upstairs, where they take off their clothes, each in a separate walk-in closet. They stand at the his-and-hers sinks, brushing their teeth. The best night of acting they’ve ever done. A nice-sized theater full of enthusiastic applause. Calls for an encore.
Dorothy puts one foot in front of the other, exaggerated, like the police—her husband—are making her walk a straight line. She raises her toothbrush to her mouth, waves it around, then breaks into tears, biting down on one end of the plastic stick while clutching the other.
Ray, the night’s designated driver, soberer than he cares to be, sets down his brush and goes to her. She leans her head on his collarbone. Toothpaste dribbles out of her mouth down his plaid bathrobe. Toothpaste and saliva everywhere. Her words are full of pebbles. “I just want to stand in the lobby before the show and tell everyone as they come in. There’s no fucking baby!”
He gets her to spit and wipes her off with a washrag. Then he leads her to bed, a place that has felt much like a double-wide pine box, these last two months. He must lift her feet in, then nudge her to make room. “We can go to Russia.” It feels good to speak in his own voice, after way too many hours as someone smarmy. He doesn’t want to play in any more plays, ever again. “Or China. So many babies that need parents who’ll love them.”
There’s a thing people in the theater call hanging the lampshade. Say there’s a big ugly piece of pipe sticking out the backstage wall, and you can’t get rid of it. Stick a shade on it and call it a fixture.
Her words blur into the damp pillow. “Wouldn’t be ours.”
“Of course it would.”
“I want a little RayRay. Your little guy. A boy. Like how you were.”
“It wouldn’t be—”
“Or a little girl, like you. I don’t care.”
“Sweetie. Don’t be like this. A child is what you raise. Not what genes you—”
“Genes are what you get, goddamn it.” She slaps the mattress and tries to bolt upright. The speed of the ascent tumbles her over. “The only. Thing. You. Truly. Own.”
“We don’t own our genes,” he says, neglecting to add that companies can own them for us. “Listen. We go someplace where there are too many babies. We adopt two. We love them and play with them and teach them how to tell right from wrong, and they grow up all tangled together with us. I don’t care whose genes they have.”
She pulls the pillow over her head. “Listen to him. This guy can love everybody. Let’s just get him a dog. Better yet, some vegetable we can stick out in the yard and forget about.” Then she remembers their anniversary custom, neglected for the past two years. She springs up to retrieve the words that fly out from her. But her shoulder clips him in the jaw just as he leans forward. His teeth mash up through the side of his tongue. He yells, then grabs his face, contorted with pain.
“Oh, Ray. Shit. Damn me! I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
He waves his hand in the air. I’m okay. Or: What’s wrong with you? Or even: Get away from me. She can’t tell, even after a decade of marriage and other amateur theatricals, which. Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they’ve planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But the humans hear nothing.
FIVE INTERSTATES LEAD WEST, the fingers of a glove laid down on the continent with its wrist in Illinois. Olivia takes the middle one. She has a goal now—Northern California by the fastest route, before the last trees as big as rocket ships go down. She crosses the Mississippi at the Quad Cities and stops at the World’s Largest Truck Stop, on I-80, over the Iowa border. The place is a small town. She has her choice of more gas pumps than she can count before freezing. Several hundred trucks school around the spot where she pulls up, colossal sharks in a feeding frenzy.
The light is gone. Olivia rents a shower and gets herself human again. She strolls down a crowded covered avenue of restaurants that offer hundreds of ways to partake of corn, corn syrup, corn-fed chicken, and corn-fed beef. There’s a dentist’s office and a masseuse. An enormous