slow rotation, pressing her naked breasts against him.
Rishi was whispering in a Hindi dialect, the language he had learned as a child. He was not a man who frequently gave in to emotion, but when he did, the dialect emerged. She could understand some of the words, but what she understood most of all was that Rishi was entranced with her, that he wanted her in the same way that she wanted him. That at this moment, when they might create a child, they were together in every way.
He opened his eyes and stopped moving. He stopped kissing her. He was still warm against her, but now his body seemed inflexible, rigid. Worse, much worse, as he lay there, he lost all desire to be with her. One moment they had been one entity. Now they were two, and one was strongly resisting the other.
“What’s wrong?” she asked softly. “Did I do something wrong?” Such a thing had never happened before. Normally she was the one who had to be coaxed.
He didn’t pretend. He rolled to his side, then to his back. She had been so warm, so caught up in their lovemaking. Now the soft breeze of their ceiling fan rippled unpleasantly against her heated skin. She wanted to cover herself with the sheet, but she was afraid to move, afraid she would completely destroy the spell that had brought them here—if any part of it was left.
“It’s looking at me. It’s staring at me.”
She propped herself up on one elbow and stared at him. “Rishi, what are you talking about?”
“The bull.”
She had set Nandi near the head of their bed, on a table near the window. She had thought little about it, laughing when she told him her mother’s intention. She had teased him and said they should be grateful for all help.
“Nandi?” She sat up and looked at the bull. “Rishi, it’s a statue made of stone. I do not think it can really be staring at you.”
He didn’t reply.
“I will remove it. Don’t concern yourself.” She got up and went to the table, lifting the statue with both hands to carry it around the bed. In the living room she looked for a place to set it. Nothing seemed quite right. In the end she opened the door into their puja room and set the statue next to Krishna. She closed the door again and went back into the bedroom, picking up their clothes as she went and draping them carefully over her arm.
“It’s gone,” she said softly as she moved around the bed, lay down and eased herself against him. “Rishi, I didn’t know having Nandi beside the bed would upset you. I won’t put it in here again.”
There was no answer.
“Rishi?”
Again, no answer.
She didn’t know if her husband was really asleep or just pretending to be. She considered shaking him awake, but wasn’t that more pressure than a statue?
In the end she got up, brushed her teeth, washed her face and slipped into a nightgown. When she came back to bed, Rishi hadn’t moved, but his breathing sounded shallow. It was not the breathing of a man so fatigued he had not been able to remain awake long enough to make love to his wife.
She told herself she was wrong. But the hour was too early, and her thoughts too heavy. She knew she would lie awake for hours staring out her window at the moon drifting across the night sky.
She was considering therapy. In the week after Dana moved in, Tracy thought she saw CJ twice more.
The first time happened when a strange man walked jauntily up her driveway wearing a meter reader’s uniform. On closer view, of course, nothing but the walk was the least bit familiar. The hair color was wrong. The height was wrong. And the man was a good ten years younger than her former husband. But for a moment…for one whole moment, she had expected the real CJ to knock on her front door.
The second time, she spied CJ from a distance, disappearing down the road toward the point on foot. This sighting was more disconcerting. She knew if she jogged in that direction, she might lose him. So she actually, actually, got in her car and sped toward the point herself. But in that brief time span, the man disappeared, most likely off to some favorite fishing cove on the bay. And having chased one impostor through palmetto scrub, she was not anxious to chase another. She