If anyone can soothe Eva’s wounded sensibilities, it is Peter, whose voice when he’s comforting turns to velvet, cushioning her. If anyone understands that the tensions of a house are sometimes too much to bear, it is him. She imagines—she has always imagined—that it is the same for him, that they share a mutual desire to shuck off confining rooms, to be away from the demands of the people in them. They’ve been talking a lot lately, him sneaking furtive calls when his wife is away, their conversations sometimes brief and sometimes extended, sustaining her for the day like a pleasant meal.

Now she dials a number she hasn’t yet dared to call, but one that she still knows by heart, having run her finger over “P. Fulton” in the phone book so many times, it borders on absurd obsession. When Peter answers, Eva blubbers out, “She came back. Can you believe my mother came back?” She tries to keep her tears in check, but it’s no use, her emotions always betray her. “Peter?” she asks, sniffling. “Are you there?”

There is an awkward pause on the other end, a muffled, deadened noise, and then Peter calls to someone else—his wife, Eva suddenly realizes—telling her that he’s got the phone, that it’s no one. Hearing this, Eva becomes even more upset. “I’m trying to tell you something,” she begins again, more stridently, “and you say I’m no one?”

“Eva.” His voice sounds put-upon and burdened. He breathes in, waits. “Jesus Christ, don’t call me at home.” Then what follows is a click, a complete silence. She is suddenly as inconsequential as the day her mother left—cast off, adrift. She bites her lip, confused momentarily and, above all else, hurt. It seems she must make a decision then— to stay locked away in her room as she has for so many days, or to take some decisive action. She rummages through her jewelry box and slides on a tigereye ring. She changes into fresh clothes, a long white dress. Resolved, she takes her keys from the dresser, vowing that she, as much as her mother and father and Peter himself, can do as she pleases. Downstairs she finds Sissy in the kitchen, still upset, Eva thinks, but subdued, possibly stunned. Her mother, changed into work clothes, is down on all fours, cutting into the kitchen tiles with a wire brush. She looks up, eyes her daughter, the dress, the sudden need.

“Where are you going?” Natalia asks.

“What does it matter?” She opens up the phone book and writes down the address, just so she makes sure she remembers. “Where were you when anything mattered? Where did you go?” Eva thinks of saying more, but when she sees the look on her mother’s face, the deep crease between her large eyes, she stops.

“Go, then,” Natalia says, scraping harder across the floor, her muscles straining. “Be alone.”

It is a twenty-minute drive to Peter’s house on the other side of town. She gets lost twice and stops for directions at the gas station, the attendant finally drawing her a map before sending her on her way again. The winding streets around Peter’s house daze her slightly, as do the idle park benches and newer houses. On Arbor Place, she turns and drives slowly, studying the numbers etched into brass fixtures on the mailboxes and front doors. She slows and parallel parks across the street from a blue colonial. The windows are open, the curtains flapping in the breeze. Wind chimes clatter. In the front yard a plastic kiddy pool lies abandoned, the slide shaped like an elephant’s trunk. It all seems so practical, so mundane in a way, that it hurts Eva to witness. She expected Peter’s house to be an altogether different shape, perhaps round with solar panels and Grateful Dead music blaring from smoky rooms—something hip and cool, but not this. Not this at all. She expected the house to have a different temperament altogether. She checks the slip of paper she clenches in her moist hand. Written there is “247 Arbor Place,” a number that matches the one etched on a brass plate next to the windowed door.

She has imagined herself here so many times. She has constructed all the rooms of Peter’s house, imagined herself moving through them, opening his drawers, running her hand over his tweedy smoky clothing, opening his refrigerator, lying down in his bed, the nutty smell of him on the covers. But she has never tempted the fates before in this way. She beeps the horn, waits, but no one pulls back the curtain. No one opens the door and steps outside. An elderly couple strolls along the sidewalk, eating ice cream with a pleasant laziness. A chubby boy jogs down the street, his cheeks pushing out air like small balloons.

She plans what to say, what to do. A sense of alarm grows in her, a sense of danger. She knows he is married. She knows he has a daughter he’s talked about frequently in class and once or twice, more tentatively when he was alone with her. She knows all of this, and yet in light of her mother’s return and his callous response, her mind turns over new questions: Why should his wife have all of him? Why, if he and Eva are together, shouldn’t he be there for her when she most needs him? She’s filled with a sense of undoing and daring. What would happen if she walked up to the door? Knocked? Rang the bell? Announced herself as Peter’s lover, told his wife about their exchanges, their bodies pressed together slick with sweat? She might say, Do you know where he goes when he says “to the library”? Do you know the things that happen behind your back, when you aren’t watching? Thinking of all this gives her amused satisfaction. How liberating it would be to say these things aloud. If he thought he could keep her from his life, if his wife thinks their life so perfect, so immune to hurt and disruption, how wrong they both are. Eva lacked the bravery to say what she thought to her mother—her mother who in one moment managed to silence her yet again—but she could say what she thinks to a stranger, to this wife. The thought is simply tantalizing.

Resolved, Eva primps her hair and checks her face in the mirror. She gets out and sprints across the street, smoothing her dress as she ascends the walkway. She passes the kiddy pool, realizing that sand, not water, fills it, along with two plastic shovels and a bucket. What kind of mother would let her little girl play in dirty sand? Eva wonders, her sense of entitlement and swagger growing. She inhales deeply, hesitates only for a moment, and presses the doorbell. She waits, peering in through the columned windows on either side of the door. She views the front entrance, the curved wooden railing that leads upstairs. To the right, she catches sight of a dining room that has, in the corner, a desk with a reading lamp and envelopes stacked in thin slots. She imagines Peter sitting there, back turned to his wife, his attention consumed with his poetry his sestinas. Around the desk, toys lie scattered on the floor. She holds her hand up to her forehead, cutting back the glare.

Impatient, now fully committed, she rings the doorbell again. She turns and looks at the view from this angle—the bushes pulling out, her car across the street, the empty-looking houses, the wide road. She hears a woman call from inside, “Hold on.”

After excruciating seconds, the same woman appears, a child on her hip and phone cradled in her neck. She opens the door wider and motions with her finger. Eva braces herself and steps into the foyer made bright in the day. She puts her hand to her throat, the words ready to pour out from her. But the woman places her finger to her lips, and Eva waits, immediately comparing herself in attractiveness: Peter’s wife is stout, with short permed hair, a pug nose, and a weary look. Passable, Eva thinks, but not beautiful by any stretch.

“I love you, Mom,” she’s saying. “Tell Dad I love him, too. Make sure Peter holds the ladder when Dad goes up on the roof this time, will you? We don’t want a repetition of events.” Unconcerned with Eva entirely, she turns and walks down the hallway and goes around the corner, disappearing again. Eva inhales, smells rose-scented perfume. She peers into the living room, taking it in full view. A puzzle on the coffee table remains only half-composed—a clown’s face appears appallingly white, his eyes dark and serious. Against the wall, there is an ugly worn love seat with wooden inlay, a ficus tree with brown leaves collected in the base of the pot. Peter’s wife comes back into the foyer a moment later, the baby still on her hip in a diaper, no shirt, a mass of red-yellow hair. “I’m sorry,” the woman says, her breath exasperated. She shoos the cat from under her feet before setting the baby down in a children’s swing next to the sofa. “Right,” she says, turning, placing her hands on her hips. “So, what are you selling?”

Eva feels her stomach turn. “Me? Nothing.”

“Oh. I thought you were selling something. You wouldn’t believe how many people have stopped by in the past month, selling magazine subscriptions, cookies, wrapping paper, Avon, books. I can’t keep up.”

Eva shakes her head and puts her hand to her chest. “I’m not selling anything.”

“What can I do for you, then?”

Eva tries to sound assertive, but she feels her swagger lessen suddenly. “Is your husband home?”

“Peter?”

She smiles. “Peter, yes. Peter.”

The woman seems to regard her finally. Her eyes travel down over Eva’s dress. Later, when Eva will replay this moment, she’ll remember the wary look, the cautious handling of the conversation, how for a moment Peter’s wife crossed her arms and paused. “He’s at my parents’—just left,” she says, and it seems to Eva she stammers a bit, in the same way Eva might. “I’m his wife, Amy.”

“That’s sweet,” Eva says. “That’s nice of him to help your parents, I mean, to care like that.”

Amy pauses for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

Eva tells herself not to flinch, not to miss a beat. She stands up straight, puts her hands on her hips. “I know Peter,” she begins.

“Do you? Well, then, if Peter knows you, I should know you. We have the same friends, mostly, the same acquaintances …”

“You seem surprised.” A moment more passes, and Eva sees something register in Amy, a quiet alarm. There is a broken quality to her expression, a tense hesitation. And, seeing this all, Eva suddenly hesitates, too. She wanted to feel invincible. She wanted this woman to be mean-spirited like she always believed her mother to be. The baby starts to cry. Amy sighs and pulls the child from the swing, pudgy legs kicking. She holds the little girl close, kisses her head.

“I talked to him before,” Eva says, adjusting. Her cheeks flush; she can’t think of the words to be so cruel. “About babysitting.”

A sudden relief seems to come over Amy. “Oh,” she says, patting the baby’s head. “We’ve been discussing a sitter. You know, maybe once a month so we can get out. I didn’t know he’d talked to anyone already. I don’t suppose you’d do light housework, too?”

Eva bends her leg and tries to take on an air of complete casualness. She can feel the words failing her, the stutter in the back of her throat.

“I guess not,” Amy says, waving her hand around. “The house is always a mess anyway, as you can see. I guess at some point it’s ridiculous to bother at all with cleaning. But do you have references?”

“What?”

“You know.” She scribbles an imaginary note. “Someone who could vouch for your reliability?”

Eva hesitates again, thinking. “Yes,” she says, nodding, in what she will remember was a desperate way. “I can bring you names and numbers, I guess.”

“People in the neighborhood? Are you the girl who sat for the Johnsons down the street? Rita Johnson? Their son’s name is Henry. They were so happy with that girl; they said she was a dream.”

Eva shakes her head. “No, I didn’t sit for them.”

“Who do you sit for in the neighborhood, then?”

“I don’t,” she says, straining now. “I live across town.”

“That’s far to go, then, isn’t it?”

“Not really.” Eva’s hands drift upward, into the air. “I love being here. This side of town is so pretty. And the people here, they’re nice. You’re very lucky. I’d give anything for what you have.”

Amy winces and rocks the baby. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, I should write it down. I’ll talk to Peter when he gets home.”

A few moments later, Eva hastily scribbles down the first name that comes to her, Brenda Armstrong. She gives the paper and pen back and then watches as Amy studies the scrawl.

“Are you still in school?”

“A senior this year. I’m almost eighteen.”

“Big year.” Amy glances at her again. “Well.”

“Well,” Eva says, “I should go.” She turns, in that moment, victorious despite everything. It is so easy, she thinks. To slip into someone’s life, someone’s house, and imagine yourself in their rooms. A sense of gloating overwhelms her, thinking how easy it is to fool this woman, how much prowess she herself holds. Her face flushes with the knowledge, too, that it’s a secret, that Peter will never know, that he’ll wonder why on earth Brenda Armstrong would stop by to chat and offer ser vices. She steps outside feeling, for the first time that day, for the first time in many days, a sense of empowerment.