stone out of the sky. Surprising, what a clean, small hole it made in the glass, with only a few slender shards to pick up. The pieces were still in her hand when the phone rang.
Hello? she said. Hello—?
Hello? Mrs. Young?
Mrs. Young! The blood went out of her. She steadied herself on the counter. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t Gordon. It was his brother, Edgar.
Rachel managed to give her sympathies, then listened while Edgar explained that Gordon wasn’t going to open the store tomorrow, so the boys should plan on staying home.
She saw the scene over there, at Gordon’s house: Edgar at the phone and Gordon beyond him, heaped in a chair, staring into his coffee. Meredith on the sofa, and their daughter, their only child, laid out somewhere in some cold, awful place, dead.
—under the circumstances, Edgar was saying, they should plan on staying home until further notice.
After he hung up, Rachel kept the phone to her ear, listening to the strange silence there, a sound from outer space, an eerie wind. She stood frozen in it, her chest hollow. There’d been a day, years ago, when something happened, or nearly happened, between her and Gordon Burke. A gray afternoon, the windowpanes ticking with bits of ice. She’d come out of a bath and felt weak and had sat down on the bed. Before her was the cheval glass that had belonged to her grandmother, then her mother, now her. Who would she give the mirror to, this girly keepsake?
Rachel—?
A man had come into the house, downstairs. There was the sound of his footfall across the living room, and then her name again, lobbed up the stairs. A stair tread creaked and she reached for her robe but stopped.
Two days ago they’d buried Roger. This afternoon, Gordon had picked up the boys and taken them to a movie so Rachel could sleep. Now they were back.
Rachel—? he said from around the corner.
Yes, she answered. That was all. He came anyway, into the frame of the door.
Oh—he said. His big face filling with the sight of her there, on the bed. I’m sorry, he said.
She heard the kids in the yard, already into some kind of contest. Holly could be mean but Danny would keep things fair and good for Marky.
Brought the boys back, Gordon said, not looking away, looking her in the eye. He reached up and worked the flesh under his jaw with a coarse, sandpaper sound. He was a man who was sure before he acted, who didn’t operate by guesswork or even intuition, but who held in his head all the hard facts of mechanical things. Over the years there had been moments, yes, when she’d wondered what it would be like to be with him instead of Roger, to simply switch. Innocent, helpless thoughts such as every wife must have.
He took a step, then came certainly toward her. In the wash of movement she smelled the outdoors, the steely clouds and the wet, moldering leaves. Her heart was beating in her breast. She turned to the mirror and the picture there was incredible: this naked, wet-haired woman, this man beside her dressed for cold.
Rachel . . . , he began, and in the next instant Holly’s voice, cold as a queen’s, penetrated the room.
Hands off, retard.
Out there in the cold, Danny said something low, and there was silence.
Gordon’s face had gone red. His jaw muscle jumped.
She knows better, by God, he said.
It’s all right, Rachel said.
The day was going dark. In the mirror she saw Gordon’s arm drift toward her shoulder, then beyond it. She saw the robe rise up like a phantom, felt it brush her skin. In the mirror, as in the flesh, he got the robe over her shoulders and over her breasts without quite touching her.
There was glass in her hand, Rachel had noticed standing at the sink. Slender fragments pressed into her palm, and after a moment she remembered the broken window, the strange little stone. She dumped the glass in the trash and rinsed her hand under the faucet. She had wanted to tell him something, that day—something true and unafraid, such as how she’d often felt, her secret thoughts. Holly’s voice had stopped her.
And if it hadn’t? If everything had gone just a little bit differently? Meteors, they said, were on their way, right now, crossing billions of years of chance. The smallest bump changed everything. If Holly had not spoken and Rachel had—would things be different? Would