FOUR

Susan was barely six months old when Dore began to feel guilty. Sometimes she thought it was because of Nick, because of her anger at him. He seemed more in love with his child than with her. He couldn’t go down to the supermarket for a box of Kleenex without taking the baby with him. He had to take her to museums; to drive-ins, where he’d make a soft bed for her in the back seat; to restaurants and shopping malls. He just wouldn’t go anywhere unless the baby went along as well. As soon as he stepped into the trailer, before he even saw Dore waiting for him, waiting for the kisses that should be hers, he was in the baby’s room, teasing her, singing and nuzzling, riling Susan up so she wouldn’t sleep later.

Dore tried to pull Nick back to her. She put on sheer black nightgowns, she dusted herself with perfumed powder, and then she started seducing him—unbuttoning his shirt, tugging him down on the living-room rug if she had to. She felt it, though, how he somehow wasn’t there, how he kept listening for a voice that wasn’t hers, for sounds she wasn’t making.

“I’ll just be one minute,” he’d say, bending to kiss her breasts before rising up away from her.

She’d wait one minute, then two, before storming to her feet. She didn’t have to guess where he was, she knew his face was softened in wonder, that he was leaning over Susan’s crib. But she couldn’t yell at him. How could she? A man had the right to adore his daughter. And it was more than most of the men in the trailer court were capable of. None of them took his kids to the park the way Nick did; not one of them would be willing to spend a whole Sunday just sitting on a blanket with a baby. The children here all belonged to the women who bore them.

The trailer women saw how Nick doted on Susan, but even so, they gave their advice to Dore. They didn’t discuss children with men. Dore saw the pictures Ruby’s girls drew, taped up on the kitchen cabinets. Ruby was always drawn big and bright, taking up the page with her outstretched hands, her mass of hair, and her smile. But her husband, Danny, who was even larger than she was in real life, was dwarfed on the paper. He had no arms, and in some of the pictures it looked like he was wearing a skirt.

The first time Dore saw those drawings, she had to sneeze to keep from laughing. She waltzed home and curled about Nick in gratitude. She used to think she knew what Susan’s drawings would look like, but lately she feared that she would be the person dwarfed and disappearing in a drawing. She thought the baby preferred Nick. Susan quieted right down when it was Nick who picked her up. She didn’t stiffen in feeding the way she sometimes did with Dore. Susan would let Nick change her without a fight, and when Nick was away on the road, the baby seemed to know. She’d get cranky, spit up in her crib, and refuse her bottle. She perked up only when she saw Nick again, when he asked how his girl was. “Oh, we’re both dandy,” Dore said.

The whole thing vaguely shamed her so that she couldn’t talk about it, not even with Flora. She told herself she wasn’t a bad mother, there wasn’t one thing defective about her. If there had been, the other women would have picked up on it, they would have noticed it and scolded her. She watched the way they were with their babies. She didn’t think they showed any more love than she showed Susan.

No, she took good care of her baby. She rocked her and told her stories. She took Susan into the bathtub with her and filled it with bubbles. She’d look at her baby and feel half-dizzy with love. She didn’t know. It was just that whole nightmare period, the way Susan was somehow different with Nick. Dore thought maybe she just needed to get out alone with Nick, without the baby. Maybe when Susan got used to that, Dore could even think about going back to work again. Nick, after all, still had his job. They could hire a girl, just for half the day, just until she got home. Dore remembered Ronnie Dazen’s eyes suddenly, how they had followed her, had seen no one else but her—and despite herself, she blushed with pleasure.

Nick was uneasy about getting a sitter, but he agreed to it when he saw how unhappy Dore was, how much she wanted to get out alone with him. He wouldn’t hire anyone from the trailer court, though there was certainly a wealth of baby-sitting material there. The girls scribbled advertisements for themselves on colored index cards they tacked up on the bulletin board by the pool. The names blurred from the splash of the water, the slogans (“Leave the baby with someone you know, then what a treat to get up and go”; “Hire me, I’m great, you see!”) grew smeared and inky. Nick didn’t trust any of them. They were too young, too silly. They whispered every time he walked by them.

So Nick called up one of those services, and there were a few interviews, and finally they hired a high-school girl named Monique Lelac, who came with two references. Monique was tall and pale and thin, studying to be a painter. She was from France, finishing her basic schooling before returning. Nick thought she was great. The first time she came over, he saw how she moved right toward the baby, how she pulled two soft cotton blocks out of her bag and handed them to Susan.

Nick insisted on giving Monique a detailed lesson on how to use the fire extinguisher. He showed her the numbers of the police and fire departments tacked up right by the phone, and he showed her how to light the stove, making her do it while he watched. Dore told him he was being silly; that if they wanted to make the movie, they should go now.

Their first few times out alone, Nick called Monique from the theater, from the restaurant. He didn’t relax until they were back in the trailer and he saw for himself how Susan was sleeping. “You see?” Monique said. “Everything is fine.”

They hired Monique every week. Nick began trusting her enough not to call her at all, and Dore finally relaxed. She found she liked her daughter much better when she didn’t have to spend every minute of the day with her, when she could have Nick to herself for a whole evening. It felt like they were courting again. They held hands in the dark of the movies. At restaurants, she would lean over and nip him on the neck. One evening he surprised her by driving out to one of the lakes and parking with her. There were other cars scattered about, just teenagers, fumbling in the back seats, passing Thunderbird wine back and forth. But Nick had brought champagne and he spread out a soft plaid blanket across the back seat, and when the two of them came home, they were both flushed, their eyes glittering like mica. “Have a nice time?” Monique asked.

No one in the trailer court went out as often as they did. No one could afford to, or maybe no one wanted to. Sometimes, when Nick was away for a week, Dore would call Monique just so she could get out and go to a movie by herself or go shopping. It was too hard being without Nick and having to stay in the trailer all day. “A baby needs attention,” Flora said. “She gets it,” Dore said, balancing Susan in her lap.

Her guilt made her try harder. She’d put Susan into the backpack Nick had bought and take her to the park. “What a good girl,” she crooned. “My little plum.” She’d turn and look at Susan with rare delight. She’d start to feel wonderful. And then her back would begin to hurt so she’d have to unbuckle the backpack and carry Susan in her arms. By the time she got home, exhausted, hot, Susan burbling and happy, she’d need to curl up around the heating pad to uncramp her muscles. She tried to talk to Susan, saying, “Listen, I’m your mother and I love you, I do.” She told her stories about mothers who loved their babies so much they created whole magic kingdoms for them. And then she’d lie back in bed and remember how complete she had felt carrying Susan, how content and whole, and she’d try to figure out just why that feeling had left her, just where it had gone, and why love wasn’t enough.

Dore felt the women watching her when she went out nights with Nick. She sensed eyes behind the curtains studying Nick when he walked Monique out to the car to drive her home, her long white legs flashing in the moonlight. The trailer girls who baby-sat resented this usurper. They snubbed Monique every chance they got, deliberately gathering in front of Dore’s to talk, becoming sulky and silent when Monique walked past. Girls who had once come out of now here to help Dore carry groceries from her car, to help with the stroller, seemed suddenly to evaporate.

Ruby, whose girls baby-sat more than anyone, came to visit Dore less and less, and when she did come, she was critical. She noticed the baby’s wet diaper before Dore did; she commented on the brand of baby food Dore used, telling her stories about glass being found in the jars. She judged everything, but she never once came out and asked why Dore hadn’t hired one of Ruby’s own girls to tend her baby. Monique even made the mistake of putting her own index card up on the bulletin board for baby-sitting. It was ripped down every time she tacked it up, and of course no one ever called her.

The thing about Monique was that she didn’t even like kids. She needed occasional work that paid decently, and baby-sitting was the one thing she knew she could get. People were morons. All she had to do was say two words with her French accent and suddenly she was in hot demand. It was all such baloney. No one ever bothered to check her references, which were coaxed from old beaux, written in false hands.

She didn’t do much with Susan. She set her into her playpen and then studied for an hour or so before she got on the phone. She would have invited her American boyfriend over if it weren’t so far out of the way, and if the people in the court didn’t watch her so. Instead, she phoned him. She knew how to time things, how to gauge when Nick would call, irritating her with a million stupid questions, reminding her over and over about the damned fire extinguisher. He didn’t even keep ashtrays around, at least not that she could find. He had babyproofed the place so well it once took her a half-hour just to find a sharp knife to cut some cheese. But at least after he had called, she knew she was free for the night. An hour before they were to return, she’d tend Susan, changing her, giving her a bottle. She put Susan to bed briskly, with no stories, with only a snap of a kiss. She was a good enough baby. She didn’t cry that much, and despite herself, Monique was actually beginning to like her.

They were dancing, moving among the kids and the bright lights, when Nick decided to call Monique again. He was gone for only a moment, and when he came back he was vaguely irritated. “She’s been on that damned phone for hours,” he said.

“Well, she’s a kid,” Dore said. “What do you want?”

They left early, though, and when they walked into the trailer, Monique was curled on the couch, reading a botany textbook. The place was so quiet, you could hear the ticking of the clock. “You’re home early,” she said.

Dore brushed by the baby’s room and peeked inside. Susan was under a light yellow blanket, her soft white toy lamb beside her. When Dore walked back to Nick, she said, “She’s perfectly fine,” and then she went into the kitchen for some water.

“And no more phone calls that take two days,” Nick said to Monique, handing her her money.

“What two days?” Monique said. She stretched, waiting to be driven home.

Probably no one would have noticed anything for a while if Nick hadn’t decided to go and check on his daughter himself, if he hadn’t taken Dore’s peek one step farther, bending down to kiss Susan, to stroke back a soft wisp of hair, the same inky black as his own.

The name for it was crib death. A simple catch in the breath, a death so soundless you could stand right over a baby and never even notice that one moment there was an intake of breath, and the next, nothing. It was a mystery unprotected by fire extinguishers and phone calls, by rope-tied drawers and covered wall sockets.

Monique had insisted on coming to the hospital, terrified that she had done something she shouldn’t have. Even after she knew it was crib death, she still couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, and when she left, she left alone, hailing a cab in the darkness.

Nick and Dore were sleepwalkers. They rode home not speaking, not touching. It wasn’t until they reached the entrance of the court that Dore got hysterical, that Nick remembered, almost as if waking from a dream, that Susan wasn’t going to be there. His hands started shaking; he violently swerved the car around, careening, driving like a crazy person to the Holiday Inn at the next exit.

He felt safer in the hotel. He kept telling himself it was somehow a mistake, that none of it was really happening. He’d wake up in the morning and realize his error and then he’d owe Monique all this money for spending a whole night watching over his daughter, his girl. He tried to breathe normally. He sat on one of the beds in the room, beside Dore, but her eyes were glassy with pain, and when he touched her, she flinched.

Dore eventually cried herself into a restless sleep, but Nick stayed up, one hand on her belly where it rose and fell with her breath, the other hand moving on his own knee, the way a stranger’s hand would in comforting. Don’t think, he told himself. Don’t think.

They stayed at the hotel until after the funeral, and when they drove home, they drove with people from the trailer court and Dore’s parents. No one knew what to say to Nick. The men patted his arm, stiff, uncomfortable; a few muttered vague sorrow. But all the women concentrated their energies on their own kind, on Dore. Flora wouldn’t let Dore alone for one moment. She even offered to move the two of them into her trailer for a while; she said she wasn’t so sure that being alone right now was such a hot idea. “She’s not alone,” said Nick, but Flora paid him no mind.

Nick sealed up the baby’s room, but Dore kept walking by, jerking the door open, straining to hear anything, a cry, a breath. She couldn’t believe she wouldn’t open the door Nick kept shutting and find Susan laughing in her crib. It wasn’t true.

Dore’s parents left, and the women from the court began coming over with plates of cold cuts. They all let Dore be. No one thought of blaming her for hiring a sitter outside the court, for going out so often; no one even mentioned the mother’s intuition they all depended on. The only person doing any blaming was Dore herself.

She told them what a terrible mother she had been. She’d get so wrought up she’d have to go into the bathroom. They’d all hear the water rushing into the sink, masking her crying, and when she came back out, no one said anything about her red eyes, no one looked at anything but the tangle of needlework in their hands, the plates on the table. Dore told them she was responsible, that she was an unnatural mother, that she had ignored her own baby.

“Oh, hush, you did not,” said Ruby.

“The baby had nightmares,” Dore said suddenly. “She wouldn’t stop crying.” She looked at Flora. “You knew. Everyone knew. You said you could hear it halfway down the court. I don’t know, maybe she knew what was going to happen. Babies are so close to their beginnings, maybe they can see their own ends, too. And—and—she was marked.” She touched Flora. “You said so.”

“Dore,” said Flora. “That was just a birthmark, nothing more than a daub of extra color. And I never in my whole life saw one single baby who didn’t wail his lungs out once in a while. You’re just tormenting yourself, and for no good reason at all.”

“Listen,” Dore said. “I did nothing. I could have wheeled her in the park more. I could have taken her to the baby pool. I went out by myself, leaving her with the sitter. I could have taken her, I could have.”

“You could have been the first man on the moon, too,” Flora said. She took Dore’s hand. “There’s no one to blame,” she said.

Dore said nothing, but she kept looking. She went to the library and got medical texts and turned to the pages on crib death, writing down statistics, details, on small scraps of paper that she’d jam back into her purse. She bought medical paperbacks in the drugstores and read them in the trailer. She hid the books from Nick; she never discussed what she read with him, and when she came home one day to find him reading one of the books, his face steel, she averted her eyes. Neither of them said anything about anything. Dore sprawled across the bed, watching the ceiling, listening to the steady turn of the pages Nick was reading, waiting for him to come across the one sentence in the book that would, once and for all, irrevocably blame her.

Dore needed Flora more and more. She needed the women in ways she didn’t need Nick. She almost couldn’t bear to be with Nick. Every time she saw his face, she remembered just who had prodded and prodded for a sitter, just who had insisted on making those nights under the stars last and last because she couldn’t let go of any of the sweetness. When he tried to touch her, she flinched. She kept going over to Flora’s, walking into the other woman’s kitchen as if it were her own. She’d start washing Flora’s dishes in the sink, she’d shell the peas for Flora’s dinner, keeping her back straight, her eyes unfocused, and Flora, knowing mindless work was just what Dore needed, said nothing.

Nick couldn’t believe it. He felt that he was precariously floating through life, unattached to anyone or anything. Dore talked only to the women, and the women ignored him. He walked toward the men, but they were embarrassed by his grief. They’d pat his back and avert their eyes; they’d mutter what a tough break it was and then excuse themselves, leaving Nick standing in the middle of the street, alone.

At night he reached for Dore. He wanted to make love to her, to be inside of her, as deep as he could, so that he’d know he was a part of someone, but she stiffened, she pushed him aside. “I can’t,” she said.

He knew she blamed herself, but as far as he was concerned, he was the one at fault. How could he have agreed to a sitter? How could he have allowed himself all those times away from his daughter, away from his life?

He saw the baby everywhere. At first, just glimpses. Under the bed, a gurgle by the back door. Sometimes, too, he simply smelled her. Milk scent heavy in the sheets, so elusive, so strange, he’d tear the covers from the bed trying to find her. Only once did he see her whole. He was stepping from the shower, and there she was, just under the steam by the door, crawling toward him.

He quickly crouched, reaching out his hands, his heart slamming against his chest. He shut his eyes, grabbing for her. All he had to do was just touch her, fingertip on skin, and she’d be real, she’d be alive. He knew it, and then his hand trembled, and he grasped for her, and instead of her downy dark hair, her peachy skin, he felt the sudden rough terry towel on the floor, the smooth side of the shampoo bottle, and he opened his eyes and she was gone. His baby, his girl. He slumped to the damp tiled floor and put his hands up to his face and wept into them. He wished he were holding his daughter—and, oh, God, he wished he were holding Dore.

He began working. At first, to forget. Later, because it became such a simple pleasure, walking into a room, finding a face that seemed glad to see him. He would never have left Dore for a moment if she had seemed to need him, even a little, if she weren’t so wrapped up in her cocoon of women. He was nervous about seeing his clients at first. He was used to treating them all like friends, telling them all about Dore, all about his daughter. Before he even started pulling out the new crop of book jackets, pitching his books, he’d be pulling out snapshots of Susan, showing her off. But now he didn’t want to talk about anything; he didn’t want to have to say the words, to remind himself all over again what had happened, freshening his pain until it was all he could do to breathe. He didn’t want anything more than the warmth of a welcome.

He had nothing to worry about. He didn’t have to tell his clients anything, because somehow they already seemed to know. No one said anything, but clients had hot coffee ready for him as soon as he stepped in the door. There were crullers and chocolates set on a plate. He was taken to lunch, to dinner, made to have a cocktail or two. And clients bought more books from him than he knew they could sell, and when he pointed that out, he was waved aside. He couldn’t bring himself to ask any of the old questions about how their families were doing, and no one volunteered information; they seemed to be waiting, poised on his words.

Nick finally broke down at the Stonewall Bookshop in Philadelphia. The book buyer there, a friendly young woman named Felice, led him to the back room and made him sit on a box of books and talk to her. She listened while he spilled out his grief; she kept her hand lightly on his shoulder and she never once took her eyes from him. When he was finished talking, she didn’t say anything. She didn’t tell him it would get better with time, she didn’t say she understood, but she kept her hand right where it was so he could feel her pulse moving through her fingers, and she sat so close, he could hear her breathing.

She made him go with her to a movie, right that moment, and she kept talking to him through the film, ignoring the angry hushings of the people around them, not letting him brood, and it wasn’t until afterward, over coffee, that she told him she had heard the news a week ago, from another salesman. “News like that spreads,” she said, and then she waved at the waitress, tilting up her coffee cup to show it was empty.

Nick worked long hours. He liked being busy, out on the road, his mind filled with schedules and billing sheets. His hours were so crowded, he could fall into bed and sleep from exhaustion, deep and dreamless; he could wake up and the million things he had to do that day would push into his mind, leaving no room for Susan, for Dore.

When there were lulls, when he did call Dore, she usually wasn’t even home. He’d have to call over at Flora’s. “She’s sleeping,” Flora told him. “She’s out back in the sun.” The times he could persuade Flora to get Dore to come on the line, Dore sounded distracted and very far away from him.

“I hate to leave you alone,” he said.

“I’m not alone,” Dore said. “I sleep at Flora’s.”

She didn’t want to talk. There were long silences that he kept trying to fill, and as soon as he hung up the phone, he wanted to dial her again right away.

It was funny, too, that now, for the first time in his life, when he climbed back into his car for the drive back to Dore, he felt a sudden unwillingness, a raging yearning to stay where he was, moving from bookstore to bookstore, collecting smiles like medals.

He began thinking they should move. It was too hard to drive into the court, to have every single trailer remind him of what he wanted to forget, to see his past in every face. And, too, he had this strange feeling that the trailer court was gradually taking Dore away from him, transforming her, and that the longer they stayed, the more he would lose. He wasn’t quite sure where they should go or how to approach it, until he saw a notice on the company bulletin board. They needed a salesman in the Boston area. He started to think. He remembered a brochure Tom had about Boston; he could almost see the picture of the skyline. He remembered Helen saying a city like that didn’t interest her, because a place that got so cold in the winter wouldn’t allow a proper summer to get anywhere near it.

He talked to his boss, and then he went to Dore. He told her it was a great career move, and he told her that they needed to get away from their past, needed to be in a place where every single thing they encountered wasn’t a memory.

“I don’t want to leave here,” Dore said.

“Yes, you do,” he said.

She didn’t say anything, and when he prodded, she sighed. She said she would think about it, and then she went back into the kitchen and he heard the slap of the door, her slow, careful steps on their way to Flora’s.

She wasn’t lying. She did give it some thought. She thought about how much easier it was for Nick, how his loss was less total than hers because, after all, he could still sense the baby around him; he sometimes even saw her, she was sure of that. Oh, she knew, she knew. She had seen him sniffing at his shirts, she had seen him turn toward Susan’s room, startled, listening, and when she asked him what was he listening to, he had become flustered. He had told her it was nothing, but he hadn’t been able to meet her eyes. She never once managed to feel Susan around her, no matter how she strained with her eyes clamped shut, no matter how she sniffed and sniffed until people started asking her if she was catching cold. She thought it all must be part of her punishment for not having loved Susan enough, for not having been a good enough mother.

Sometimes she thought Nick was right about leaving. It wasn’t always enough to spend the afternoon at Ruby’s, the slow, steady evenings with Flora. Ruby suddenly didn’t like it when Dore did her dishes; Flora told her to leave the meat loaf alone because she had her own secret recipe she liked. The women let Dore stay as long as she wanted. No one ever told her to leave, but they were reclaiming their old lives, leaving her with nothing more to do than sit with her hands in her lap. She had time to think then, time to know that all she had to do was get up and look outside and she would see Nick crouched down among the flowers she had planted, parting the petals in his search. She knew what he was looking for. She knew, too, what she would never find.

She woke up one night and Nick wasn’t there and she suddenly started remembering how it was with them when they were first courting, how just the sight of him had made her heart helpless. She missed him, she suddenly wanted him there beside her. She got up and went to the window and saw him, standing out in the middle of the street, fully dressed. He was rocking on his heels, his hands in his pockets, and she went outside in her white T-shirt and panties, and when she got close enough to him, she saw he was crying. She rested her head against his back, felt how warm his body was, and then, without turning, he looped his arms about her, he rocked her in his rhythm, and then she said it was all right, they would leave.

They moved to Sommerville, to a large, sunny, one-bedroom apartment right on the trolley line, just fifteen minutes from Boston. At first Dore didn’t even bother to leave the apartment. She spent a lot of time on the phone talking to Flora or Ruby, trying to keep up the connection. She missed the trailer, she missed the whole layout of the court. The week they had left, the place had thrown them a going-away party at the community center. Someone made fried chicken, someone else brought cole slaw and hot dogs. The trailer kids ran around and threw chips at one another, the babies got cranky, and the men idly flirted with their buddies’ wives. Nick had brought the young couple he’d sold the trailer to, and he moved them through the crowd for introductions, becoming more a part of the trailer court in his departure than he had ever been while he lived there.

Now, though, Dore felt that part of her life receding, telescoping away. After a while, Flora on the phone didn’t feel as familiar as she used to. Ruby, on the phone, was rushed. She had kids pulling at her skirts; she had the woman who had moved into Dore’s old trailer coming by for coffee. Dore, no longer part of the community, felt pushed out on her own.

She moved tentatively. She walked two blocks to the supermarket. She took the trolley to Boston and wandered through Fil-ene’s basement, but everything she picked up was pulled from her hands by another, more ambitious shopper, and in the end she just gave up and came home with nothing.

Nick watched her. A simple thing like buying herself a new belt would make him smile at her, treat her like everything was going to be just fine. She’d wake nights burning, wanting him, but then she’d turn and see him already awake, leaning on one elbow staring at her, and it made her so angry that she’d get up and go to sleep on the living-room couch.

She found a teaching job at a private high school to keep herself busy, but she couldn’t get excited about it, or care even slightly about what might happen. Her teaching was subdued, reflective. Her students imagined there was something dangerously aloof and mysterious about her, and they adored her for it. They smiled. They treated her as if she were alive and worth knowing. Dore began finding love notes slid into the pages of her grade book. She got essay after essay from young girls about their stormy love affairs. She got comically inaccurate descriptions of abortions. She got suicide tales told by someone who was burning away in hell, looking sorrowfully back on a damaged life. She graded every paper without comment. She wouldn’t meet the disappointed stares of her students when she passed their papers back into their hands.

She came home evenings and made dinner. She graded papers. She saw Nick watching the corners of the rooms, cocking his head at the sounds she never heard, and then, in the stillness of the night, she, too, tried to feel her daughter. She listened for her. Come home, she thought, come home.

Nick had thought the move would change Dore, and it had, but not in any of the ways he had hoped. Sometimes she slept pressed tightly against him, sometimes she slept on the couch. When she made love, she was so soundless, so removed, he sometimes yearned to bite noise from her skin, to pull a sigh from her hair. Instead, he was gentle. He acted as though a false move would shatter her.

The move didn’t make things much better for him, either. He escaped to the road. He kept telling himself that his life was new now, that he wasn’t going to think about what had happened. He’d start to get pleasure from driving on the highway; he’d glance over at the other cars, and then, halfway to some new city, he’d have to pull the car over to the shoulder because he was so upset, because he had seen a baby in the car ahead of him, and his own car had suddenly filled with the scent of milk. He sat slumped over the wheel until the milky smell started to disappear, and then he bolted upright. “No,” he pleaded. “Don’t go. Don’t.”

When the car finally smelled like nothing more than a car, he drove to the nearest pay phone and called Dore. He couldn’t make his mouth work very well. He made up some story about having forgotten some papers at home, just to keep her on the phone talking with him. He told her he missed her, he told her he loved her. Sometimes he asked her if she wanted to catch a plane and meet him at the hotel, but she always said no.

“You miss me?” he said. “You love me?”

“Don’t I act like I do?” Dore said, and then she told him she had to go, there was someone at the door.

Nick was cheerful and friendly to his clients. He lied to his old contacts, telling them how well things were going, that he and Dore both loved Boston. To his new clients, he presented a picture of great activity. He detailed dinners that never happened because Dore didn’t feel well, plays they didn’t see because he couldn’t focus his attention. He made it seem that he was happy, and sometimes, when he almost could believe what he was saying, he tried to stretch out the conversation just to make the feeling linger.

Away, without constant reminders, he could fool himself into thinking he had a very different life. He wasn’t living with a woman who was more of a ghost than a partner; he hadn’t lost a baby. He was just a salesman, a visitor in a city, with time to enjoy it. He tried to stretch the time out the way he stretched out conversations. He’d walk around trying to find the longest lines at restaurants, and once seated he’d read every item on the menu, then call the waitress over and make her explain even the simplest meals to him. Even then, he wouldn’t order until she had come back three separate times, asking him with a steely gaze if he was ready yet. He never enjoyed the food. He took slow, careful bites, watching the other men in the place and wondering if they were happy, if they had wives who loved them, who let themselves be somehow indelibly marked by lovemak-ing, if they had daughters who were still alive, still safe.

He took over some new territory, wanting to stay as busy as possible. The only problem was that his boss wanted him to take over Pittsburgh, too, the one place he never wanted to return to. He wanted the new territory, he needed it, and in the end he told himself that he could go back and be just fine; It didn’t have to matter that he had once been so unhappy there, because, after all, he was a new person now and none of that could touch him anymore. He wouldn’t let it.

It felt so strange in Pittsburgh now. He walked past Marks, only it wasn’t Marks anymore; it had been torn down and made into a porno theater. No one at the theater seemed to remember much about a student-run café. The girl at the ticket booth scoffed at Nick when he persisted; she told him to either buy a ticket or get the hell away, because his standing around was going to drive the customers away. “What customers?” Nick said, looking around the blank sidewalk. “See? You drove them off already,” the girl said.

Nick couldn’t bring himself to go past the home. He didn’t want to see boys standing out in the yard, yearning toward him when he walked past, mistaking his interest for their salvation. He didn’t want to walk into Mr. Rice’s office and watch him fumble for Nick’s name, trying to place the man he had once claimed was just like his own son.

He wouldn’t go to his old house, and he wouldn’t go anywhere near where his parents were buried. Being in the city where they were didn’t make him feel any closer to them; if anything, it almost felt like a betrayal to come back to the place Tom had tried so hard to escape, the place he himself had managed to leave.

He walked to the stores where he used to buy his clothing, he passed the place where he used to get his haircuts, and then he went back to the hotel and called Dore. There was no answer. He didn’t know where she went evenings. There was no Flora around Sommer-ville, no Ruby. Dore never even mentioned any neighbors she might know, any friends. He couldn’t pinpoint his competition for her anymore, and he felt powerless. He called her three times, letting the phone ring and ring, and then he got his jacket and wandered over to town to get something to eat, to be among people.

He ended up in Shadyside. He remembered artists used to live here, students, but now he saw only a lone businessman, a few older women walking arm in arm. The Cluck-a-Buck, where he used to work, was now a psychedelic poster shop, but even this early in the evening it was closed. It was funny—even though the city had changed, he still didn’t like it. He walked around. It was only eight o’clock, but the streets seemed so dead, the homes and apartments shut up tight, and he thought, Who could ever live in such a lonely city? Who could live here without going mad?

He searched for noise, finally finding a small Italian restaurant on a side street. The tables were cramped close; it was fairly crowded, fairly noisy, and it comforted Nick just to see it.

He was seated by the door at a small table for two, and he was studying the menu, line by line, when a woman tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you mind if we share a table?” she said. “It’s just that I’m in this terrible hurry.” She stared down at him, anxious. “I eat really, really fast,” she said.

Nick looked up at her for a moment. He had never seen anyone who had eyes like hers, so deep and black he couldn’t make out the pupils, skin so pale it was practically white. An unruly mass of black hair tumbled down her back. She was dressed in black, too—one of those plain, sweatery dresses, hitched up and belted into a mini.

“Listen, you take the table,” he said, wanting to prolong his release from the quiet, empty streets.

But she shook her head. “No, come on, I can’t do that,” she said, annoyed. “Please.”

“Sit,” Nick said, and she did, ignoring him, immediately picking up the menu, bending forward for some of the bread. She ordered quickly, and she didn’t look up until the food came, and then only to clip back her hair. She smiled at him then. She said it made some people squeamish to eat with all that hair around; that even when she was growing up, her teachers used to call her up to their desks just to get her to pin her hair out of the way.

“Some of the kids thought I was a witch,” she told Nick. She didn’t know how it started. Maybe it was the hair, maybe the dark, ill-fitting clothing her mother bought her. She hadn’t really minded people thinking she was the reason they found twenty dollars on the street. It was only when she was made the cause of someone’s bad luck that she got angry.

“Kids thought I hexed them into failing a test, that I somehow made their dogs run away. What did I have to do with any of it? Some of the girls at school once offered me five dollars to make up love charms. I told them the truth, that I had no charm, but they didn’t believe me. I needed the money. I wanted to buy a necklace. So I wrapped up some Queen Anne’s lace in a red string, said some words over it, and then I took that money and tucked it into my waistband the way I thought a real businesswoman would.” She took a sip of water. “My father was watching from the window, and when I came inside, he beat me with a tennis racket.”

She grinned. “It didn’t stop me.” She told him her name was Leslie and that she was no more a witch than he was. She was a dressmaker—a designer—who worked out of her home. She had worked in New York City for a while and done fairly well, but she hated the city, hadn’t been able to cope with the pace or the pressure.

Nick wasn’t interested in remembering his life, not during a light and pleasant dinner, so he told her only outlines—that he sold children’s books, that he lived near Boston. He was mute about Dore and Susan.

“So listen,” Leslie said. “Why don’t you let me know the next time you’re in town and maybe I’ll buy some books from you?” She fished in her purse and pulled out a scrap of paper, a nibbled pencil, and scrawled her number and address.

“You can buy any book I sell right in the stores,” Nick said, but Leslie shook her head; she said she liked things when they were most direct.

“You like living here?” he said abruptly.

“I love it,” she said. “I’d never leave here.”

He was baffled. “But what do you do at night? The streets seem so empty.”

She laughed. “What does anyone do at night? I go to movies or the theater, I visit friends, go out to eat—you know. Sometimes I just get into an old robe at eight and watch TV.” Nick shrugged and she stiffened a little, defensive. “Listen, we have everything Boston has and we’re prettier.”

His food arrived, and she didn’t talk much after that, but Nick still liked having her interesting face to look at while he ate, her voice occasionally directed at him. She bolted her food, told him she had to rush to get to a fitting, and when she finished her meal, she abruptly unclipped her hair so it fell, casting shadows about her. “Look,” she said, standing. “Call me, why don’t you. If you lose my number, it’s in the book. And I bet I can make you love this city the way I do.”

“Not a chance,” Nick said, but he smiled at her, and she smiled back before turning away. He watched her as she left; he saw how she turned around once to meet his gaze, how in seeing him, her face took on light.

He thought about her as he drove home. He remembered her hair, the way she talked about spells, and it made him feel restless, as if there were fireflies in his blood. But then, as things on the road turned familiar, he began thinking about Dore, and he reached inside his pocket for the paper with Leslie’s name and number and address. He rolled down his window and held the paper out, feeling the pull of the wind tugging it from his fingers, and then he let it go, let it carry back across the endless dark path of the highway. He tried to look back, to follow it, a simple strip of white along the highway, but then a car raced toward him, forcing his mind back on the road, back on Dore.