“A raffle,” she told her boss, who was also Charlie’s boss, which meant she had to be careful. She had considered saying “charity auction,” but with that one word, raffle, she painted herself passive; she was simply consenting to fate.

“A fucking raffle?” Charlie said over the phone.

“I’ll only be gone a week.”

“I don’t get it. Where will you stay? What if–”

“Some hotel. With the other raffle winners. I mean, I’ll have my own room.”

“But what if–”

“I’ll buy a calling card. You’ll never know I left.”

*   *   *

Two weeks ago, around the time she stopped wearing her engagement ring, Tia met Dominick at a birthday party on an enclosed terrace (working for a nonprofit means occasional pity invites), where everyone was fancy and no one knew whose birthday it was. By comparison, Dominick, with his spacious smile and loosened tie, seemed as carefree as a canoe. But the next night, on their first date, he kept checking his Blackberry.

Tia’s own cell phone (not a Blackberry) was stuffed deep inside her purse. Charlie had been calling frequently with updates: “We have the hospice bed set up in the kitchen. I’ve been lying with him in it. He doesn’t know it’s me.” And, “It’s snowing. I forgot how much it snows here.” And, “These nurses are celestial beings.”

When Tia imagined the hospice nurses, she saw Amish women. She wasn’t sure why she’d conjured the image, but she liked the sense of peace it brought her: translucent bonnets; long, dark dresses with puffed-up sleeves; Charlie lifting a synthetic skirt to run a hand up a pale, supple thigh, while snow fell past the picture window onto the frozen lake.

Dominick tucked his Blackberry into his breast pocket and looked at Tia hard. “Do you know what I do?” he asked.

Tia did know. He was an international bank’s Asian project manager. Although he was from New Jersey, he worked in Tokyo – but he was “doing business” in New York all week. Though she wasn’t sure what any of this entailed, Tia recognized money when she saw it. After all, that was her job: All day, she wrote letters, made phone calls, stuffed gift baskets, in hopes of procuring money from people with too much money.

“You told me,” Tia said.

Dominick chuckled, set his martini on his cocktail napkin, and leaned across the lacquered table. He had gray eyes that made no promises; neat hair; a wide, masculine face. His body was large, the kind that would gladly relax into obesity if he missed a few weeks at the gym. The night before, Tia hadn’t found him particularly appealing until he’d mentioned that he’d gone to Yale. “Do you know what I do?” he asked again. “I make things happen.”

When Tia laughed, she meant no harm. She thought he was joking. In fact, her laughter was forced because she didn’t find the joke funny. She stopped abruptly when she saw him flinch.

A tall waitress approached their table, carrying a wooden cruise ship. “Your sushi,” she whooshed, docking the ship between them. She made it sound sexual. Her lips were bright red and blindingly glossy.

“I didn’t mean to laugh at you,” Tia told Dominick.

“But you should,” he said, smiling, his earlobes turning pink. “I didn’t grow up with sisters, you know.” He smoothed his napkin over his lap. “Laugh at me! Please! Sometimes I forget myself. Sometimes I’m such an asshole.”

“Reading ‘Who By Fire’ is a little bit like getting run over by Mack truck while eating a really great doughnut,” said the Palm Beach Post. “One minute, you’re devouring it greedily and the next, you’re being plowed into by some of the best writing you’ve read this year.” Added the Boston Globe: “Spechler is a talented writer who transcends melodrama and cliché with striking sensitivity and a delicate touch.”

Diana has written for The New York Times, Esquire,  Nerve, Glimmer Train, Moment, Lilith and many other publications. 

She lives in New York City.

Visit her online at www.dianaspechler.com.

Henry was going to Ireland to present a paper at the International Ocean Research Conference. Nicole was going because Henry invited her to come along. At seven months old, William, their son, was big enough to be left with his Mamó, and Rosemary, Henry’s mother, said it was good for young parents to get away alone, and that they shouldn’t worry one bit about Rosemary’s sore back. She was not one of those grandmothers who bought toys but could never pitch in. That child was twenty-five pounds if he was an ounce, but she’d take an aspirin and call her friend Rowena who lived over on Reed and they’d watch William together until Henry and Nicole returned. Of course, Rosemary didn’t like to feel beholden to Rowena, but that was her own business and nothing Henry or Nicole should worry about in the least. The important thing was that they should go, together, six days in Galway, and have peace of mind knowing it was no trouble whatsoever.

They booked an overnight flight departing on December 25, the cheapest fare they could find, and figured William’s Christmas would be over anyway since he went to bed at seven sharp. They packed light, just enough to tramp the coastline and pick through the bundled heaps of knotted wrack that were Henry’s specialty. Galway wasn’t like it had been when they were kids, Henry promised, knowing Nicole had also experienced the shock and dismay of Irish pizza in the 1980s. There’s food there now. Good restaurants. They squeezed into a seat at the very back of the traincar and held their bags on their laps.

“You remembered your rain jacket?” Henry asked. “The one with the pulley on the hood?”

Nicole nodded, patted the bag on her lap. “You remembered the spare battery for your laptop?”  Henry double-checked.  Yes.

The trip to the airport was the first time they’d been alone together, without the baby, in weeks. There were nights when William went to sleep early and Nicole and Henry could eat or read or watch television in peace, but this was the first time they didn’t have to worry about dropping a fork, pots clinking in the sink, Nicole having to bend over the rail of the crib to rub his back until he closed his eyes again. They’d gotten a sitter a few times so that they could go out and look each other in the eye, as Nicole put it, but the dinners always felt rushed, unsatisfying. Nicole was exhausted from nursing and William’s daily six o’clock wake-up call, and she couldn’t stop herself from worrying that he’d wake up and protest at a stranger’s face looming above him. She also worried about the money they were paying this stranger to watch him, and about paying twenty-five dollars for a bottle of wine they could drink at home for twelve.  And, most worrisome of all, she and Henry didn’t seem to have anything to say to each other.  “Movie?” Henry had suggested that last time, as they hustled into the hall and down the stairs of their apartment building before William realized they were gone.

“I don’t know,” Nicole said. “Sort of weird to shell out fourteen dollars an hour so we can go sit in the dark and not talk to each other. You know?”

“Wow,” Henry said. “Makes sense, I guess.”

An hour later, at dinner, he’d joked that he was ready to hear all the interesting subjects she’d lined up, since she wanted to talk so much, and get her worth out of every dollar. Nicole had showered and blown out her long, auburn hair during William’s afternoon nap, knowing it would be her only chance, and for the first time since William was born she’d stood on her tiptoes at the leaky bathroom sink and lined her eyes, applied blush, lipstick, mascara. She’d shaved her legs, moisturized, put on stockings, a pencil skirt. She dug out a real bra from behind the mess of nursing bras in her drawer, and was relieved that it fit the same as before. She left her heels out to step into once Henry came home. She had saved up bits and pieces all week with dinner in mind, things she’d noticed about their neighborhood, comments the other moms had made in the park (the pearl of that very morning: Alexander (five months old) absolutely loved the Gorky exhibit! You have to bring William!). She’d also reminded herself more than once to ask about Henry, his work, how the department was handling the budget cuts, if he was really happy there. Did he have any regret about not going to San Diego, like they’d originally planned, but instead staying in Philadelphia, a city hemmed in by two rivers but no ocean, the city they were both from, so they could be near family now that William was here? She also reminded herself to avoid talking about William. She’d read it in a magazine somewhere, that on date night new parents should make a point of leaving baby talk at home.

But there they were, and Henry was teasing her about the movies, and she felt like everything had been ruined.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Nicole said, but then found she couldn’t explain.  They told the sitter they’d be home around eleven, but it was only nine-fifteen when they paid the bill. “I guess we should kill an hour or so? Make it worth her while?” Henry said. “What should we do?”

“What did we used to do?” Nicole asked, trying to remember what exactly used to keep them out until all hours, stumbling home in their smoky clothes, waking the next morning and clapping their hands over their mouths because they’d been too tired, too drunk, too much in a hurry to undress to take the time to brush. It occurred to Nicole that their money would be better spent if they’d paid the sitter to watch William in the next room while Nicole climbed the narrow steps to their bedroom and slept.

But then Henry had asked her along to the conference, had been so eager to ask her that he’d called from campus so that she could think about it and decide before he got home. His ticket would be paid for by the Biology Department, along with a small allowance for accommodation.  Their Christmas gift to each other could be Nicole’s ticket. Nicole knew she would go before she even hung up the phone, but she decided to let him hope for a few hours. When he arrived home he asked before he’d even taken off his coat. “What do you think?”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Really?” He hugged her, lifting her entirely off the ground. His paper (Sargassum Muticum: Friend or Foe?) was about a species of seaweed that had been invading western Ireland’s rock pools and seagrass since the mid-1990s.  When he returned Nicole to her feet he told her that the first thing they’d do was borrow scuba gear so he could show her all the places this particular weed now thrived. (Foe, he’d concluded, definitely foe.)

“Henry, love, it’s December. It’s Ireland. There will be no scuba. Not for me anyway.” He’d made three separate trips to Galway to research, all before William was born, all paid for with grants he’d fought for and detailed to Nicole late at night after he’d finally left campus for the day, shoveled back a pile of spaghetti, and collapsed into bed.

Rosemary had warned them about Ireland in December, how much colder they’d feel in their bones even though the temperatures would be warmer than in Philadelphia. And also the daylight, how late it would arrive, how early it would disappear, whole days over before they’d begun.

Now, as they waited to board the plane, Henry reminded her that Galway’s blackweed was the reason he’d gotten into marine botany in the first place. He could remember getting tangled in it as a kid, stumbling out of the frigid ocean near Salt Hill with the dark ropes around his ankles, caught up between his toes. At the same time that his brother pronounced it disgusting, Henry had wondered what it tasted like, if it was nutritious, if seaweed looked the same no matter which sea, or was it like people, who looked different on every continent.

“But you already knew that,” he said, and Nicole looked at him, confused for a moment because he seemed genuinely surprised to remember that she did already know that, of course she already knew.

On board, Nicole took the window seat. She had brought the pump, and tried not to think about unsnapping the cups of her bra and assembling the tubing, the suction cups, attaching the bottles in the airplane bathroom. Or after, when she’d have to dump every drop of hard-earned milk down the sink. She imagined it vaporizing over the Atlantic, six ounces from the left, five from the right. She considered doing it right there – she could drape her coat over her shoulder for privacy – but she knew Henry wouldn’t like it. He wouldn’t say anything but he’d shift away from her and fix his eyes at the front of the cabin, and she knew that small shift, that look away, would make her furious and she’d indulge that fury for the next six days. He loved seeing her nurse William at home, the two of them cozy on the rocker, the big pillow on her lap and William on top of the pillow, but the pump was another story and the first time he saw her at it he’d grimaced, and she’d caught him.

“What am I supposed to do?” she’d asked. Being full was a pain the books had not prepared her for, a discomfort so acute that despite the doctor’s advice she still got up most nights to pump herself some relief, a chore she found particularly cruel once William started sleeping through the night. In the dark and silent apartment, she heard the pump’s motor speaking to her in two-syllable phrases. Try sleep. Stand up. Watch out. One time she was so tired that she forgot to attach the bottles and realized after a few minutes that she had a puddle of milk in her lap.

Part Two

It had taken Nicole six full months to realize what Henry had figured out while she was still pregnant: she wasn’t going back to work.  Her maternity leave passed in a blink, and when William was almost three months old she’d called her boss to find out how long they’d hold her job for an unpaid leave. They’d hold it for three more months, he told her, but asked her not to mention it to anyone else in the office, as they’d had to let Salma go once her leave had expired. They didn’t want to stir up trouble, but the hard facts were that Nicole presented well and Salma had started to let herself go a bit, after the second baby. Salma was dynamite! But she just seemed more harried than she used to, less put together. They knew Nicole would come back and present as she always had: beautifully. That’s why the donors loved her. Dan, the senior vice president, didn’t worry about mentioning this to her because he knew that Nicole was discreet, and he knew she understood that they had to do what was best.

For almost seven years she’d worked in the development office of a small arts foundation that was headquartered just a few blocks from the university where Henry was on faculty, and although she’d liked it at first – the parties, the socializing – she realized after a year or so that asking people for money was uncomfortable business. She thought she’d have more interaction with the artists, but the real focus was on the donors. The Richie Riches, Henry called them. The chairman of the board referred to their work as “the cause,” but as Nicole’s tenure lengthened and the artists’ grants got smaller and smaller, she had to continually fight the temptation to point out that the Children’s Hospital was just a stone’s throw away.

They’d talked to nannies. Nicole would forever look back on William’s third month of life and remember the parade of women in and out of their apartment. Some were lovely, she could see that, but there was a vacancy in each of them. They’d never be able to pay enough to make these women care about William like she would. Henry thought they could be drawn out in the interview process but Nicole knew it was useless. They all knew the right answers; their candidacy would be decided by something they did without thinking, a way of sitting, a reaching down to pluck a thread from the floor, a quick glance at a watch. Will she love him? Nicole thought with each. Will she step into traffic for him if she has to?  Will her day feel brighter for having seen him?  No, no, no, she always said after, to which Henry always said, You know where this is going, don’t you?

William’s fourth month of life was spent touring daycare centers both near her office and near their apartment. Every one of them was in a basement with low ceilings, dim light, and walls of plastic toys penning them in. Each one seemed to Nicole more grim and chaotic than the last.  Children everywhere, the squealing, the noise, and again the blank stares of the women hired to watch them, to sing songs and tell them stories.  “Do you hug them?” Nicole asked, interrupting a speech about the center’s policy on feeding schedules and breast-milk storage.

“Hug them?” the director had asked.  “Sure!”

“Like all the time?”

“Constantly,” she said, and plucked up a brown-eyed boy from the Tiger Cub class to demonstrate. The boy, Nicole noticed, stiffened against the affection, didn’t quite know how to respond. Nicole imagined his mother somewhere in Center City, wondering how he was getting on.  When the woman put the boy down, he took off, fled, Nicole thought, and ran right into another child, a girl, who was racing around a corner.  The boy went down hard, hitting his head on the end of the craft table on the way.

“It’s only a flesh wound,” the director laughed as she waved someone over to help. The boy opened his mouth wide before the sound followed, but when he cried it was loud and all the other Tiger Cubs looked up from their trucks and their music makers to see what had happened.

There was also the problem of salary. After four full days of daycare per week (Rosemary volunteered to watch William on Fridays), there’d be barely enough left over to cover their groceries.

“What do you love about work?” Henry had asked when she was trying to decide. Ever since she’d started to show he’d been saying that she should stay home, raise their son like they’d been raised. Fine, so they didn’t live in South Philly anymore, but with the same foundation, the same realistic view of life, and that they’d be without Nicole’s salary made this even more possible, in a way. It would stop them from indulging him, from buying him things he didn’t need. It would keep him honest, down to earth, unspoiled. It was good for a child to know that he can’t have everything he wants in life, Henry said, and it took counting to ten and taking a breath for Nicole to stop herself from asking what in the world he knew about it. She also had to stop herself from accusing him of trying to talk her into what he wanted: a clean apartment, dinner on the table when he came home. Oh, he claimed he didn’t care about those things, he’d coped with frozen Hungry Man dinners for plenty of years and had never complained, but Nicole knew him. She saw it. The leaning back in his chair. The satisfied sigh. He was happier with her home.

Nicole liked some of the people at work, and she loved when an artist they’d supported went on to really make something great, something well-known. A young playwright they’d supported two cycles ago was premiering his play in an off-Broadway theater in New York and had sent everyone in the office an invitation. But other than those moments, which were rare, mostly she liked the routine of work: showering, dressing, rushing for the bus, getting her coffee from the vendor on the corner of 36^th and Chestnut, lunch with the girls, sunning their legs outside if it was nice, holing up with hot chocolate and gossip if it was not nice, stopping off on Walnut Street on the way home to push through the sale racks. She liked checking her bank balance every other Friday to confirm, once again, that just as it had petered down to nothing, just as she was straddling the brink, another paycheck had come through and she was in the black again.

“So it’s just the money,” Henry had said, trying, she could see, to understand.

“No, it’s not the money at all.”

“But you just said –“

“I know, but…”  But what? She couldn’t explain.  He had worked his whole life to get his position. He had to work hard every single day to keep it. He worked for twelve hours a day, six days a week. He had to fight to get his name added to articles, even if his was fifth on the list. He wrote at night, on weekends, he had drafts of papers sticking out of every bag, stuffed into the glove box of the car, notes and books and journal articles flagged to be read later. He spent all his funding on dives, some drivable, most not, collecting data, and spending some of their own money too getting to these dives and getting back.  Nicole had graduated from college with a degree in Art History and had found her job by answering an ad in the Inquirer.

“Nothing, I guess.”

So when William was five months old, Nicole had called them and told them that she wouldn’t be back.  And for one glorious month, the world seemed new. A Monday was just a Monday, the same as Saturday or Sunday. She planned elaborate meals and projects for the apartment. She stuffed William into his stroller and pushed him out into the world and felt more affection for their neighborhood than she ever had before. Every tree, every storefront seemed quaint, perfect. The woman behind the deli at the grocery store knew William’s name, the dry cleaner told her that he’d gotten so big. She looked forward to exploring the city with him and she knew it would be a time they both cherished for the rest of their lives. Even if William didn’t remember it, he’d always have it with him, that foundation, those critical months with Nicole, safe and swaddled and protected from strangers.

And then, every day, three o’clock rolled around and found the baby tired, cranky, Nicole tired, cranky. She stopped bothering to take a shower during William’s nap. She stopped bothering to empty the dishwasher.  Henry never got home before eight o’clock. The hours between three and William’s bedtime at seven yawned before her and she heard herself singing ‘itsy bitsy’ as if she was listening to another woman from across the room.

Part Three

Henry didn’t need a map to get to the B&B where they were staying, where he’d stayed the last three times he’d been in Galway. The owner, Mrs. Corcoran, catered to academics who did fieldwork year round, and Henry said it was easy enough to get from the B&B to the conference in Galway City. Nicole, despite having a mother from Clare, hadn’t been to Ireland since she was sixteen, the year her grandmother died. “Was never taken back,” she always corrected Henry, feeling it was her mother’s choice to bring her home or not, and since her mother had decided not to go back, Nicole didn’t feel like it was any of her business to go back after her mother died of bone cancer at fifty-nine.  Going to Ireland to see her mother’s people after her mother was dead seemed to Nicole to be exactly the same as snooping in a box of old letters that she wasn’t meant to read.

When they got to the B&B, Mrs. Corcoran had tea waiting for them, the electric blanket turned on in their room in case they wanted to sleep for a few hours, get used to the time change.  “Nicole,” Mrs. Corcoran said, taking her hand. “I’ve heard so much about you.” Nicole squeezed her hand back, and almost said “you too” until she remembered that she’d not heard one word about this woman, not a peep.  “And the baby?” Mrs. Corcoran inquired. “He’d be around seven months now?”

“Yes,” Nicole said, looking at Henry, who seemed perfectly at home. He’d tossed his laptop bag into the deep chair by the fire. He’d gone straight to the hall closet to hang his coat.

“She seems fond of you,” Nicole said, once they got to their room, put down their bags, collapsed on top of the covers of the bed.

“She’s a nice lady. Reminds me of my Nana, a bit. We talk a lot when I’m here because there’s nothing else to do. I think she’s lonely. There’re pictures around of a man but I’ve never seen him.”

Nicole imagined Henry coming home to Mrs. Corcoran after a long day out on the water, sitting by her fire and telling her all about the bits and pieces he’d be shipping home to Philadelphia for further scrutiny, mushy odds and ends he’d dry and separate into plastic bags. He didn’t like diving at night so he’d probably been in by five, Nicole figured, all those hours to kill before bed spent talking to Mrs. Corcoran. The TV in their bedroom was old, rabbit-eared, and Henry told her that it only had three channels, all bad. There was no wireless Internet, nowhere he could even check his email unless he drove into town.

“So you talked.”

“Yeah,” Henry looked at her, rolled over onto his belly. “Why?”

Henry slept. Nicole tried. She pumped. Showered. Tried again. She helped him tug off his sneakers, his jeans. She helped him under the covers before she snuggled in there herself, moved as close to him as possible, the heat of his body and the blanket making for such a warm and lovely nest she thought she’d sleep away the week. She got up and closed the blinds, pulled the curtain to block out the light, and dove in again.  She wiggled out of her own jeans, pulled off the layers until she was wearing only her white cotton underwear, a white tank top, white socks she hooked with a toe to remove, one at a time, and pushed to the end of the bed. Henry settled his arm around her, across her chest. She shifted it slightly, and he turned to curve his body around hers, bury his face in her hair.  They were eighteen the first time they’d seen each other naked, in the upstairs bathroom of Rosemary’s house, right after Henry’s father had been diagnosed with cancer and he’d called Nicole because he knew she’d understand, having gone through it with her own father just a few years before.  But instead of talking they’d ended up taking off their clothes, and Nicole remembered the effort it took to quell the nervous laughter in her belly, knowing what a giggle would do to such a moment, and then how serious she felt all of a sudden when she realized she was really, actually, truly standing there in the nude with Henry Blaney, handsome Henry Blaney, wickedly smart Henry Blaney who had been one grade ahead all her life, and was about to disappear to M.I.T. on scholarship and might never return. The same Henry who used to shovel their sidewalk once her father died and it was just her and her Mom. The same Henry who had famously chased down a purse snatcher on the corner of 3^rd and Wolf and caught him, holding him until the police arrived.

At eighteen, he was perfect, and seemed to have more flesh on him naked than he did in clothes. In clothes he seemed nearly as skinny as Nicole, but that first night she could see there was mass in his shoulders and across his chest even if his belly narrowed to nothing, the bottom of his rib cage showing, disappearing, showing, disappearing as his breath got more ragged.

“I love you,” he’d said that night. They’d never even been on a date.  It was as if he’d decided one day that they should be together, and that was it.  Whenever they went anywhere together he kept his hand on the small of her back; he stared at her from across the room.  No matter how crowded a party, how loud, they always ended up together, a seat shared in a corner, talking as if they were alone on Rosemary’s couch, or in Nicole’s mother’s kitchen, saying all the things they wanted in their lives.

But now their lives had split and she lived her day and he lived his and it was impossible to explain to him all the new thoughts she had during the eleven and a half hours they were apart.

People had congratulated her belly, full bloom by six months. Strangers had blessed her, predicted a boy, wished her much happiness, much health. And the books said birth was a beautiful thing, an event that would define her from that moment forward and how proud of herself she’d be and how proud  her partner would be and how he’d see her in a different light, he’d have no choice, after seeing what she was capable of.  She had no fear of labor because it had been going on since the beginning, and her own grandmothers had done it thirteen times between them, and she was tough, had run a 5K in under twenty-three minutes when she was nine weeks pregnant, just to make sure she could.

But labor was not beautiful, and Nicole had come out of it shaken and bewildered, unsure of what exactly had happened, furious that even after reading all those books and handing out copies of her birth plan to doctors and nurses that there were things she didn’t understand. The baby had stalled at the point where she could feel the top of his head every time her body heaved.  She thought someone had overturned a gallon of water but when she saw Henry blanch and back away for a moment before he hurried back and grabbed her hand, she knew it was she who was spilling, the baby stopped, her body suddenly very cold.  Strangers rushed in and surrounded the bed and ignored Nicole completely. She vomited. “Over and over,” Henry said later. “Maybe ten times. Maybe fifteen.” They’d given her four units of someone else’s blood. Nicole didn’t remember any of that, just the foreign hardness of the baby’s skull trying, trying, and her own roars that she was surprised to realize were hers.  Henry prayed. She hadn’t seen him pray in years, not since his father died and they were all there at the hospital and Henry and Patrick had joined hands with him and bowed their heads while Nicole, not yet married to Henry, tried to make herself small by the door.

And then, four a.m., the abrupt emptiness, the frightened cry, the overwhelming relief, William taken upstairs for examination, Henry gone home to sleep, Nicole alone in the recovery room wishing for food and something sweet to drink like she’d never wished for anything before in her life. She had an animal need to put something in her empty stomach, but when she moved she felt herself packed, wrapped, her hips throbbing, an IV attached to her arm. No book had mentioned being so hungry. Turned out every woman in the world was tougher than she was.

A few hours later, she got her first good look at that small face in the fiberglass bassinet they’d rolled up next to her bed the moment she had a room assigned.  That raisin face, a person, her son, the same being that had been pushing his toes between her ribs for weeks. His eyes stayed shut. He yawned. He had lips, a tongue, ten fingers, ten fingernails.  He wriggled, broke free of the swaddle, punched a fist in the air and cried.  “Oh, Jesus,” Nicole had said, looking around, struggling to sit up. When she sat up the room faded to white and seemed to fall away from her bed, slantwise. The nurses rushed in with salts.  When she woke again it was dark, and the doctor said her fever had come down, and William was off to the nursery where he’d be given two ounces of formula every two hours.

“Thirty-seven stitches,” he read off the chart. “And a mastitis in your left breast.” He looked up at her, looked at the fold of the hospital gown over her breast. “Already,” he said softly, almost to himself. And then: “We’re going to bring the baby. You have to get him to latch or else he might not be able to.”

“Vicodin?” Nicole asked, remembering the name of what she’d taken when she’d had all her wisdom teeth out at once, the pain only a sliver of what she was feeling now.

The doctor looked stern. “Not if you’re nursing.  I’m sorry. Just a Tylenol. Make a note of the hours. You have to remember the baby.”

The baby, the baby. The first time he slept through the night was also the first time Nicole had two big glasses of wine after dinner, thinking she’d just pump and dump the next round, but William had woken before she’d had the chance and she promised Henry she felt fine, absolutely fine, but then the baby had slept for a solid eight hours and Henry had sat up in bed and looked at her like she knew what she’d been doing, like she’d risked their family for eight hours of sleep.

Part Four

When Nicole woke it was dark outside, and she could hear Henry in the hall, talking to Mrs. Corcoran.  There was another man’s voice along with them, and before she could wonder Henry opened the door to their room and asked in a whisper if she was awake.

“Want to get dinner? Drive into town?” Mrs. Corcoran’s place was near Maam Cross, which seemed a long way from anywhere. Henry promised Oughterard was just a short drive away and that they had a few good restaurants there.  The other man’s voice she’d heard was an Australian who was also staying with Mrs. Corcoran, another marine biologist who had come to Galway for the conference, where he was scheduled to interview for a position at Florida State. “And we could buy a phone card and call home,” Nicole pointed out as she pushed the covers down and reached for her duffle bag. “We need to check on William.”

“That’s right,” Henry said.

Although the Australian didn’t seem quite as familiar with Henry as Mrs. Corcoran had, Nicole could see that they knew each other moderately well. She learned they’d spent a week together once, studying intertidal zones along the Sea of Cortez, sharing a hotel room with two students from Hopkins and another from Stanford. Nicole had already figured out that once a person gets good at something as specific as Henry did, the world got smaller, and it was impossible not to come across the same people over and over. The Australian, Nigel, seemed to perk up when he saw Nicole and said he was glad to have a woman at dinner because he had female troubles he needed advice on.  Nicole had showered and put on the only dress she’d brought with her, a black merino wool sweater dress she wore with black boots. She stood sideways to the mirror and smoothed the material over her flat belly. She put on the silver necklace Henry had bought for her when William was born. She tied her hair into a high ponytail and decided it was the best she could do in the few minutes she had to get ready. She could feel Henry tapping his foot in the next room.

They piled in to Henry and Nicole’s rental car, a tiny breed of vehicle that Nicole imagined only existed in Europe, and as their headlights picked out the way from Mrs. Corcoran’s to Oughterard, Nigel told them that earlier that week his girlfriend had left him for another biologist. Henry groaned.  The other man worked for a commercial builder in Canberra, finding ways around the Australian environmental laws.

“Were you engaged?” Nicole asked.

“No,” the Australian laughed and sunk back into his seat.  “I could barely stand her to be perfectly honest.”

Henry snorted.

“Well there’s your trouble,” Nicole said. “And now it’s solved.”

“But I’m heartbroken!” Nigel said. “By which I mean, I’m very surprised.”

Henry turned from one narrow, unmarked road to another. “Whatever happened to that girl from Mexico? The girl from Stanford?”

“Oh Jesus.” Nigel said. “Forgot about that. She was a beauty, wasn’t she?”

They ordered a bottle of wine, but before the waitress had gotten very far Nigel called her back to say that she’d better make it two. He was as loud as Henry was quiet, but Nicole’s intuition told her that he was harmless, and besides, he seemed to draw Henry out. They shouted over each other, something about zebra mussels, something about gooseneck barnacles, and Nicole reminded them that most men talked about sports, and didn’t get drunk talking about phytoplanktonic algae and the temperature of the ocean. At that, Nigel reached across the table and hugged her, squeezing her and pulling her like he wanted to lift her across the table and take her away from there. “This one doesn’t let you away with much, does she?” he’d laughed, and then winked at her like he was in love.  Turned out Nigel’s work revolved more around lakes and rivers than the ocean, and Nicole thought about how that would have been easier, more local.

“You should have done that!” Nicole said, turning to Henry and grabbing his arm. She poured herself more wine.

Henry shifted, and looked at Nigel. “Doesn’t exactly work like that, Nic.”

There was a beat of silence that no one moved to fill. “I know that, Henry.” Nicole smiled. “I was kidding.”

“She knows well,” Nigel said, again reaching for her shoulder, forging onward with a story about a professor, gossip about a lab in British Columbia, on and on round the world went their references and Nicole felt herself sitting back, sipping her wine in silence, nodding whenever they glanced at her but mostly keeping watch on the sidewalk on the other side of the window, which was beginning to fill with people. It was St. Stephen’s Day, a day in Ireland that meant doing absolutely nothing, less even than Christmas Day, until night rolled around and it was time to celebrate. It would go on like that all week, shops closed, streets empty. In their small neighborhood in South Philly the Irish kids used to go door to door chanting The wren the wren the king of all birds, St. Stephen’s Day was caught in a furze, before holding their hands out for a coin. ”What’s a wren?” Nicole used to ask when her mother reminded her of her lines. “What’s a furze?”  “Make sure you don’t get a puncture,” the man at the car rental lot had warned them. “You’ll be here for weeks.”

Now it was Henry who was talking, telling Nigel all about the weed he was going to hold forth on the next afternoon.  Nicole counted back the hours: William would be just getting up from a nap, getting ready for lunch. Kristine, Henry’s brother’s wife, said she’d look in on William once in a while in case Rosemary needed a break. Nicole suspected that Kristine thought of babysitting as a kind of audition for motherhood.  She and Henry’s brother, Patrick, had been married for five months, but as she told Nicole in hushed tones as they shared a cigarette on the dark back porch of Rosemary’s house on Christmas Eve, she wasn’t getting any younger, and she wanted Patrick to catch the bug too before they decided anything.  “It’s not enough for one of us to be ready,” she’d said. “You know? Did you have to talk Henry into it?”

“God no,” Nicole had said. “He’d been at me since we got married. Every apartment we looked at I’m there asking about the windows and the electric, and he’s counting the blocks to the nearest park.” She put on her best Henry voice, “Hey Nic, You notice the courtyard? Nice place for a kid to run around, right?”

Christmas morning was a parade of shiny toys for William to pull and push and press. He played with the wrapping paper and the empty boxes all day long, pointed to his belly button when quizzed by anyone who stopped by to wish them a happy Christmas and a safe trip, and when bedtime arrived at Rosemary’s house Nicole rocked him and read to him as she always did and waited for the sweetest moment of her day, when William started twisting in her lap until he had completely turned around, and then, after a long and serious inspection of her face, nestled in to her and closed his eyes, chest to chest, his warm head with its soft curls in the nook under her chin.

I don’t have to go, she had told herself in the silence of Rosemary’s guest bedroom, which Rosemary had converted to a nursery complete with a crib and changing table within a month of learning that her first grandchild was on the way. Nicole’s bag was packed and waiting in the hall. She thought: I’ll tell Henry that William is sick and he’ll go by himself, no questions asked. But then he’d peeked in on them and when he saw William was asleep he’d walked over on tip-toes to give each of them a kiss.

“Can’t wait,” he’d said, kissing her again in his mother’s kitchen like he hadn’t kissed her in seven months.

“Another bottle?” The waitress asked.  The two they’d ordered were already empty.

“No,” Henry said as Nigel and Nicole said, “Yes, please” and “Sure, okay.”

“Nice,” Henry laughed. “It’s not like I’m presenting a paper tomorrow or anything.”

Nigel said, “Don’t be so selfish, mate. The wine is for myself and your wife.”

Nicole squeezed Henry’s knee to let him know it was okay, they’d go soon, he’d be great the next day, she was having a good time. She was young, she was attractive, she was in a foreign country. She’d packed the silky number she’d picked up before Christmas, once she knew for sure that she’d be going with him.  It was the type of thing she’d never worn before, had never understood paying so much money for, especially if the idea was that she’d only be wearing it for a few minutes and then with any luck it would spend the rest of the night on the floor. She’d gotten a red one at first — the sweetheart neckline laced with black — but then returned it after seeing it at home, laid out on their bed. It was trampy and he’d laugh at her. She’d pushed William’s stroller all the way back to Rittenhouse through the slush to exchange it for a plain one, pale blue, no straps, no strips of lace, something she might not have purchased with him in mind, a nightdress, a garment every proper woman needs. It came with a short robe. She’d go into the bathroom like she always did, brush her teeth, wash her face, but she’d come out in the pale blue nightdress and he’d look over at her, ask if it was new.

She’d call William in the morning. Anyway, Rosemary had told them not to call, that Nicole might hear him crying in the background and her vacation would be ruined. Rosemary had the number of the B&B and she’d call them if anything happened. Go, she’d insisted. Just go.

Nigel continued with the story he’d been telling Henry when the waitress had come over and interrupted.

“So I’m out there in the middle of the fucking lake. I’m reading the temps off Niskin bottles all day long and my eyes bleeding out of my head. So we’re on our way back and – there’s no pier, we just pushed off from shore – and there’s not a soul but us around, we’re twenty miles outside of Fairbanks, and what do we see as we’re getting to shore but a baby.”

“A baby what?” Nicole asked.

“A human baby. An infant.”

“Where?”

“In the water. In among the weeds.”

“Dead?” Nicole said. She put down her glass.  “A dead baby? Drowned?”

“Jesus Christ,” Henry said.

“What happened?” Nicole asked.

“Don’t know,” Nigel said. “We called the police, who took over an hour to get out there, and we told them what we were looking at. We asked them should we pull it up, pull it onto the boat, you see, and they said no, at first, then they told us to hang on and we waited a bit, a few seconds, probably, it felt like a few minutes, then another man came on the phone and asked me to tell the whole story again, and then I said again should we pull him onto the boat—“

“Him?” Nicole asked. “How’d you know it was a boy?”

“Ahh,” Nigel looked stumped. “The water was shallow.  And clear. So clear, Alaskan water, even in the muddy season. And we knew from later. When we took him onto the boat.”

“Jesus Christ,” Henry said again. “That’s enough.” He pushed back from the table.

“No,” Nicole said. “What happened?”

“We waited on shore and left him in the cooler — we’d put him in the cooler, we didn’t want to risk him shifting around — and then we told the whole story again when the police arrived and then we left. I think they were expecting more police to come. They took our mobile numbers but no one ever called.”

“Didn’t you try to revive him? Did you check to see if he was alive?”

Nigel opened his mouth and then closed it again.

“I think that’s enough now,” Henry said. “Really.”

“But the next day,” Nicole said. She knew she sounded a little hysterical. She knew the row of men sitting at the bar were listening to her. “Wasn’t it in the papers? Was the baby dead already when he was put in the water or did he drown? Was it the mother? A kidnapper? What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Nigel said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told that story.”

He apologized again as they crammed back into the rental car, and again when they parted ways in Mrs. Corcoran’s hall.

“I didn’t know you had a baby,” he said. He looked like he might cry.  “Well I knew, I think Mrs. Corcoran mentioned it, but I forgot.”

“I feel sick,” Nicole said once they were in their room with the door closed.

“I’ll bet.” Henry said.  “When’s the last time you had five glasses of wine?” He looked at his watch. “In three hours?”

Nicole sat down on the edge of their bed to take off her boots, and she felt the alcohol slowing her movements, making her clumsy. She looked over at him for a pointed second before she spoke. “Because of the story.” Silently, she added: asshole.  Once she’d managed to unzip both boots and kick them away, she crawled under the covers and slept.

Part Five

The next day, Henry woke early to drive to Renvyle.  “I didn’t know you were going on a dive today,” Nicole said from bed, her voice scraping along her throat like a scouring pad. “I feel like shit.”  Henry reminded her that he wasn’t due at the conference until after lunch, so he had the whole morning. Nigel had mentioned that there was a boat going out at eight, and he hadn’t done a dive just for the fun of it for as long as he could remember.  “You want to come?” he asked, calling to her over the sound of the shower.

“Okay, but we have to call home,” she said as she experimented with sitting up. “We have to call William.”

“We will. We can’t call this early anyway. It’s the middle of the night there. Remember?”

Nicole got up and dressed despite her pounding head, and was, for once, grateful for their habit of tucking aside and turning away from what was uncomfortable to discuss. A dive. He hadn’t asked her out on a dive since before William.  Nicole had gotten certified one summer before they married, but would usually opt to lie on the beach and wait, leaf through her magazine, wonder how deep he’d gone, what he’d find, looking forward to how animated he’d be at dinner, and she would also be animated, having lined up the top three stories of her day, never lonely, never one of those girls who needed constant company, constant attention. She would arrive at the water’s edge with nothing but a towel and a magazine and abandon both along with her clothes to dunk herself in the water.  The end of the summer would always find them both berry-brown and happy, full of plans, always making plans. The first house, a down payment, a ring, a marriage, the places they’d go, the things they’d accomplish, a summer house by the water, one day, the real water, the ocean, not the stinking Schuykill.

But there would be no waiting in a bathing suit in December, in Ireland, and Nicole  bundled herself for the boat and asked Mrs. Corcoran to pour her tea into a Thermos so she could sip while she waited for him. William would still be sleeping. She hoped Rosemary hadn’t gone against her wishes and put a blanket on him. Rosemary believed SIDS was something that only happened to skinny babies, and William was a bruiser, twists of fat on every limb. Nicole leaned against the car as she waited for Henry to come out, looked in every direction at the burned orange grass of Connemara in the winter.

When they were finally buckled in, Nicole said, “I just realized that baby must have been naked.”  Henry didn’t say anything, kept looking at that road.

“Are you listening? The baby from Nigel’s story.”

“I don’t want to talk about that again, Nicole.”

“I’m only telling you something I just thought of. How else would they have known he was a boy just by looking down into the water?”

When they got to Renvyle the boat was waiting for them, two divers already on board and another who would steer the boat and wait up top like Nicole.  Nicole sipped her tea as Henry struggled with the bulky drysuit he’d borrowed, and she observed him as he made ready the seemingly endless gear: mask, fins, buoyancy vest, depth guage, tank guage, the tank itself, underwater light, backup light.

“We have to call William,” Nicole reminded him. “Straight after this, Henry.”

“We will,” Henry said. “I told you.”

“Not after the conference.  Before.”

“We will.”

“I don’t care if it’s still early.  I don’t care if it’s still the middle of the night.”

Henry sighed, attached the diving knife to his calf.

“I don’t care if you’re running late.  I don’t care if your mother wakes up.  And I’m going to have her put him on the phone. I want to hear him breathing.”

Henry showed no sign that he was listening.  He walked to the edge of the boat, looked down into the black water.

“Don’t you?”

“Don’t I what?” he said without turning around.  He was like a sea creature, a mammoth black figure covered with tubes and pipes and canisters instead of limpets or shells.

“Don’t you want to hear him breathing?”

“Nicole,” Henry said, and held up his hands like she’d been shouting at him, or coming at him with her fists.  She felt pathetic all of a sudden, the boat pitching before it even left its mooring, sure she was going to be sick over the side.  The other men rushed up, boarded. Nicole found a seat, clutched her Thermos, silently sang William’s favorite songs to distract herself from the churning of her insides. The boat moved through the water faster than she expected it to, and she braced herself as they pushed beyond the cove and out into the open ocean.

“Be careful, Henry,” she shouted over the wind once they’d anchored.

But he couldn’t hear her, didn’t respond, and she made it to the edge of the boat just in time to see the splash, Henry falling away from her.