She was staring out the kitchen window. Somehow, it was dawn. They’d fallen asleep. He looked at Laura—the set of her jaw, the way she pinched her eyebrows. He felt sure she was watching Bill Peters walking up the driveway. A panic leapt inside his stomach.

“Mike Sr.’s out there digging,” she said.

The jug was on the kitchen table. There was a glorious amount of it left. Eddie could see the pale waterline.

“Digging?”

“Graves, I think.”

Eddie stood next to her. The panic was subsiding. Outside, the grass threw up a golden light. The sun seemed to be burning from below the horizon. Mike Sr. was pressed against a shovel. Digging wasn’t the word for it. He was leaning. If the shovel wasn’t there, he would have fallen.

“Did you look in the driveway?” Eddie asked.

“No.”

“Don’t,” he told her.

They were quiet for a while, watching Mike Sr. lean on his shovel.

“It’s not very big,” Eddie said.

“What isn’t very big?”

“The hole.”

“It’s not a hole. He’s only scratching the ground a little.”

“He has to decide how many holes to dig.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.

Mike Sr. lifted the shovel tip from the ground. When he placed it back, he put his hand to his forehead.

“We could still help him,” Laura said. “We’re still here.”

“We’re going to your parents’.”

“We could give him water.”

“Look,” Eddie said. He poked the jug so that the water rocked. “We talked about this last night. We need it. We’re leaving.”

“How do you feel now, though? You feel good, right? I feel pretty good. Not normal, but not as bad as yesterday.”

“And how long will that last? Not long. Not in this heat. Maybe we can go ten miles today. That’s three days it will take us. Look at this.” He tapped the jug again. “That’s not enough for three days.”

“But right now we’re feeling fresh.”

“The fire department will be back soon,” he said. “Remember? They’ll help him. Like you said.”

“You don’t know that.”

“They’ll bring a water truck.”

“Then where are they?”

“They’re in the city now.”

Laura looked back at Mike Sr. in the yard. “I’ll help him, then,” she said. “I’m feeling okay.”

“No.” He reached out and held her wrist. “We’re going. Mike can take care of himself.”

“You can’t stop me from trying.”

Anger squeezed through him like water through a crack in a dam—a dam he hadn’t known existed, nor what it held at bay inside of him. His hand was in a fist.

“Stay here,” he said. He made himself relax. “I’ll do it if you stay.”

The sofa was still buttressed against the back door, and the bean-can alarm balanced precariously on the knob. Eddie used the front door so as not to disturb it. The heat outside was ovenish and thick. The leaves on the azalea bush were gone. Blood from Patty’s head had dried in a potato-shaped puddle. Eddie tried not to look as he passed her, but he looked. She’d already bloated a little.

“Mike,” Eddie said.

Mike Sr. didn’t turn around. He continued leaning on his shovel.

“Let me help,” Eddie said.

He walked around to the patch of dirt that would become the grave for the Davis family. The earth wasn’t broken; not even the pattern in the grass was broken. There was no strength in Mike Sr. to even scrape it away. The grass was yellow and dry. The shovel tip barely stuck in.

“Can you bring her back to life?”

The heat was already getting to Eddie. He was sweating. Mike Sr. wheezed.

“Why did she do it?” Mike Sr. said. He leaned more heavily into the shovel, and his stomach hung. “We could have started over.”

He pulled the shovel back, as if to rake the dirt away, but only combed the dead grass toward him. Eddie watched. Even burnt, the grass was elastic, erasing the path of the shovel tip. He looked at the creamy sky, the dead trees.

The shovel fell and struck the ground. Mike Sr. lunged, grabbing Eddie by the back of his neck, but there was no strength in his fingers. They peeled off when Eddie stepped away.

“Jesus, Mike,” Eddie said.

Mike Sr. sat down on the grass. A wheezing persisted in his chest. Eddie rubbed his neck where he’d been touched.

“You have it,” Mike Sr. said, looking at the parched ground.

“Have what?” Eddie said.

Mike Sr. ran his fingers through the grass. “The water,” he said.

“No. He took it away.”

“Don’t lie.” When he looked up, the skin around his eyes was iridescent with veins. “I saw you pick it up.”

“I wasn’t near it,” Eddie said.

“You were there. You could have stopped her.”

“I tried …”

“I’ll go to the cops,” he warned.

“I’m trying to help you, Mike.”

“We’ll see what they think,” Mike Sr. said. “We’ll see what happens when they investigate.”

Eddie picked up the shovel and stuck it in the ground.

Mike Sr. said, “You give it to me, and I’ll forget it. I won’t tell them anything.”

“There’s nothing to tell.” Eddie put his foot on the edge of the shovel and leaned on it. A little wedge of soil came up. Mike Sr. didn’t move. He sat there looking in the other direction. Eddie dug a few more wedges out. He wasn’t feeling well, and didn’t hear Laura come out until she was right behind him, handing Mike Sr. a cup of water.

Mike Sr. was babbling. “Why did she?” he said. “Why’d she?”

Laura said, “It’s what you do now that counts.”

“Why did she do it?” The more he said it, the more it didn’t sound like anything. “Why’d she doot. Wideshee.”

Eddie walked past Patty in the driveway and tried again not to look. If he looked at her, he felt she might start talking—she might provide an answer for her husband.

Inside, he could see that the waterline in the jug was lower from when Laura had poured it for Mike Sr. He poured himself one, too. It was too much, maybe a third of a cup. He held it, and then put it on the table and looked out the window. Laura was standing over Mike Sr., who had his head between his arms, his fingers grabbing at his ears. Eddie picked up the glass and tried to take a sip, but couldn’t stop himself from gulping it. When he was through, he poured another, and sipped from that one slowly. The first glass bubbled in his stomach. Outside, Laura was trying to dig. She was putting her back into it. Eddie was too tired even to call to her from the window. He could see her shoulder blades move beneath her shirt, but couldn’t see the ground—whether it was becoming a hole or just a collection of more divots. After a few minutes, she came back inside, too.

Her shirt was damp beneath the armpits.

“That was stupid,” Eddie said.

“You did it, too.”

“It was stupid for both of us.”

She didn’t wait for Eddie to pour her a glass. She poured it herself, and drank it down fast, though not as fast as Eddie had.

“I can’t leave yet,” she said. “Now I’m tired.”

“Is he still out there?”

“Yeah.”

“He won’t make it in the sun.”

“I told him to go inside.”

“Did you look in the driveway?” Eddie asked.

Laura closed her eyes in the way she might if stymied by an endless argument.

“No,” she said.

“Where’s the gun?” It struck him suddenly. “The gun that Patty had?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus, Laura. We can’t let him have that gun.”

He went out and stood in the driveway. Patty’s head was crystallized like rock candy where the bullet had gone through. The creases at her shoulder and in her elbow were barely creases. The skin was too tight and full of gas to fold. She’d fallen on her arm, and her right hand was tucked beneath her body. Eddie went to the side of his house to get his shovel. When he returned, he pressed the metal tip beneath her belly to use it as a lever. He leaned down on the handle, but the curve in the head wasn’t big enough, and the handle hit the asphalt before she budged. He had to get down on his knees and put his shoulder into her side and push back with his feet to get some daylight between her body and the driveway. He saw her hand under there—pink and meaty—but it didn’t hold the gun.

“Get the hell off her.”

Mike Sr. was standing at the fence. Eddie’s chest tightened as he watched him stagger, his legs buckling. He fell hard into the grass and didn’t move.

Eddie went back inside.

“Did you find it?” Laura said.

“No. It must have gotten lost.”

“It can’t be lost.” She shook her head. “Mike Sr.’s got it.”

Eddie leaned back on the sofa pillow. Laura brought him another glass of water.

“It’s too much,” he protested, but only weakly.

“Just a little bit of it, then.”

He took a few sips. The water was warm and felt silky going down. The air in the house was hot, but not intolerably hot. Not like outside.

“If you’re taking a nap,” Laura said, “I’m taking one, too.”

“I just need to rest,” Eddie said. “Then we’ll go.”

Laura went into the bedroom.

He took another sip and then another, and then he lay back and thought about how they would do it. It would be slow going. He was right in thinking that they might have to travel at night, when it was cooler. At night, though, they’d have to walk on the highway, which he didn’t want to do. He expected that if people were out, they’d be out on the highway. They wouldn’t be safe with the jug of water there.

There were at least twelve miles of trail heading northeast through the park. Eddie had run that stretch when they’d first moved. It was soft and without much grade, and it followed the stream almost all the way. It connected with the big regional park to the north, and from there with another park, though he didn’t know what it was called and had never been inside it. They’d have to cross along some roads then and cross Route 29, and then they’d be in the burned-up reservoir and could follow it east for a while. After that, they’d have to find the highway. There were woods alongside the highway, and if they stayed in the woods and kept the highway in sight, it would take them to the bridge and they could walk right over the Bay. Laura’s parents were just eight miles on the other side. It seemed like a lot, but they could do it. He just needed to sleep for a couple of minutes to build his strength.

But he couldn’t sleep.

Beneath his fatigue was an energy that made him tremble.

Mike Sr. with that gun.

They were wasting time. The key was to get away from there, and yet they were sitting around, doing nothing. The truth was hardening all around him. The rest of the world wasn’t coming. The fire department was gone. He’d have to muster the strength to do it now, to get out of the neighborhood.

His fingers tingled, but it wasn’t like before. The map was mostly clear in his mind. He could run it, if he had to. He could put Laura on his back. He’d make bad time, but he would make it. He’d run that marathon without training. Once, he’d been a track star.

He went to her and could hear her soft breathing—a healthy breathing. Hadn’t she said she was feeling better? When she stirred, he touched her thigh. It was warm, and he could feel the fluids straining beneath her skin. It was full of life! People had no idea what was happening inside of themselves. Eddie knew this. He rested a hand softly on her belly. Then he laid his forehead down on top of it.

“Eddie …”

He felt things. Tremors, currents—an incubating heat. It filled him up, just touching her like that. On the other side of this, they would be a family.

“You’re crushing me,” she said.

He crawled up close to her, so her ribs expanded against his own. The symmetry of their bodies brought him some relief.

“We have to go,” he said.

“It’s too much. I can’t stop thinking about Patty.”

“Try,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of that image.”

“You will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because everything fades.”

She scooted to the edge of the bed and sat there. Eddie felt the cool place against his body where she’d removed herself.

“It’s awful,” she said.

“We’re surviving,” Eddie said. “We’re saving ourselves.”

“We’re abandoning him.”

“Mike Sr.?”

“He’s got nothing left, and now we’re leaving him.”

“We can’t save everybody. That’s what you said.”

“I don’t want to save everybody. I want to save someone we know. Someone right there.” She pointed at the wall in the direction of the yard.

“The fire department …” Eddie started.

She went into the living room, and when he came in, she’d curled up on floor and pressed her face into the carpet. “I’m no good at this,” she moaned. “I can only keep myself alive.”

“No,” Eddie said. “You don’t know what you’re capable of.”

“She’s out there right now. His wife, Eddie. And his son is dead, too.”

“You have to forget about them. When we go, you won’t think about them.”

“They’re our friends.”

“Our neighbors,” Eddie corrected.

“If I could kill him now, I would,” she said. “Just to put him out of his misery.”