78.

I don’t know how many times we’d been back to see the Trampoline Girl, and I don’t know how many times Tess had risen from our bed and gone alone into the early dark.

We could no longer go walking after dinner without feeling the planetary pull of that house on Vista. What for me was dread was some other thing for her.

But it doesn’t matter.

Dread or not, the result is the same.

There were nights we found nothing but lightless windows and there were nights we found her bouncing on the trampoline with no sign of the professor. “Hello, Boyfriend. Hi, Tess,” Anna said, and laughed as if she were fully a child.

There were nights she bounced expressionless through the screaming and we looked on, imagining ourselves silent guardians, in loco parentis.

“Good night, Tess, good night, Boyfriend.”

I don’t remember how long it went on. Our visits. Those walks. How many times we saw the house dark, or saw Anna smiling, or stood idle behind the white picket fence listening to the fighting through the thump and squeak of the trampoline.

There were many nights I wouldn’t walk. Nights Tess went off without me. Nights I’d sit on the porch and worry about her until she came home to take her place next to me and pour herself a glass saying nothing to my nothing.

We were moving toward something. You have to see that it was inevitable. I’m sure you believe in responsibility, in free will, in making decisions. Even as you spend your life sliding back and forth on that train, in that truck, rising up and down on that elevator. Even as you do the same things day after day. Even as you murder your time while the same dull people say the same dull things about changing your same dull life.

And all the while saying, I can do what I want, I can do what I want, I can do what I want.

There was a moment when the great boulder began to roll, and nothing was to be done about it. A time when there was no more freedom, no more choice. We were a simple single fact, one foregone conclusion, the two of us, one thing, hurtling forward.