of his pajamas.
“Con?” she said. He didn't answer.
“Con? Are you all right?”
“I'm okay,” he said thickly.
“Con, what is it?”
“Nothing.”
“It can't be nothing.”
A minute passed, filled only with the sound of his weeping. She thought, My life is going on outside me. I don't know anything about it.
He said, “I can't believe she's really gone.”
His own words seemed to inspire in him a fresh wave of sobs, and his crying had a tone that was not quite fleshly, a sound like wet paper tearing. She hadn't heard him cry in years. Mary was sympathetic and irritated, to almost equal degrees.
“She isn't gone,” she said. “She just has a life of her own now. New Haven isn't so very far away.”
“She's gone,” Constantine said. “She isn't ours anymore.”
“Well, she hasn't really been ours for a long time, has she?”
“She's been mine,” Constantine said.
Mary understood. She pushed the thought away.
“You're just tired,” she said. “And you've had too much to drink. Everything will be okay in the morning.”
He turned and faced her. In the dimness, distorted by weeping, his face looked haunted, ancient. Mary saw, with awful clarity, what he would look like when he was helpless, and needed her care to survive.
“Please,” he said. He held out his arms and, when she did not move into his embrace, he took her and pressed his hot wet face onto her neck. “Please,” he said.
“You're just tired,” she said. “And drunk.”
“I'm more than that,” he said. “Oh, God.” He kissed her neck, took her chin in his hand and put his lips on hers. They hadn't made love in—what?—six months? Longer? Tonight would not be the night, not as far as she was concerned. Long ago, she'd started winning the battle with her own feelings. For years now she'd felt desire closing down in her, the lights going out like the lights of a household preparing itself for sleep. At moments, lying right here in this bed, she'd fallen into a panic. This was her fate being made; this was the future stitching itself onto her skin. There would be no other life than this. The feelings, the fear itself, had come to seem familiar to her—they were part of what she meant when she used the words 'my life.' Now, tonight, she was in no mood to change her life. Not with Constantine maudlin and drunk, not after a day as wearing as this had been.
She disengaged her mouth and said, “Honey, go to sleep. You'll feel better in the morning.”
“I can't sleep,” he said.
“Yes you can.” She spoke to him just the way she'd spoken to the children when they awoke from nightmares. Now, as then, she marveled at the maternal certainty she heard in her own voice. They believe I'm their mother. They believe I know what I'm doing.
“Just close your eyes,” she said. “It'll happen before you know it.”
And, to her surprise, he obeyed her. He returned quietly to his own side of the bed like a randy boy who wanted discipline even when he said he wanted every noise and thrill in the world. She lay quietly beside him, listening to his abating sobs with motherly concern. It was only after he'd fallen asleep that she was stricken with a horror so powerful and nameless she got out of bed and took three of the pills, to give herself the simple unremarkable gift of sleep.
She took a hairbrush, a cheap bracelet, a bar of amber-colored soap. She knew she had to stop. She consoled herself with a short list of virtues. Everything she stole was cheap, and she never used what she took. As long as she didn't use the objects, she did not feel indicted by them. Susan sent postcards from her honeymoon in Hawaii, short and undetailed assertions of happiness written in a hand more scrolled, more adult, than Mary remembered her handwriting to be. Mary attached the postcards to the refrigerator with fruit-shaped magnets. She kept the objects she stole in her drawer, hidden away, until her holdings began to look like the trousseau of an impoverished bride.
1970/ He called it car ballet. It had that strength and grace, that musical stillness. Out on the back roads, trees hung blackly, fence posts were dark and important as tombstones. Behind the trees and the fence posts, farmers slept under roofs blue with moon. Billy liked to imagine the silence. When he pictured the silence he loved all the more what their headlights did to it. What their