“I’ve got to go,” she said.
“Wait,” he said. He stood up. “Hey. Call anytime. Been too long!”
She walked slowly to the door. When she turned, he was standing like an enormous, discarded boy, arms dangling; her heart rose with sympathy.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, and she drove the hundred miles home.
TWO HOURS IN THE TRAFFIC’S WHITE GLARE MADE HER HEAD FEEL light. When she returned home, she felt blurry, unreal, the way she had when she returned from the shooting, but now she was also embarrassed. She hurried inside to find her husband at the kitchen table with the children. They were digging into a frozen pizza. The ceiling lamp cast a stale glow upon them. She walked into the room briskly, holding out presents she had purchased earlier for the children.
“Hello!” she said. She said to the boy, “Hey. I got you a new pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.”
He looked at the pack and said, “I don’t collect Yu-Gi-Oh! anymore. Only Pokémon.” His facial expression had become slightly condescending, as though he had finally, after much searching, made a crucial decision. He threw them to the floor.
“Oh,” she said. She turned to the girl. “And here, I got you. . a pink pony!”
The girl violently slapped the pony away. “I hate pink! I want yellow!” she declared.
The children’s faces appeared more fleshy and solemn in the kitchen light. They had changed over the course of the day. It was something she generally noticed over weeks, months, the way their faces, arms, legs became larger, the way they acquired skills, but now Anna noticed the small, precise shifts that had happened just that afternoon. Carefully, she took her seat at the table.
“You want cheese or pepperoni?” her husband asked. There was a new streak of gray in his hair.
“Cheese,” she said.
“Did you know,” said her son, as though lecturing to a college class, “that Earth is mostly water?”
“Really?” she said.
“It is true,” he said, and he bit off a large piece of pizza.
She did not know what to say. Their faces looked so innocent — of the trip she had made that day, of their own march to adulthood, old age, their passing — she was overcome with tenderness toward them. Her helplessness — at their growth, at her tumble toward Warren Vance — overcame her, and she began, quietly, to cry; then, embarrassed, she pretended that she was coughing. Her family stared at her. They proceeded with their pizza. The girl jumped up, climbed into her lap, and said, “I’m sorry.”
“She learned it today,” her husband said.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said, over and over, delighted with the word.
THE NIGHT FELL UPON THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD. THE SKY FADED; THE golden hills rising beyond the development turned blue with dusk. The houses around them, identical with slanted red roofs, glowed with light. The children were bathed, dried, their teeth brushed, and eventually it was time for them to settle into their beds. Already the children were formed, moving into their lives with distinct approaches and confidence. The boy pored over his new cards as though they would tell him everything about his future and then abruptly fell asleep. Anna read a story to the girl and kissed her and placed her in the crib. The girl clutched her wrist and looked up at her with accusing eyes.
“I want juice,” she demanded.
This request was filled.
Then: “I want my blue pony.”
“Lion.”
“Pink bear.”
Her husband tried to fill all requests — first kindly, with a soft voice, and then, by the thirty-minute mark, with the silence of a slave. Finally, he settled himself in a corner of her room. Anna watched her husband sitting there, pretending to look at a newspaper, to appear occupied, but it was futile, as there was no light.
Anna crawled in beside him.
“You can’t just sit here forever,” she said.
“You want her to sit in the dark, screaming?”
“We’ll tell her we’re here.”
“What if we gave her everything? What if she felt so loved she wasn’t afraid?”
The girl’s pastel ponies and kittens and bears regarded them from their perches.
“But you can’t sit here your whole life,” she said.
He looked at her with a sharp expression. “Sometimes I think you don’t know anything about me,” he whispered. “What am I thinking right now?”
“Who still owes you money.”
He rubbed his hand over his face. “Okay, okay. They needed something. I helped.”
A sheer curtain lifted and fell with a breeze from the window, as if it were trying to breathe.
“Our children can be president if they can just shed their fear,” he said. “I know it.”
“But we can’t be with them every day,” she said. “Every minute.”
“So?”
“So they still have to learn to fall asleep,” she said.
He sighed, sharply. “And then what?” he said. “How long can you listen to her scream? Five minutes? Ten? Thirty?”
She looked away. “I don’t know.”
She thought, suddenly, of Warren Vance’s naked body. He was not only wide but also surprisingly tall, his head almost touching the ceiling. Warren wrapped his arms around her and began nuzzling her neck. She closed her eyes, trying to get the thought of him out of her head.
She looked at her husband, his long legs stretched in front of him. She understood that they married not only to love each other in the future, but also to remedy the past — to give each other what they had not had as children.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
They sat, frozen, beside each other. The girl was finally asleep. Anna reached over and clasped his hand. She felt the pulse of his heart in his palm.
THREE DAYS LATER, SHE WAS MAKING DINNER WHEN THE PHONE RANG.
“Annie,” said Warren, “You never call. You never write.”
She stood against the counter; she felt pinned, even though she was the only one in the room.
“Been thinking about you,” he said. “Been thinking about that girl in auto shop who could take apart a carburetor faster than any of them. Remember her?”
The children were in the living room, watching the television as though they wanted to eat it. “I guess,” she said.
“That girl should be standing on a cliff watching the sun set on her personal slice of the Pacific,” he said. “Would you believe five grand?”
She could taste his voice in her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “What did you think of Vance, Anna? Be honest.”
“Why?”
“Should Vance have had children, Anna? Tell him. His wife didn’t want to. Should Vance have gone to business school? Maybe Vance should have learned Russian. Arabic.” He was short of breath.
His anxiety alarmed her.
“Do you know that I am the fattest man in my zip code?” he said, sadly. “I like all cuisines. I hate nothing.”
It was dusk. The windows glowed. She moved from the refrigerator to the microwave, defrosting meat. She held the phone to her ear.
“Tell me what you used to tell me,” he said. “After.”
Her heart jumped. “What are you talking about?”
“You know.”
She remembered when she was eighteen years old and lying naked beside him, the experience of love so new that she felt she had been taken apart and reassembled. She closed her eyes and spoke to him, a soft, obscene endearment.
“Say it again,” he whispered.
She did. The moment was clear and full.
“You say it,” she said.
He said the word to her. She closed her eyes and breathed.