1970

FERN WAS NEVER SURE where Edgar had gotten the magic mushrooms. He had taken the car someplace, been gone all day, showed up later at their little house on the Army base with the first smile of its kind she had seen on him in a year. He said, “I want to do something together. Don’t freak out.” When Cricket had been bathed and read to and her warm, three-year-old head had been kissed by both of her parents, Fern and Edgar each chewed two small mushrooms that tasted half-rotten and metallic and stuck in their teeth, and thirty minutes later the room took on a purple-green hue and Edgar started singing a song from a musical he had seen as a child and had not thought of since and Fern sat on the floor with an apple for an hour without taking a bite.

He said, “Did it really happen that we put a man on the moon?” and Fern said, “I think so. We watched it.” Later they went outside and said, “Outside!” like they had never really been there before, and they hadn’t, not this way, not with the grass this sharp and the leaves on the trees so individual and the sky—the sky!—dark and rich and flush with stars because they were on a tiny planet currently facing away from the sun and the universe actually might have been endless—endless!—and here they were, two bodies, maybe three hundred pounds of human between them, and they were both alive and they had made a child who was beautifully asleep. “I miss your brother,” Edgar said. It was a risk to bring this up and they rarely did but tonight Fern felt alive enough to talk about the dead. “Thank you for loving him,” she said. “I miss him too, but I’m glad he’s free of it all. He didn’t need to live in that place.” She looked at Edgar and his skin shimmered with color. “I do not forgive my mother,” Fern said. “I feel sorry for her, but I don’t forgive her.” Edgar nodded. They stood at the fenceline and looked up into the peach tree that was about to explode into blossom any day and they held hands—hands!—and they did not let go even when dawn flushed them with so much light that they felt overexposed.

—

The next day they took turns playing with Cricket, eyes sandy and burning, drinking glass after glass of water while the other slept. It felt good to be thankful.

That afternoon in the mail there was a letter for Fern. “Radcliffe?” Edgar asked, reading the address in the top left corner.

“Oh,” said Fern. There had been a fight, like a dozen others they had had in the year after Ben had died. Edgar had just received a postcard from Runner in Alaska who said he had married the Inupiat librarian and they were living off the land near Nome and that he had just killed his first seal. Edgar had said, “People are living communally and growing their own food and hunting or fighting for civil rights and we’re sitting here on an Army base in fucking Tennessee,” and she had said, “You were the one who insisted on this life. We have a three-year-old. I don’t know how to be a mother on a commune,” and he had said, “You know, women don’t have to be only mothers anymore. Don’t you want more for your daughter?” Fern had shut herself in the bathroom, furious. He was right and he was terrible. That night she had sent away for an application to Radcliffe because it was the best college she knew of and she thought she would never get in, thus proving to Edgar, to her mother, that she was nothing but a housewife. In the months while she had waited for the answer, the possibility that she could be accepted was a thin but bright crack. She had counseled herself not to want it, but she had.

Fern took the envelope. We are pleased to offer you a place in the incoming class, the letter read. “Oh,” she said again. She expected Edgar to be angry that she had sent the application without talking to him but instead he grabbed the letter and whooped. “This is amazing! This is exactly what we need!”

She wanted to be a mother and a wife but maybe she could also be her own self, separate from the needs of others. This possibility kicked at her from the inside. Just like that? Send one stack of pages to Cambridge and a door to yourself opens?

With the mushrooms still a vague fizz in their veins, Edgar and Fern hugged. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “I’ll finish my book, you’ll study, Cricket will grow up near the ocean.”

Out there on the edge of the country, new soil was a promise.

—

They had rented a cottage to begin with and when they drove onto their new street they found big trees and beautiful old houses all freshly painted and all the children in the yards were clean and white. They also found that Edgar’s mother was already in residence in a fancy hotel nearby. Road weary, the family sat at the table while Mary, wearing a red pantsuit with a huge collar, her hair trimmed into a new blond bob, served martinis. She said, “The good news is that I have already done a lot of research on houses.”

“Houses?” Edgar asked.

“I know you don’t care about these things, Edgar, so Ferny and I will take care of it.”

Over the next weeks, Edgar took Cricket to watch the Red Sox lose three games, to the museum where they stayed all morning in the ancient art collection and discussed philosophy with the sculpted heads of Roman noblemen. Another day he took her to the harbor so she could learn the names of different sailboats. “Gaff-rig, cat-boat, Herreshoff,” she said in her little voice.

Mary and Fern spent every day with a real estate agent who wore pink from head to toe every time they saw her. She drove them all over Cambridge in her big bronze sedan, which sighed over every bump. They drove along the edge of the Charles, sparkling blue and dotted with boats, the Boston skyline on the other side. They went to neighborhoods made of brick and neighborhoods filled with Victorians, neighborhoods around Harvard Square where they stopped for lunch in a sandwich shop filled with students with round glasses and long hair and jeans and leather jackets. They did not go to the neighborhoods where Irish people lived, where black people lived. The agent offered an edited version of the city.

Mary fell for a huge brick colonial with white trim and columns holding up the porch. It had six bedrooms, four baths, inlaid floors, three fireplaces and a garden thick with roses. “You can’t fake an old lawn,” the agent said, tapping her pink pump on the grass. “The younger stuff simply isn’t as dense.”

Edgar would hate it, Fern knew, but she liked it. It was beautiful—the big brass knocker, the long path to the door, the porch-swing. Mary was buying and Fern could let her mother-in-law take the fall for the choice. She had spent the last years in a box of a house on a base in the South where she was too unlike anyone else to have even one friend—a little comfort did not seem unearned.

To Fern, Mary explained that she would need at least four sofas and eight armchairs. All-new appliances. Fifteen good Persian carpets minimum, six chandeliers. “Teak is best for outdoors,” she said. “Inside I would recommend something warm.”

Fern said, “Edgar is going to hate this house. You know that, right?”

“The poor baby,” Mary said, frowning an exaggerated frown. “I wonder how he’ll ever survive such a sacrifice.”

—

Edgar did hate the house and he also didn’t care. He was thinking about his book and about sailing and about starting over.

The first night in the house, Fern sat up in bed in the blue hours and tore the blanket off. Her heart was racing. She jumped up, looked on the floor, under the bed, in the closet. “Where is he?” she yelled. “Edgar, where is he?” Edgar woke up and ran to his wife. “Where is Ben?” she said. “Where the hell is Ben?”

Edgar pinched her earlobe to wake her up. “Ferny, Fern. Ben isn’t here. We’re in Cambridge in our new house. It’s 1970.” He did not say the word dead.

Fern sat down on the floor of their big empty house and shook hard enough that Edgar felt it in the floorboards. He held on to her hands but said nothing. He had learned this from her brother: sometimes the only comfort is the fact of another person. Not a dam, but a surface to wash across.

Fern did not know that her father also woke sometimes and went looking for Ben. She did not know that her mother dreamed about him three nights a week, that in each dream, Evelyn and Ben were running side by side and they were lost and tired and it was on the brink of twilight and they had to keep going until they found the path home. Fern did not know that in her mother’s dream Evelyn held Ben’s hand, coaxed him gently forward, spoke to him the whole, hopeless way.

In the morning, the family went to the pet store and Cricket picked out a sloppy Lab that she named Flower. The dog and the girl followed each other around, each revering the other more. Before bed Fern went to pull Cricket’s blankets up and found them curled together like they were part of the same litter, legs and tail, fur and skin. She could almost feel her brother’s warm kid-back against her belly, the way they had folded together at bedtime after their daylong separation.

—

Summer’s torch fizzled down quickly. Fern suffered over clothes for an hour in the morning of her first classes. Everything she put on made her look too old to be a college student but too young to be a mother. She settled on a pleated skirt and blouse and oxfords not because she felt good in the outfit but because it was time to go. She dropped Cricket off with a sitter around the corner and drove to campus. Her first two classes were Modernism and Introduction to Sociology. Both professors were ancient men in ancient suits who could hardly hear and Fern was years older than the other girls, all in minis or bell-bottom jeans, their hair long and pooling behind them in the chairs. Fern’s hand hurt from taking notes and she felt incomplete away from Cricket, but also good, she noted. It also felt good. Since high school, Fern had been oriented towards another person. This was the first time in her adult life that her efforts were her own. She did not have to drag a child to the bathroom every hour. She did not have to carry snacks. To sit still in a chair and listen for a full hour and a half was luxury. She almost cried, to think that she might actually belong there.

—

Edgar rented a studio near campus in which to work on his book. It was small and run down and he loved it. He leaned out the window onto the fire escape and watched the students with their big hair and big glasses and he smoked cigarettes and read Tolstoy and worked to get the specter of a novel to emerge out of him.

At night Edgar knelt on the floor and put his ear to Cricket’s chest. Fern could not hear what he heard, but she knew what it sounded like because she did this too.

“How was writing?” she asked.

“Hard,” he said. “Today was hard. I think I figured something out about the structure though. How was school?”

“It was good. Everyone is so young,” she said.

Edgar was twenty-six years old. He still did not want to run a steel company. He still did not want his only contribution to the world to be suffering on one side and profit on the other with a thin column of vacations between. Edgar still did not want to turn into his father. Everyone would have to continue to wait for him to grow out of his own mind.

Edgar brought his lips down to Fern’s and held them there while a spark passed between them.

—

Fern recognized the symptoms immediately: she was so tired that her legs felt leaded; she was starving yet no food seemed edible. She called her doctor but already knew what the test would say: for the second time, she was not alone in her body.

The leaves changed to red by mid-September and it snowed a week later. It was as if the earth had been wobbled off her axis, as if the memory of however many tens of thousands of years of summer, fall, winter, spring had been undone. Fern fell asleep in class and woke up to the professor saying to her, “Missy? I’m terribly sorry to bore you.” She bent her head, stared hard at her notebook, which was blank except for the time and date of Cricket’s next dentist appointment. She could feel the snickers and the glances of the other students like pinpricks. They were scholars; Fern was a mother.

She stood in the line of girls waiting to talk to him after class. The other girls all had questions about selfhood and the public sphere. She heard a tall black girl with big eyes say the words the off-modern condition, and suddenly Fern, pregnant and tired and nauseated Fern, understood clearly that she had been mistaken: there was no place for her here.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to the professor, whose nose hair quivered with each breath he let out. “It’s not an excuse, but I’m pregnant.”

“Congratulations,” the professor said. For a moment, she thought he might have meant it. Perhaps he saw kinship in their shared adulthood—a person might get tired of looking out at a sea of nineteen-year-olds. But no. “Good for you,” he said, with a skip of mockery to his voice, “you’ve achieved the biological imperative. But here at Radcliffe we have other projects. You can stay in the class provided you stay awake in it, despite your condition.”

—

The neighbor was watering the hacked-back stubs of rosebushes out front. “Tell me again where you all have come from?” the woman asked when Fern got out of the car.

Fern just wanted to get inside and hate the professor while eating ice cream and sitting in a warm bath. “We lived in the South but we’re from Chicago. The North Shore,” said Fern. Fern knew that this fact, which had been so heavy to carry on the base, would keep her afloat on the sunlit surface of this particular social sea. They were wealthy with other wealthies, all of them having had the same upbringing, the same training, the same assumed values. This was not the whole of it, though—she did not care which wife was at the top of the pyramid, which wives were working their way up and which wives had slipped lower having made the wrong dish for a party, having gotten too drunk, been too honest. The woman sprayed her hose over a new tangle of Princess Graces and Polar Stars and Black Magics. “If you need anything . . .” she said, but her back was already turned.

That night Edgar put Cricket to bed and came downstairs humming. He had written two thousand words, some of them good. He was reading James Baldwin and wanted Fern to read it too so they could talk about it. He got a drying rag and began to work on the pile of dishes she had amassed in the rack.

“If you want me to say something about ‘the off-modern condition,’ then forget it,” she said.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

“I’m dropping out of school,” she told him. “I’m having a baby—what’s the point of pretending I’m a serious student?”

Edgar went to the freezer and took out a pint of vanilla ice cream. He got two spoons and patted the counter. They hoisted themselves up and ate big scoops.

She told him about the professor and Edgar said, “Don’t drop out. Take a semester off. Take a year off.”

“Do you think it’s lonelier to be a foreigner around people who obviously don’t understand you or to be among people who seem just like you but whom you don’t like?”

He kissed her on the neck. “Both,” he said.

“Maybe we should go far away.”

“I was as far away as a person can be and it didn’t help.”

Edgar would convince Fern not to drop out and give the professor the satisfaction. She would finish the semester with Bs, but she would not reenroll in the spring.

A few weeks later they would learn that Fern was carrying twins, and though twins ran in her family and this set was nothing more than genetics, it would feel to Fern like a direct apology from whatever god had made Ben and taken him again. Replacement plus addition. Fern was afraid and she was hopeful—here was a chance for a twin-pair to be broken up; here was a chance for a twin-pair to remain whole. It made her miss Ben too much. How good it would have felt to sit on a sofa next to her brother, both of them grown, a baby on each of their laps. She imagined the photograph of that day, how they would both smile the particular smile of a twin holding a twin and how she would have pinned the picture beside her vanity so that she could look at it every single day.

Fern remembered when she had first bought a razor and how she had sneaked off with it, embarrassment and excitement humming in her, and how, when she had come out of the steam and wrapped herself in towels Ben had been sitting on the sink and his face was thin and sorry and they both knew that the years when they were the same had just ended. Maybe they will both be boys or girls, Fern thought, rubbing her belly. Maybe they will always be each other’s mirrors.

At night, Fern dreamed about the end of the world, only the dreams were cheerful. It was the end of the world and she had a nice bow and arrow and was an extremely good shot. It was the end of the world and everyone played softball all the time.

The twins kicked her hard from the inside. So many little feet.

—

All through the fall, winter and spring, Edgar sat at his desk and he tried to explain to the white space of the page what it meant to be a son and a father. He tried to explain to the white page what it meant to have so much and yet to feel mostly the emptiness of desire, unfillable. He tried to explain that there was no life without want. He thought that if he could get these thoughts to make sense in language he himself might make sense in the world. Edgar was trying to write himself a way to exist.

Some days the magic trick almost worked. He got a few sentences that felt true, a scene of a boy in a limousine in a poor neighborhood, a scene of a young man in a bar in Kentucky feeling more companionship with the miners than he had with his own parents, except the miners died from their jobs and he was safe, a scene of a new father and his baby who was filled with a midnight-sadness that she could not explain and he could not discern, both of them weeping by dawn. Other days he reread his pages and saw there the whine of privilege, a character fooled by the sound of his own voice. Edgar wondered whether he even deserved to tell a story. Because of his father’s money, because of the men who earned pennies in the mines, pennies in the mills, he could sit at this slab of wood and write. His clothes were paid for by their effort, his glasses, his lunch. He did not know what it felt like to work close to the edge of survival. Maybe severe lack brought clarity—the skin-bone monk at the top of the mountain, having given up everything but his mind. Edgar was supremely lucky, but luck was a lonely place.

He turned on the radio and listened to the news of the war that had continued even after he himself had been sent home. The American position had grown weaker and weaker. Forty boys had died that day. Edgar thought of the unknown person whose job it now was to write to their mothers and fathers. He put his pen down and went walking. It was warm outside after having been cold for so long. The trees were tipped with buds.

In the windows of all the stores were objects made to shine and beckon, to distract. Edgar went inside a shop and felt the cold porcelain of a set of nested white and green mixing bowls. He weighed the bowls in his hands. “Shopping for someone special?” a pretty young salesgirl in a long flowered dress asked. The promise of this transaction was so simple—an object, a certain price and everyone left smiling.

“My wife,” he said.

“Is she a cook?”

“Not really,” he admitted.

“Can I show you something? It’s brand-new. We haven’t even put it out yet.” The girl touched Edgar’s elbow, led him to a locked case where she pulled out a box. Within: a gold chain with a deep locket. “It’s meant to hold a lock of hair. It’s old-fashioned and I think it’s so romantic.”

Edgar opened the latch. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

“I could cut the hair for you,” she said, her thin fingers miming a pair of scissors, closing. It was not something Edgar knew how to say no to. It was expensive, this locket, etched gold with a ruby in one corner. This was a gift his mother would have congratulated him for. The girl took out a pair of scissors from behind the register and pulled a curl at the back of Edgar’s head. “Hold still,” she said. He could feel her breath on his skin. She cut.

—

The day after the incident with the professor, Fern, seeking comfort, had ordered a desk from a famous modern designer in Sweden. She had not asked Edgar because the price was absurd and the shipping costs even more. It took months to arrive. She had received postcards letting her know of its progress, as if the desk was a friend who greatly anticipated this visit: Hello from Denmark; Love from London. The desk had traveled all through her pregnancy, as if it was following the same gestational calendar.

There had been a long break between mailings while the desk had sailed across the ocean. Fern had thought of it, crated up in the belly of a ship, rocking against the waves. Her own belly had grown enormous. She could hardly fit in the car anymore and baths were impossible, half of her sticking up out of the water. Then the correspondence resumed: I’m here in New York. Then, days before her due-date, two men knocked on the door, tall men with thick blond eyebrows and matching blue worksuits.

“We have come with your desk,” the first man said. The dog barked at him.

“Flower, shush,” Fern said.

The men had suitcases and another bag full of tools. The crate was on wheels, and they brought it in. The two men looked tired and thirsty, so Fern waddled into the kitchen and offered juice in juice glasses and slices of cheese and crackers on a plate. “Sit down a minute,” she said, “before you begin unpacking it.”

“Thank you. It was a long journey.” They had to fold themselves up carefully to fit at the table.

“Where are you coming from?” she asked, thinking of a shipping hub in a nearby city.

“Stockholm,” they said, surprised. “We traveled, with the desk.”

“You traveled with the desk from Stockholm?” The shipping costs made a new kind of sense.

“An American would do wrong setup.”

Fern looked at the clock. She was glad that Cricket was at preschool. Edgar would be home in a few hours and she wanted very badly for him not to walk in and discover that his wife had bought a completely unnecessary piece of furniture from across the world, and accidentally ordered two blond men along with it. “Shall we get to work then?” she asked. Another thing: she had begun to feel contractions. They were mild enough if she breathed right.

The Swedes looked too big for the house, for the chairs. She imagined that where they lived, everything must be much larger. Larger table, larger chairs, larger juice glasses, larger wives.

“It’s a big desk?” she asked.

“It is a Swedish desk,” said one of the men, revealing his yellow teeth. “It is right size.”

“So,” she said, trying to make conversation but not wanting anyone to get talking too long. Her body cinched up. She could feel the babies pressing down. The dog circled her as though she knew what was going on.

“We began the first day much early,” the yellow-toothed man explained. “Travel by train.” He smiled, waiting to see if she understood him. “That day was a cold day. How do you say this weather, like rain but not rain?”

“Fog?” she asked.

“Fog?” he asked back.

“Fog,” she said to confirm, and he repeated the word again.

For such big men, they took surprisingly small sips of their juice. Fern said, “I’m sorry, I think I am in labor.”

“For the baby?” said one.

The other Swede continued the previous conversation. “The last herring, we ate in the train. After, only bread and butter and meat from a can.”

“You have some herring?” the yellow-toothed man asked.

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t have any herring. Only meat from a can. Very old meat from a can,” Fern said, hoping to discourage them from wanting anything else to eat. She breathed through a wave of what was now definite pain. The two men watched her patiently. One went over to the crate, knocked on it.

“I should call my husband,” Fern said but when she dialed Edgar’s studio number it just rang and rang.

“We can help,” said yellow tooth.

Fern watched the clock, had to kneel while the pain peaked. She remembered this pain now—how could she have forgotten it? She also remembered that it went on and on, and figured that she had many hours to go. Flower whined with her. When Fern was back in her chair the first man said, “London was nice city. Having bad weather, but having good time.” Did the men have return tickets? Fern wondered.

“There are many dark people here in America,” one Swede said. “Do you feel fear of them?”

“Of the dark people? The black people?” Fern stumbled. “No, no, we like them.” It came out sounding wrong, as if they were a kind of animal some people thought of as pests and others found sweet.

“But not in this neighborhood,” the second man said.

“No,” she said, “not so much in this neighborhood.” Pain and shame peaked at the same time.

Finally, finally, yellow tooth stood up and stretched. He gave the small chair a dirty look. Fern wanted to defend it—we Americans can fit in chairs that size. We are not being cheap. He came to stand beside her and wiped her forehead, which was sweating. “You have a cloth? I can make it cold for you.” He wet a red gingham dishtowel in the sink, squeezed it in his big hand and draped it over Fern’s forehead. The contractions were closer together but she could not keep track of the time and survive at the same time. She kept expecting Edgar to walk through the door and drive her to the hospital.

The two blonds began to unfasten the nails in the crate, pulling at them with the back of a hammer. Boards fell away. It was like excavating a tomb. Musty, woodsy smell came out when they opened the door panel and the inside of the crate was so dark. The bigger man reached inside and pulled at a handle. Inside was a ramble of wool blankets.

Tape was cut and the two blonds pulled the blankets off, revealing the desk. Just a desk. It was rectangular and sleek and the wood was rich and marbled like meat. But it was only wood, not some precious material. It seemed now like a very strange thing to do—spend money to have some nailed-together boards brought from the other side of the ocean, complete with two handlers. And there was no assembly. All the Swedes had to do was take it out of the crate and run a soft rag over it to remove the shipping dust.

When Fern was between waves, yellow tooth pulled one of the kitchen chairs over to the desk and said, “Sit down.”

The desk was big. It was technically too big. Fern felt like a little girl sitting at it. She thought of her father at his big desk in his big study, a fat novel in front of him and a red pen.

Fern dialed Edgar again and again he did not answer. She finally called her doctor and he could hear in her voice that she was very far along. “Why didn’t you call earlier? I’m coming over.”

“You are?” she asked. “Don’t I have hours to go?” Only poor people and hippies had babies at home. Fern wanted the hospital. She wanted the drugs.

“I don’t think we have time to move you.”

While Fern rocked on her hands and knees, sat back up and rocked again, the Swedes drank coffee and found and ate cans of tuna fish to which they added a smear of butter. Fern, in a lucid moment, said, “Is that customary? Is it always done that way?”

“Never,” said one. “It has never been done that way.”

It was so hot in the house. Fern said, “I have to push now,” as much to herself as the Swedes. The dog paced.

“We understand,” said the yellow-toothed man. “You must lie down. Don’t worry, we understand what to do.”

The doctor would arrive just after the two boys had been safely delivered into the hands of the yellow-toothed man, wrapped in blankets by the other Swede and placed on Fern’s chest on their sides so their lungs could drain. The Swedes had waited until the cords stopped pulsing and then cut them with kitchen shears. One man had given Fern ice chips to suck on. The doctor said, “Oh, hello.” He had not expected this particular kind of company. The towels the Swedes had put under Fern were soaked with blood and fluid. “Thank you,” he said. They had done exactly what they were supposed to do. The babies, two boys, were scrunched but beautiful, one slightly larger than the other, and Fern was fine. Everyone was absolutely fine.

While the doctor put fresh towels under Fern and tended to her and Fern tried to figure out how to hold both babies at the same time, the Swedes began to cinch up the laces on their boots. They smoothed their shirts.

“We have to go back now,” they said.

Fern told them to make themselves a bag with the rest of the tuna fish and some bread and a thermos of coffee. They stood at the doorway, looking east towards the hills, towards the train, towards the many miles. “You are all right?” they asked.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to do that.”

“It was a luck,” yellow tooth said.

“Miracle of life,” the other told her. She had forgotten the desk completely. In the sunlight the Swedes had such tender, pink skin.

—

When Edgar came home he found that his family had nearly doubled. The doctor was there and Fern was lying on the bed covered by a blanket. “You gave birth,” Edgar said. “I missed it again.”

“Two boys,” Fern said, her whole body still flushed. “Come closer.”

“Are they all right?” he asked.

“They’re perfectly healthy,” the doctor said.

Edgar felt the weight of the locket against his leg. It made him feel stupid, this small, purchased beauty, when Fern had brought forth two lives in the space of an afternoon.

She grabbed his hands and pulled him onto the bed. “When Cricket comes home from school, we’ll be complete. This is our family.” Fern wanted to freeze them on this first day as a whole family before time got to work on them. The babies were tinier than tiny. They wanted to be pressed together, like two halves of a circle. Fern recognized this because she had felt it twice—first with Ben and then with Edgar. It was as if the idea of a single body did not exist—only in joining did either of them come true.

—

As if the family had tipped over the edge of a waterfall, time sped up. The twins were healthy and happy and neither of them was overquiet or odd. They were regular babies and then regular kids. Everywhere they went people said to Fern, “I guess triplets would be harder,” and “You certainly have your hands full,” and Fern smiled and nodded. The twins learned to crawl, to walk, to beg. She put them to sleep in their own beds but by morning one had always migrated over to be close to the other. Cricket learned to put on her own shoes, to pour a glass of milk. She learned to read. She learned to scold, to congratulate and to console. Time doubled, tripled. Edgar went to his study and read and wrote. Some days the story unwound and some days it tangled. Some days he came home feeling like a writer and some days he wanted nothing more than to give it up. Edgar felt the magnetic pull of misery less strongly than he ever had before. He was too busy trying to articulate the complicated fact of his own privilege to hate it the way he always had.

Edgar’s parents sent gifts, Fern’s parents sent short letters detailing the repairs that had been required on the house, the sculptures that had sold, the number of headache-free days Paul had had each month. Fern replied with news of the children, news of the summerhouse they had purchased on the island, the sailboat to go with it. She had to give her parents something because she was their daughter, but she wanted their reach to be shallow, surface-level, since everything they had touched before had been left aching.

Fern bought furniture and clothes and art and then spent time taking care of those objects. Edgar teased her for the purchases and then forgot about them. When the twins were two years old, she enrolled in one class—Archaeology—and imagined digging up bones of ancient people on the banks of the Nile, in the deserts of Syria, the mountains of Central Asia. At dinner she explained the methods to Edgar and the children: the way the area of a dig must be marked off in squares with flags and pegs. “The earth is like a layer cake,” she explained. “The deeper you go, the older the soil. It’s your first information about how old your find is.” Fern promised that they could conduct a dig at their summerhouse. She imagined wearing a bandana and sitting on the ground, brushing away the dirt from an Indian femur with a toothbrush. The children imagined bigger beasts: mammoths, pterodactyls.

Fern liked taking the class but she was afraid of a full schedule and afraid of failing again and afraid of being told just how small she was. “I have three children to raise,” she said when Edgar pressed her. “My mother had two nannies to help her. One of the kids is always waking up in the middle of the night. Everyone is always hungry. I’m doing all I can.” She kept picturing that professor and his nose hair and the humiliation that had bloomed in her. Learning to be a mother of three was hard enough and she had not slept a full night in all these years and no one gave grades for it and there was no end-of-the-year party or vacation and school sounded lonely and surrounded with teenagers and tests she did not have time to study for, old professors looking at her like she was already overripe.

“When they’re bigger,” she said, trying to smile. Edgar let it be. He did not want to tell his wife that he thought she could amount to more, though he did, because he loved her and because she was smart and because he was blind to so much of the work she did in their home, the invisible structure she built to support five lives.

—

Six cats were adopted and six cats were hit by cars or eaten by wild animals. Flower did not come home one night and Cricket quit eating for two days. The dog was replaced by a beagle, which could not be housebroken and was soon given away and replaced by a golden retriever whose blind enthusiasm even Cricket did not have the strength to match. Later there was a turtle, a rat and a series of fish. Maggie appeared on the doorstep and the children immediately made her family.

The house was all noise and then quiet, noise and quiet. Edgar’s parents came to visit with ever-larger gifts. In Chicago, the world’s tallest skyscraper was built using Edgar’s father’s steel. Fern’s parents sent a letter saying that the First Lady had purchased one of Evelyn’s sculptures to put in the White House garden and she had gone to see it settled, reported a long conversation at dinner with the wife of the Spanish Ambassador about the difference between American aphids and European ones. Fern replied with basic facts about the children—Cricket was growing a garden and could cook her own eggs and was reading books about fragile young British women, the twins were obsessed with building great block towers and crashing them down. In every conversation with her parents, Ben was a dark maw that would not close. Fern knew blame had no purpose but she hoarded it all the same.

The children always needed Fern to be a different kind of mother than she had been the week before. They exhausted her and she longed for a break and then she missed them acutely the moment they were out of sight—that was the truth of motherhood. Birthdays accumulated under everyone. Each year Edgar said, “Would you consider finishing your degree?” and each year she said, “Later.”

The rest of the world came into Fern and Edgar’s house on television: the Ohio National Guard shot unarmed students at Kent State, the Weather Underground bombed the US capital, abortion became legal. The first American space station was launched into orbit, people all across the country lined up in their cars to fill up during a gas shortage. The President resigned in scandal. The daughter of a rich newspaperman was kidnapped. North Vietnamese troops encircled Saigon. The last American soldiers were lifted by helicopter to an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. Nearby, the Cambodian dictator forcibly emptied his capital city and began killing thousands of people, but the world was war-weary and it would be a long time before anyone intervened.

A serial killer began and completed a spree. The economy was slow, inflation was high, people were stabbed and robbed in the subways in New York. There were gays in the streets and performance artists and cocaine; the music changed again and men grew long sideburns and everyone young was always taking their clothes off.

Edgar had a chapter of his novel published. Then on a winter Saturday, he sat at the kitchen table and held a thick stack of typed pages in his hands. They were heavy and felt warm. Almost like a living thing. Edgar looked at the title page: LUCKY by Edgar Keating. He found a large envelope, sealed the manuscript inside, wrote the name and address of an agent, and kissed the flap. Fern and the children were outside stomping snow into paths and chasing each other. Edgar was too nervous to say where he was going. “I’m taking the dog out,” he said. His whole body felt electrified. It would have been easy to talk himself out of mailing the package: the potential embarrassment, the concern that he had wasted his time, that he would have to find something else to do with his life. The day was deeply grey. A snowplow had created dirty piles on the sidewalk. It was not as bitter as it had been and Edgar was without gloves for the first time in weeks. On a busy corner he saw a thin man his own age wearing pressed plaid pants and jacket, a nice wool coat and sneakers. It took him a minute, but then Edgar knew. “Runner?” he said to the man.

“Holy shit, brother!” the man said. He had huge sideburns and curly hair that resisted the side-part it had been forced into. Edgar did not feel as grown up as Runner looked. Runner, whose wild and unapologetic life Edgar had sometimes wished for, a shadow of which formed the story in his novel.

The summary: he was there to close out his mother’s estate. He still lived in Alaska and was still married to the librarian but they had moved off the commune. “All we wanted was a real fucking toilet,” Runner said, “and we ended up with a big house, a couple of trucks, three kids and two law degrees.”

“You’re an attorney?” Edgar asked.

“I know. But I’m on the right side.” He told Edgar how he and his wife were working for the American Indian Movement. “There’s so much fucked-up shit in the past that it’s hard to know where to start,” he said. “Broken treaties, stolen objects, stolen land, stolen children, forced boarding schools, systematic rape. Mass murder. I could go on.” He looked Edgar up and down. “You seem happy,” he said.

Edgar squeezed the package in his hand. “Thanks. I am.”

Runner wrote down his address. He offered the guest room. He said, “We see the northern lights in winter and there’s almost no night in summertime. Come find me when you get tired of the city. I’ll take you salmon fishing. Bring the family.”

Runner, true to his name, held his briefcase up to his chest and jogged off. Edgar watched him until he turned the corner. For the first time, Edgar did not feel like he was living the worse life. Even the hippies were buying houses and having babies. They had all grown up.

Two weeks later the agent called with the news that Edgar’s novel would be published.

A few weeks after that Fern’s parents died.

Spring came, the roses bloomed, Fern dreamed about Ben. She talked to him in her head. Edgar waited impatiently for notes from his editor. Fern once again did not register for classes for the fall.

Fern thought of a hundred things she might have said to her parents about Ben, about herself, about being a woman, a mother, about love. She might have told her father that she didn’t blame him. She might have told her mother that she understood that it had not been fair for her either. Mostly though, their death was a quietness in Fern instead of an explosion. That her parents were no longer behind her on the path did not feel like an event; she had been walking away from them for a long time. Summer came again and the family packed for the island. They sailed, they swam. They plotted out a square of the cliff to dig up and followed the protocol Fern had learned in school—the grid, the logbook, the careful use of tools. Cricket discovered an arrowhead and toothbrushed it out of the soil and they found dozens of quahog shells with dark purple lips.

One afternoon Fern watched Will and James, the side-by-side of them, at work on a puzzle. She brought lemonade over and said, “You are so lucky to have each other. I hope you know that.” They did not even look up. They were years away from the treachery of adolescence, from the time they would turn to look for love elsewhere. She wanted them to always have each other, to never outgrow this perfect pairing. She imagined a corresponding set of girls for wives and a house big enough for everyone and one next door for Cricket—Cricket who did not have the luck to be a twin but also did not stand to lose her match.

The whole family went fishing and cooked chowder and sang sea songs on the lawn in the evening, slapping mosquitos under a sky that flashed with a coming lightning storm.

Then came August. Then came the call from the lawyer. The known world shook them off.