Arcadia

Isles of the Blest

It is early October. Outside, the city rests between the winding down of day and the winding up of night. The fish-shaped nightlight shines a creamy cup on the wall and Grete is curled against Bit. From where he sits against her headboard, she is all eyelash, forehead, tiny slope of nose, his beautiful daughter.

Sleepy yet? he says, and she says, No.

He doesn’t mind. He could stay here forever against his daughter’s small warmth. He looks at the mural he’s painting on the wall across from her bed, the only thing he can do to fill the restless hour between when he comes home from the university and when Grete is walked back from daycare by Sharon, the mother who lives in the apartment downstairs. Sharon is a small, quick, dark-haired woman. Her name is about all he knows of her; yet Bit feels close to her. He once said, on a morning that he was picking up Frankie, We’re a good team: solidarity of the abandoned! But this was a mistake, and Sharon didn’t smile.

The painting on Grete’s wall is Arcadia, the apple trees twisting up toward Arcadia House, the Octagonal Barn, outhouses, Ersatz Arcadia, Pond. He has spent months detailing the landscape, and now has begun to populate it. The only people in the painting, yet, are essential: Hannah in the garden, Abe in his wheelchair under the courtyard oak, Astrid holding a newborn baby to the sun, Handy on the roof of the Pink Piper. There is Verda and her dog, Eustace, at the edge of the forest, only a dapple of sun if you don’t know to look for them. Cole and Dyllie play cards; Jincy stands in the door of a lean-to, a white bird on her roof; Leif dances under a puppet; Erik sits, a blob; Ike is frozen in a swan dive into the Pond. Bit himself is tiny, studying Helle. She is long and white, on the rock with her feet in the water, a naiad.

None of it is as beautiful as the place that lives in his head, of course. Though the vast gulf between imagination and execution is familiar, it still always comes as a sharp surprise. It is a relief, though, from his photography: all his art, these days, seems to die under the pressure of his teaching. It doesn’t matter that the mural is not how Arcadia looks anymore, taken over by Leif’s computer animation business, Erewhon Illuminations. Leif has gutted, sleeked, chromed, and glassed the entire second floor of Arcadia House for his own private quarters; one man now lives where, once upon a time, over two hundred had slept. The Octagonal Barn has become office space and conference rooms. There are tennis courts in the soy patch, a parking lot where Dorotka’s garden had luxuriated.

Leif always did hate weeding, Helle had said when they first toured the new Arcadia, and they had laughed, the laughter catching in their throats. He nuzzles Grete’s shoulder, popcorn and warm milk, to banish the thought.

Sleepy yet? he says, and Grete says, No. Story.

He searches for one he hasn’t told her, and feels it rise in him when he looks at the white bend of Helle on the rock. Okay, he says. This story is about the very first Helle. The one your mom was named after. In Greece, a long, long time ago— But Grete interrupts.

No. Once upon a time, she says.

Once upon a time in Greece, Bit says, there was a beautiful girl named Helle and her brother, Phrixus. Their father had divorced their mother, and the new stepmother, Ino, was wicked, wicked, wicked, and jealous of the children. She plotted and planned and decided to make Helle and Phrixus into scapegoats. She baked all the seeds in the land so they wouldn’t sprout, and when the plants didn’t grow, the farmers panicked. What do we do? they cried. Who is responsible for this famine? They went to the oracle that Ino had bribed, and the oracle pointed her knobby little finger at the children and shouted, They are! Those horrible children! And the farmers hustled the little ones away to kill them, to get rid of the curse.

But their real mother went to the god Hermes and pleaded for her children. Please, she said, I love them, please help them. Hermes was moved by the mother’s sorrow and sent a flying golden ram that picked up the children to carry them to safety over a body of water called the Dardanelles.

Bit pauses. Funny fact, he says. Lord Byron once swam the Dardanelles.

Who? Grete says. She is three.

Never mind, Bit says. Anyway, the ram flew so high that Helle grew dizzy and fell off its back, down, down, down into the water.

Now Bit has to scramble to change the story. He hadn’t thought it through to the terrible end, the drowned body in the waves, the very first poor dead Helle. How Grete would think of her own Helle, her mother, and conflate the two lost women.

So he says, And everyone laughed and pulled her out and gave her a crown and made her a queen. She lived happily ever after. And they found another, better, name for the water she fell into: the Hellespont.

The Helle spot, whispers Grete and carries her smile with her into her sleep.

All is dark in the window. A passing car’s headlights draw an arm of light across the room. He closes the curtain and shuts the door. Bit feels the coolness of the wood on his fingers as he moves through the dark apartment alone.

Bit’s grief changes shape nightly. His head is already with the Greeks; he thinks of Proteus, old man of the sea, the truth teller who hated truth and would shape-shift to avoid it. Bit reaches out his hands to grasp his sorrow, and it slides through, becomes water, a snake, a mouse, a knife, a dumbbell so heavy he has to drop it. It has been over nine months since Helle went for a walk and didn’t come back.

He wonders at himself, sitting in the window with his wine, watching the nightclub across the street begin to glow. He is tenderhearted Bit Stone; he cries when he reads Russian novels; he cries when he sees the hands of the woman who comes to clean his apartment, gnarled with callus and arthritis. He hasn’t cried for Helle. He keeps thinking it will all be explained to him, that he will wake up one morning to hear the key in the lock and Helle will come in, weary; that he will cross a sunlit park, and look up, and there she will be moving toward him, her shy smile on her face, and hug him and whisper into his ear some story that won’t mean she had been hurt, that she had wanted to hurt him.

He thinks he sees his wife everywhere. His heart pulses, sure that a thin figure in the distance is Helle; he runs into a café, certain that a half-glimpsed face in the window is hers. They never are. He is stuck, he is suspended. Under the strain of his hope, his daily walks through the city have become unbearable.

The night before she vanished, Helle had woken him. It was very late and her hands were cold on his chest, the smell of winter rain in the folds of her clothes. Her hair was wet against her forehead and cheeks, her face in the darkness unreadable. She had shrugged off her raincoat and boots in the middle of the floor, and he was groggy when he woke at the cold shock of her. He saw the rug getting damp with her wet clothes and, irritated, almost pushed her away.

But her hands moved down, unbuttoning his pajama top, bending her body toward his so she lay against his skin, and he put his arms around her to stop her from shivering.

What’s wrong? he said, but she didn’t answer. She peeled him out of his clothes, pajama top, bottoms, socks, boxers, then pulled off her own clothes violently and came back under the covers where it was warm. Her cold body, knobby and terrible against his.

Helle? he said.

She didn’t answer. Now her mouth was at his chest, moving across it, biting, not hard. The door was cracked open and there was a light still burning in the kitchen, and he could see that her makeup had washed off in the rain. Without it, her face was ravaged, the hard life she’d lived before Bit, her twenty lost years, imprinted on the skin. You’re more beautiful to me now than when you were perfect, he’d said once, kissing her shoulder when she cried at her reflection in the mirror. She’d turned away, disbelieving, but he’d meant it. Her life was written in her face. There, at least, she could be read.

His love for her sometimes felt enormous in him, a solid thing made of spun wool, soft and deep. Even in his irritation, this love warmed him, returned her to him.

Her mouth moved down, then farther. He touched the top of her head, her fragile skull under wet hair, pulled her up gently. He wanted slowness, warmth, kissing. But she wouldn’t. She grasped him, though he wasn’t quite ready; she wasn’t either, she was dry, still cold. But she moved just slightly, sitting there above him, and after a few minutes he took the bones of her hips and pulled himself in until he’d fully stirred. She pressed down again, her body against his chest, and at last her mouth found his. He imagined the quiet street outside shining in the lights, the millions of souls warm and listening to the rain in their beds. He couldn’t stop looking at the side of her face, her eyes closed, the small shell of her ear, the scar in her nostril where the stud had been, her thin pale lower lip in her teeth. He was close but held off, until at last she whispered, Go. I can’t come.

He wonders now, the wine bottle empty on the table, if he hadn’t heard all of what she’d said. If he’d missed the most essential word. Again and again, he has replayed it, trying to hear deeper, to find the moment that foretold the future.

Go, she said; and did or didn’t say, I can’t come.

Go, she said; and did or didn’t say, I can’t come back.

In the morning, Grete dresses herself: leopard leggings, frilly pink dress, green rubber boots with googly eyes that spin and spin. She considers wearing her ladybug earmuffs, turning her head this way and that in the long mirror on the door and pursing her lips. She decides, instead, on one of Helle’s long strands of purple beads, looping it over and over so she looks like a Padaung woman. Sharon opens the door with a cup of coffee in her hand and whistles. What a fashion sense, she says. Watch out, world, here comes Grete!

Grete hops on her toes toward the door and mashes her face into Sharon’s thighs.

Sharon’s son, Frankie, comes out. He is an owlish boy, half crushed under his enormous backpack. He hands Bit one of his shoes and says, It came off. When Bit kneels to put the shoe back on, Sharon smoothes down Grete’s fine white hair, and Bit sees with a pang that he’d forgotten again to brush it this morning. Grete is a dandelion gone to spore.

Sharon takes an elastic from her own short hair and pulls Grete’s back into a ponytail. She smiles at Bit, the skin by her eyes crinkling, and she’s no longer the rumpled middle-aged mother he sees every day; she is pretty. No harm done, she says.

When Bit stands, Sharon hands him the coffee and kisses both kids on the forehead. See you this afternoon, she says. Be good.

I am good, Frankie says in a hurt little voice.

I’m bad! says Grete and gives a wicked laugh.

They go off, Grete holding Bit’s hand, Frankie clutching Grete’s, into the streaming tides of people. Bit’s own Kid Herd of two. In the morning crush, the children are swallowed by legs and rears, smashed with purses and briefcases. In a marl at a stoplight, Bit bends and lifts them in both arms. The children lean their heads on his shoulders and breathe into his jawbone. Their school is squat and brick, shielded by scraggly plane trees that Grete hugs solemnly, one by one, before they go inside.

The teacher is a plump woman so tender-looking that she seems as if her skin would bruise if she were yelled at. She looks at Bit and gives a little tremulous cry. Oh, my, she says. Are you okay? Are you getting your sleep? Are you eating? Oh, you don’t look so good.

I’m fine, I’m fine, he says, and fine, fine repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world.

It amazes Bit how well he can teach with a fraction of his attention. Better, perhaps, than when he is fully invested in what he’s doing. These children of blog and text go uneasy near focus. They clam up. He is more relaxed when he can’t give a damn, and they are too. They learn.

In the red glow of the darkroom, skinny, odd-looking Sylvie tongs paper from one bath to another. Bit stands beside her. Her skin is marked with raised moles, and she smells like powder, coffee, honey shampoo. She looks up at him. I love this, she says. The darkroom. I didn’t think I would. Digital’s just so much easier, you know?

I know, he says. That’s why I don’t do it.

Sylvie gives a private smile. That’s your reputation, Professor Stone, she says. Nobody says you’re easy.

He is startled; did he mishear? There are too many ways to read what she said, three at least, and Sylvie always seems to speak in layers.

He backs away through the rubber curtain, and into the bright room where the water bubblers gurgle. He sits on the table and lets his students slowly flock to where he is. How sweet they are; the boys are inches taller than Bit but sit in the chairs to reestablish Bit’s eminence. The girls play with their hair, watch him from the corners of their eyes. They know his story somehow: since Helle vanished, he has become more handsome than ever to these susceptible young women, the weight of his tragedy transforming his soft features into something noble, suffering. He feels himself flush and speaks to shake his embarrassment.

All right, my friends, he says. Out with your notebooks. This one is the toughest yet.

Most weekends he gives his classes a mission. Make a camera obscura in your room and draw what you see. Photograph strangers on the subway without letting them know what you’re doing. Stand in the pitch-black film closet and roll twenty rolls of film, blind. When you come out, write down everything you’ve thought of in there without self-editing.

His job is officially to teach the lost art of the darkroom; analog studies in the Photography Department. Or what used to be called simply Photography, all that chemistry and film, most recently downgraded from a requirement. Digital is just so much easier. It has been years since he taught an advanced course, the wet-plate, the large format. For most of his students, his classes are way stations into a hobby. But his job, as he understands it, is to help his students see: to make them pay attention, slow down and appreciate what they’re doing. This is something they can use in life.

This weekend, he says to the eight faces arrayed at the table, you will go on a digital fast. He catches himself: he’s almost said yoga, vestige of Arcadia. Doubleplusgood duckspeak he sometimes calls the old language, laughing, when it comes out despite his censor. I was raised in a commune, he’ll say, and he’ll feel a bit treasonous and tell some of the funnier or sadder stories; the summer they all got hepatitis from eating the watercress in the stream near the Family Quonset loo; what happened to baby Felipe, whose white crease in the fat brown neck remains indelible in Bit’s memory, even thirty-five years later.

What’s a digital fast? says Sylvie. There is a designated speaker in every class, and she is it for this one. Awkward girl, overeager. He has to be extra gentle with her. Her eyes fill with tears after a curt word.

No cell phones, Bit says. No computers, no MP3s, no GPS, no social networking, no e-mail, no whatever else it is that you do and frankly I don’t understand. If you have other coursework, try to do it all tonight or put it off until Sunday night, if you can. Let’s see how long you can resist the siren song of the outside world. Have a response paper to your digital fast for me on Monday. One page. Written by hand, of course.

Some make faces; others, the hipsters, smile. They love being throwbacks. They wear the jeans and teeshirts and sneakers and sunglasses he wore when he came to the city so many years ago from Arcadia. He reminds himself that the hippies seemed just as childish in their own time.

Sylvie calls out as she stands and gathers her things, No problem. Smiling, her bone bracelets dully clinking on her wrists, Sylvie sings out, Easy, easy, easy.

When he woke that first morning without Helle in bed beside him, he was almost calm. He made excuses in his head: she had gone out on a long walk in the afternoon and visited an old friend, stayed too late to come home. Once in a while, she’d do this. Regina and Ollie owned a cupcake emporium in the city and a frilly apartment by the river where Helle had her own key. Maybe she was housesitting their cats and forgot to tell Bit. Or maybe she went up to Jincy’s in the suburbs, Jin just having given birth to her twins; and Helle forgot to tell Bit. He didn’t want to push beyond this thought for what followed; the drugs again, scourge of Helle’s twenties, the desperation, the needle marks between the toes.

To avoid the apartment, Bit took Grete to the children’s museum all day. The two of them ate an early dinner out. It was passive-aggressive, Bit could admit. He’d wanted Helle to come home to a cold apartment and worry about where they were, the same way he had barely contained his panic, a tightness in his chest, all day. It was dark outside when he and Grete came home; but the apartment, also, was dark.

By night, he grew worried. Grete finally fell asleep after calling out Mommy! for an hour. Bit sat at the heavy old rotary phone he would never replace for a cell and dialed their friends. Nobody had seen her. He called family. Erik, an engineer in California, was grumpy, still at work. Handy was having dinner with his fourth wife, Sunny, who told Bit that Handy was saving his voice for a concert, could she take a message, and hung up when Bit shouted, It’s Handy’s daughter, dammit, put him on the line. Astrid was at the Tennessee Midwifery School. Nobody had heard from Helle for a week.

Ike’s number was still in the ancient pleather phone book: poor Ike, dead these twenty years, who, like his sister, had grown into beauty in his midteens. Who loved his new adult body, used it indiscriminately, with gorgeous Norwegian women who knitted him sweaters, men in the park at night. By the time he finally admitted he was sick, he had lesions. It didn’t take much for him to die. A breath of cold air, pneumonia, one weekend in a hospital, and Bit arriving too late with flowers, finding a bed still warm under the imprint of Ike’s body. Those were the years when Helle’s family rarely knew where she was or how to get in touch with her. She didn’t know to come to Ike’s memorial. This broke her heart, even twenty years later, made her cry and cry when the shame of her life swallowed her down.

He called Leif, who answered coldly. Couldn’t talk. In editing. Hadn’t heard from his sister. Wait until morning then file a police report. Get back to him after Bit calls the cops. Earlier’s better than later. Dial tone.

It was midnight when he called Hannah, who had just begun living apart from Abe. He’d watched, alarmed, as Hannah suddenly became a fury of a woman, a new Hannah, a shouting one. When his mother answered her phone, Bit heard the desert behind her, the coyote howl and insect hum; could almost feel the wall of heat rise up against him, almost see the grasping saguaros. She was teaching history at a university there, and was still so full of anger at Abe that she couldn’t say his name. Your father, she called him. I haven’t heard anything from Helle, she’d said that night. Call your father.

Although Bit was on Hannah’s side (always on Hannah’s side; poor Abe), the richness of his mother’s fury took him aback. Her rage seemed immoderate in light of Abe’s sins. Bit could understand how she’d be upset: Abe had used their life savings to build a house in the Arcadia Sugarbush, throwing away all those years of scrimping, telling her they were poor again only when their new house was mostly built. Worse, Abe was officially squatting: Leif’s corporation, Erewhon Illuminations, now rented the old Homeplace from Handy. Leif had been a puppeteer, then went into movies and, when he’d tired of shoving his hand up felted asses, had gone on to computer-generated films. His last one was a retelling of the old Scottish ballad “The Well of the World’s End.” It was nightmarish, shockingly beautiful. The landscape was pure Arcadia. The company’s ranch in California had proved too small and Handy still held the title to Arcadia and always needed money, so Leif took over. What had been the Free People’s was now a corporation’s; sacrilege! The diaspora of Arcadia had rebelled. Squatters had descended, ponytailed men with tents so old the sides shivered apart in a small wind, women with rears gone soft as brioches. Most wandered home soon, but four stayed to build houses. Midge dug into the hill on the side of the Sugarbush, a geothermally controlled cabin, her own Hobbit hole. Titus and Saucy Sally and their kids built a treehouse. Scott and Lisa, hiding their anarchic hearts under Brooks Brothers sweaters, built a Mission-style cabin overlooking the Pond. And Abe, old engineer, had poured his whole being into his house. He had become obsessed with what would happen in the end of the era of oil and went offgrid, solar everything, backup windmill; rainwater catchment system, backup well; ambient solar heating, backup woodstove; materials eighty percent salvaged. Even the insulation was shredded dollar bills from Fort Knox.

When Bit called his father the night after Helle disappeared, he imagined the dark lonely Sugarbush, the forest pressing in on the old man. Abe picked up, panicked. What’s wrong? he said. When Bit explained, his father went silent. At last he said, Helle was so troubled, honey.

I know how troubled Helle is, snapped Bit. She’s been fine for four years.

Abe said nothing. Bit hung up, hard.

Bit wanted to weep with frustration. He heard a mouselike noise and looked up to find Grete, pale in the door, her stuffed frog in her arms. I can’t sleep, she said. Mommy needs to come.

Bit said, Can I try?

Grete said, No. It’s Mommy.

Mommy’s on a walk, said Bit. Why don’t I tell you a story? And she was too tired to resist, and he sat with her then the way he has sat with her every night since that first one, waiting until her breath evened out into sleep, into the morning, wondering how in the world he was going to protect her now.

He reads Sylvie’s paper about her digital fast three times before he puts it down. She has a tight, tiny script and uses the whole page. She describes how lonely she first felt when she put away her digital things, how cut off from the life she knew. She panicked a little, thinking about what would happen if her father had a heart attack or if a professor sent out an important e-mail, and to escape the anxiety, she went for a long walk. It was strange to walk outside without music in her ears. The city seemed so loud, and now that she could hear its regular noises, she could sense other things, too, the smell of the pretzels from the cart, the deep blue color in the folds of the steam from a grate. She sat for a long time in a park and watched the iridescent throats of pigeons. It seemed miraculous, this glorious color in such filthy birds. The people sped by, and she noticed how naked their faces were, as if they had become so used to nobody looking at them that they allowed themselves to be seen again. She was cold because she had watched for so long. To warm up she went to the Film Forum; they were playing movies from the forties. It was strange to be going into a theater on a bright cold day, and she kept itching to check her e-mail or text messages, feeling awkward because she was alone. But she bought a huge tub of popcorn and sat there, and after the first movie, began enjoying herself enormously. It was like taking a vacation from her life. Then a man sat down next to her. He was good-looking, salt-and-pepper. There was something about the almost-empty old theater with its velvet and gilding, the hot butter on her hands, the emotional sweep of the movies above, the man’s handsome profile, his smell of soap and shaving cream, that seemed glamorous and filled her with tension. She stopped seeing the movie, waiting for the man beside her to touch her, not knowing if she was going to scream and run or if she was going to sink into the feeling, let herself lose her head. She doesn’t say what happened. Only that when she was walking home, her knees still a little rubbery, in the thrilling cold darkness without even a phone for protection, she understood how alive people must have felt before you could reach anyone at any time. How it must have taken so much effort to connect with people. Back then, the past was more subjective, she imagines, because things weren’t immediately logged online for everyone to see; the future was more distant because it had to be scrupulously planned. That meant that the present would have been a more intense experience. The last time life felt like that to her was when she was a child, and the nostalgia for that time almost swallowed her up.

Sylvie watches him when he distributes the papers, keeps her eyes on his face when he gives hers back. When she leaves, she says, Professor Stone? About my grade? The other students pour away, and he can hear their feet in the hall, their voices released, going louder on the stairwell up to the street level. He packs his things and opens the door for Sylvie, locking it behind himself when they’re both in the hall.

You got an A-minus, Sylvie, he says.

I know, she says. I was hoping for an A.

He smiles, and she smiles back, friendly. She has a bright face that is always hungry; a puppy’s, ready to be petted. He says, as kindly as he can, Sylvie, an A means perfect. I’ve never had a perfect student. Nobody is perfect.

He says this, yet there is a strange thrill in him, a sharpness, and he understands how very much he longs to find someone who will prove him wrong.

Well, says Sylvie, pushing the door into the bracing chill. In the sunlight, the dark moles on her face are even darker, her skin translucent. There’s a blue branching at her temples. She stands, all awkward angles, one foot rubbing on the other. Her glance darts away, darts back to his chin. Try me, she says, quickly, under her breath.

Layer-speak. He waves and goes off. Three blocks later he is attacked by staircase wit. He should have said, he understands now, It’s not for me to try.

Every few semesters, there is something like this: a shy girl who flushes when he stands near, a confident girl whose eyes go dewy with suggestion. Helle used to say it was because Bit was small and gentle and emanated care. They look at you and see a husband, she said and laughed.

I always thought it was because I’m overwhelmingly sexy, Bit said.

Oh, you’re sexy, she said. But closer to the ground, which makes you more humble. You’re unthreatening.

Bit had felt the sting of this. Is that what you see? he said, at last.

Helle came close, then, and put her forehead against his, her eyes smiling. I see my best friend, she said. At the time, it was enough.

He is cleaning the darkroom at the school, wondering where his dreams went. They were not so very large; they were not too heavy to carry. One legacy of Arcadia is that his push for happiness was out of sync with the world’s; his ambition was for safety, security, a life of enough food and shelter and money, books and love, the luxury of pursuing the truth by art. The luxury of looking deeply, of finding a direct path to empathy. It didn’t seem unattainable. In the city, where there were a million talented artists, his quiet, slow pursuit was seen as a form of ambitionlessness. And even that push, after Helle, had vanished.

In a kind of anger, he grabs a developed photograph — a test run to figure out the kind of cropping needed — and writes on the back. He lists the solo shows he knows he should want, the fellowships, the competitions won, lists the galleries he should be courting, the prices he should be charging. He envisions a new set of portraits, blown up so large the whole is swamped by the particulars: this follicle, this pose. He writes a step-by-step plan over the next year to get it all and locks the darkroom behind him, feeling powerful.

But the paper embarrasses him, the vulgar scrawl of it. Just as he’s leaving the building, he folds it over and over and shoves it into his wallet. There it sits all day, a strange, bad weight. It falls out of his pocket that night as if telling him something he already knows, and he is relieved to shove it at last into the trash.

His women call him. Hannah from the desert every day; every few weeks, Pooh, Marilyn, Midge, Eden, Regina, Sweetie. Once a week, Astrid, breathless for news. He says, as always, that he has heard nothing from the police, nothing from the private detective. The detective is ferrety and lush of moustache, like an overgrown Hercule Poirot, a cliché of grooming that, absurdly, had put Bit at ease when he met the man. But Bit is starting to suspect the detective is doing nothing more than pocketing the thousand dollars a week that Bit can’t afford. Astrid’s voice always breaks a little on the phone.

Today, she says, Oh, my poor girl. She’s dead, I can feel it.

A flare of anger in Bit, and he says, Astrid. She’s out there. I believe that she’s still alive.

A breath on the other end. Assent on the intake. Yes, she says slowly. Do believe. One of us must.

Immediately afterward, Jincy calls, her twins screaming behind her. For six months last year, Jincy wouldn’t speak to Bit, after she’d taken Bit and Helle out to dinner and stuffed them like foie gras geese and had played nervously with her hair so that it spun up from her head in a wild frizz, until Helle had put down her fork and said, Okay, Jin, tell us what this is all about. Then Jincy looked at Bit and said in a great blurt that she was forty-two already and always thought she didn’t want kids but now she wanted them, badly, and would like for Helle and Bit to agree to donate sperm, and, oh, my God, she actually said it. And she didn’t mean to offend them. So consider it? And they said they would and soberly went home. Bit watched Helle get undressed that night in the dark, the slow peel of the black dress from her shoulders. Bare, they began to shake. He reached out to comfort her, only to find she was laughing. When she calmed, she said, You should do it. It’s the right thing. Plus, everyone knows you should have married Jincy anyway. You’d be happier. She smiled wanly and pulled up the sheets and fell asleep. And so Bit told Jincy no, though it broke his heart; he said it was because the world was too terrifying these days with one child of his in it. But he knows he declined because of Helle’s steadfast refusal to be jealous. When Jincy was pregnant with the twins, she rang the doorbell and came in with an armful of peonies and a chocolate cake, saying, Bygones, and that was the end of that.

He hangs up at the end of the call and is about to go back to the mural on Grete’s wall — he is painting in Titus, a giant, at the Gatehouse — when the phone rings and it is Hannah.

Nothing? she says.

No, he says. He imagines his mother. She has lost a great deal of weight: she looks like one of those lean, browned outdoorsy women who hike all day, with their beautiful legs and sunshot hair. But her voice has grown progressively darker. He says, Are you okay, Hannah?

I guess, she says. I think I’m lonely. Drinking too much.

Now he hears the bourbon in the smoky rasp. How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them. Then again, his wine bottle is already empty tonight. He says, Me too.

They sit together in companionable silence. When a garbage truck churns on the street below, Bit says, Hannah, is it worth being lonely just because you’re proud? I mean. You have a choice.

Just because, Hannah says, chewing on her words. Just because I’m proud.

Well, Bit says. That’s why you’re not talking to Abe.

Please. I have better reasons than pride, she says.

There’s more to the story? Bit says. He had assumed it was so simple: money, the universal wedge between people. He hadn’t the energy to imagine more.

Isn’t there always? Hannah says, and Bit understands that, whatever it is, her loyalty to Abe is still too strong to tell.

I miss her, he says, at last.

Oh, honey, says Hannah. And I miss your father, that old bastard on wheels.

Sharon opens the door raw-eyed, her brown hair puffed on her head like a mushroom cap. Grete and Frankie squeeze one another around the neck. Bit says, Bad night? and Sharon shrugs and says, Worse than average. I was served with d-i-v-o-r-c-e papers yesterday.

I’m sorry, Bit says, but he has to settle a twinge of envy; there is an endpoint to Sharon’s grief, at least.

Yesterday, the girl Helle had been was everywhere. In photographs on the walls in the apartment, in the frail wrists of the barista who served him tea at the university café, in the magazine on the coffee table at his dentist’s. These young starlets in Hollywood all seem to want to be who she had been: skinny within layers of clothing, with her clear white face, her vagueness. It is as if the idea of Helle he’d carried around with him for twenty-five years had bloomed external into the world.

He had barely survived his transition from Arcadia to the gritty Outside when he was fourteen. He was lonely. There were ugly urban trees, pigeons, piss caked on walls. He knew nobody and filled his time by walking for hours. The streets of Queens pinched crookedly into other streets; the parks, a mockery of countryside. He felt tender, unshelled. The warp of stories that had always blanketed him, his personal mythology, was invisible, so nobody knew him; no one knew he was the miracle baby, Little Bit of a Hippie, Abe and Hannah’s boy; no one knew about Abe’s fall and Hannah’s legendary strength and the fable of his meeting Verda on a snowy night; they didn’t know the traumas of baby Felipe and the Dartful Codger and Cockaigne Day; they didn’t know anything at all. They took one look at his slight body and tried to put him with the seventh graders; when he showed them his calculus, history, biology, they reluctantly shelved him with the juniors, two years older than he. There he rested, perilously. The other kids were incomprehensible. They fistfought, snapped gum, played sports as bloody as miniature wars. They were cruel. They called Bit Dippie because he was a hippie-dippie; they called him Stinkass because at first he didn’t dare to take more than two baths a week, even though water was free and soap abundant. When he came home from school, it was as if he were dragging a sack of lead.

Even the things he first found good soon made him feel hollow: Cheez Doodles, peanut butter, sodapop, Red Hots, which he ate until he was sick. The flickering sorts of lights they used in supermarkets and schools made even blinking feel like work. The streets were full of dogs, which he had always imagined to be good, peaceful creatures, but these dogs choked on leashes, left shit to rot on the concrete. Summer cooled into autumn, but beyond the softer light, a hint of cold, the season couldn’t come into its own. There were no golds, no blazes, no woodsmoke. The sidewalks only grew sadder until a dirty ice emerged. Worst were the people. There was no care in what they did. The pipes burst one day on the corner, the men in orange came, slapped a patch on the concrete, and within a week, the pipes burst again. People argued with themselves in public and wore their faces savage. Everyone was pale, puffy, unhealthy. At first, he marveled at the grossness, the fatness of everyone, and then one day it struck him that it was not normal to be as brown and scrawny as Arcadians were: it was not normal to see your friends’ ribs through their shirts, for men and women both to work bare-chested all day, equally topless, everything shining back at the sun. At night, the voices that came through the walls were canned, the many inflections of television, or the neighbors’ raised in anger. There were no soft songs, no lullabies. In the hall, he saw a mother hit her baby with a fist.

Even inside the apartment things were bleak: gray linoleum, Goodwill furniture. His parents moved about, faces in grief thick as paint. A silence grew between them and formed into a solid the consistency of wet sponge. Hannah stood at the window, her long hands cupped around her tea until it went cold. Her eyes sagged with winter. When she returned home from work, an administrative job at a social services clinic, silently, they had dinner. They were on the sixth floor, and there was no elevator and Abe could not descend to the street without Hannah and Bit to carry him, so all day he circled the apartment in his new wheelchair bought by welfare. Around and around he went, a thousand times. His wheels chewed tracks into the carpet.

What Bit hated most in all the Outside world, hated with an irrational, puking hatred, was the goldfish in the pet store a street away, its endless dull slide around the glass. When he passed the store on his way to school, he crossed the street. He was afraid of himself, of how badly he wanted to smash his fist through the window, to cradle the fish in his bloody hands and carry it down to the river. There he would dip it to the surface and free it into the terrible cold water. It might have been swallowed in a second, a sudden jagged mouth out of the black. But at least that second it would feel on its body a living sweetness, a water that it hadn’t dirtied with its own dying body.

His friends from Arcadia had scattered and he couldn’t track them down. He didn’t try for Outside friends. He did perfect work in school, so adults would leave him alone. Hannah and Abe wagged their lips at him, and he nodded and turned his back. He slept, later and longer, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was locked in the bathroom. He had liberated a red lightbulb from a photography store and stolen cash from Hannah for the chemicals, and only in the half-light of his improvised darkroom, watching the world emerge on a piece of white paper, did he feel his old self stirring. He could control this world. He could create tiny windows he could fit between his hands and study until he began to understand them.

The spring of his first year out of Arcadia tumbled into summer. Without school, he didn’t get up at all. He refused to eat. He lost twenty pounds. When he stopped speaking, his parents, who had seen this before from him, took him for help.

The dreary corridors, the female doctor who held Bit’s hand, the gelatin and canned fruit, the rings of sad people talking their demons out of themselves and into the air, a kind of spiritual siphoning. A fog of time, Hannah crying at the window, clenched with guilt, once confessing to the doctor how she had given this sadness to Bit, it was all her fault. He watched, as if from far away. She visited every day, and clipped his fingernails, and combed his hair and told him stories, holding him on her lap as if he were a baby. Every morning he swallowed a pill, and slowly the chemicals settled into his system, built up there, a superconductor, pulling back the magnetic splinters of himself one by one. Eventually, they erected a barricade between his sadness and the world. He has swallowed the same pill every day since. He is afraid of what would happen if he didn’t, the chemistry ebbing in the dark of his brain. Even on the drugs, he has had some long bad slides. In graduate school, anxiety swallowed him whole and he didn’t come out of his apartment for a month; after the terrorist attacks on the city; a quiet slipping in the first few months after Helle left. He hasn’t yet dug himself out of this last one.

After his very first episode of sadness, Bit returned to school and kept going until he graduated and went smoothly into college. His sophomore year at Cornell, when he was visiting Jincy at Smith, he heard that Helle had returned from Norway. Jincy was somehow the knot at the center of the net, the one who searched people out and stayed in touch with them. And over the years after the first sighting, it was Jincy who told him that Helle was modeling, mostly local stuff, JCPenney catalogs and ads. Then she’d gone out to Los Angeles. Then she’d gone to San Francisco. Then she was in rehab. Cole had become Bit’s best friend again; they’d found each other at age twenty-four in a grocery store two blocks from where they both lived. Cole took over the narrative: Helle was married. The marriage was annulled. She was in Miami. Then, for a long time, nobody knew where she was.

Suddenly, Bit was thirty-five. Time, he often thinks, goes like that. He had grown tired of poverty, of scrambling for galleries’ attention, the few solo shows not fulfilling enough, anymore. He had gone back to school for his MFA, had gotten an assistant professor position in the university.

Then one drizzly day in spring, Cole called Bit up, saying that Helle was coming to town. She was going to stay with Sweetie, who had married wealth and had a cavernous apartment on the park. Sweetie had invited her sons for dinner, but Cole and Dyllie hated one another because Dyllie, after years of editorials, had been hired as a commentator on a far-right cable news show.

A young, handsome, bowtied black man with an irrational hatred for all things liberal and hippie, said Cole on the phone. He’s the neocon wet dream.

Dear God, said Bit, though all he was thinking was Helle, Helle, Helle, the girl with the vulnerable white face, the stud flashing in her nose.

Cole was laughing. He said, Sweetie always says, Lord knows, kiddos, that I named you the right way, Cole black and Dyllie white, but fate somehow dipped you in the wrong tie-dye. Of course, that makes Dylan scream Racist! which he does only when convenient. So what I’m saying is that you have to come to the dinner, if just to keep the peace between us. You’re so inoffensive.

Bit would have given his right arm to see Helle again, but he had a show opening that night. The Chemical Quatrain, the gallery called it. There was a woman who took huge closeups of the sexual organs of wildflowers; a man who trucked in double negatives and found the ghost of himself in the shadows of buildings; a woman who staged savage little scenes with naked children. Bit and his large-scale portraits.

No problem, said Cole. We’ll come to the show first, then all go to Sweetie’s after.

But Bit never made it to Sweetie’s that night. The brothers were bickering about parking, and Helle had given up; she’d opened the car door in traffic and run inside to get away from them. She shook the rain off her cropped hair, her earrings jangling. Even from afar Bit saw that life had ridden her hard. The sight of her drooping skin, her painted-on eyebrows, broke him. She was stringy and sad, but somehow turned heads as she walked, as she’d always done. He held his breath watching her. Then she saw him in the corner with the wine, and her false smile fell, and she walked very fast right to him. She collapsed onto his shoulder, her skin’s deep smell still the same under all the orange and clove of her perfume, her body in his arms the same, his own body’s movement toward hers the same. There in the chic gloss of the gallery, the years peeled off of him and all the old stories hummed, taut, between them, electric lines.

Take me home, she said into his neck. So he took her, darting out into the night, before the Fox brothers even parked, before they entered the gallery and saw their own handsome adult Outside faces juxtaposed with their achingly tender and open Arcadia faces, shelled and unshelled, among the dozens of portraits of Arcadia that Bit had hung that night. What they found most moving, they told him later, were the blanks between the frames, the leaps that happened invisibly between the then and the now.

A brutal November morning, and Bit is walking through protesters in Union Square. Cold enough to make your balls vanish, he thinks, and remembers his hungry year in France after college, panting for the crumbs of insight strewn by the great photographer he’d traveled half the world to be near. Bit was willing to do anything: sweep the atelier, make excuses to the photographer’s wife when the photographer was with his mistress, print the contact sheets, do the enlargements alone. He was freezing and starving, wretchedly poor. He saw himself in the shop windows and was surprised at the small skinny urchin he looked like, something out of Hugo, a Gavroche nightly nibbled by the rats in the belly of the steel elephant. He was in the market searching for bruised fruit to bargain down to centimes when one old woman, peasant-fat, with buckteeth, beckoned him over. Mon pauvre, she said, eyes full of love. She was someone’s mother. She made a basket out of Bit’s hands and filled them with gorgeous purple figs, a delicate vegetable frost on them. Couilles du pape, she said with a wink, and he grins now, remembering. Pope’s balls: tiny, cold, purple.

He is still smiling at the thought, he knows, because the protesters smile back when they see him. Their faces are painted in white, and they are wearing white robes. He takes a picture, then ten. He looks over one of their leaflets, printed on paper the color of a rosy cheek. They are protesting Guantánamo, that limbo of terrorists. They protest the torture, the lack of due process. Well and good; he is on their side.

But his eye falls on a phrase that sends a white bolt through him. Ghost detainee: a person taken into detention anonymously so their families don’t know what has happened.

For a moment, the winged thing in him is relief. This is where Helle went, he thinks wildly; a mix-up, Helle saying something foolish in public as she always does at parties; Jesus, if I had a terminal disease, I’d strap a bomb to me and get rid of the Dick and the Bush in one blow. Or, looking at a television where women weep and ululate by a destroyed market: Fuck, what are we doing to that poor fucking country, no wonder they want to murder us all. Someone told on Helle, he thinks, a file was opened. He sees her go out of the apartment for a walk, sees a van pull up, a burlap sack on the head, a swallowing; she in an orange jumpsuit at a stainless-steel table, the Feds not knowing how harmless she is, how damaged, how deeply Grete needs her.

Bit lets the flyer drop into a rubbish bin. He is staggered; he has to sit. For a moment he felt relief at the idea of Helle being an enemy of the state, that she hadn’t been abducted, sold into slavery, raped, murdered; that she hadn’t fallen off the wagon and passed out in some ugly motel room, the needle in her vein under the rubber thong. Worse than those awful possibilities is the thought that she walked away in health and sanity. And what hurts him most is the gleam of peace he’d had: he would rather imagine his wife tortured in a secret cell than imagine that she chose to not love them anymore.

At morning drop-off, Bit stands watching Grete until long after all the other parents are gone. The aide has a face as lucid as a dormer window under the brown eaves of her hair, and she takes his elbow and deposits him gently into the hall. He blinks. There are the distant voices of children, the smell of their warm bodies, the sun in its pour over the honey-colored hallway, but something cold grips the back of his neck and refuses to let him move.

Look, he commands himself. Look hard. There is a piece of paper in the middle of the floor. He looks until it becomes terrifyingly strange. The branched folds across the surface, the incisor dents on one corner, the way the paper holds pores like skin, the feathery scrawl of pencil drawn across it, the way the corner shifts ever so gently in some tiny invisible wind, rocking and rocking into its own small shadow beneath, how the light from the windows condenses in the white until the paper holds a power beyond that of any other object, merely because it has been seen.

He remembers the lists of beautiful things that he used to make when he was little, and how he would say the litany quietly to his mother to try to pry her from her sad bed. He gathers a list again: this slice of late afternoon light across the subway tiles on the wall, the tree outside full of plastic bags white-bellied in the wind, Grete’s tiny spoon in her hand this morning, the gerbil smell of Grete’s breath, Grete running away from him at the playground, becoming a peapod, a spot, a dot. Again and again, all good things circle back to his breathtaking Grete. She breaks the spell. He can move again.

Hannah flies up for the week of Thanksgiving. Abe is coming also, Titus having agreed to drive him down on the morning of the feast. Abe is a secret. Bit hasn’t told his mother yet. He doesn’t think he’ll have the courage to do so until the doorbell rings.

In the airport, as she comes into baggage claim, Hannah’s face seems old and worn. Her hair has gone a heathered gray, the one long braid of it snaking around her upper arm. Her duffel is heavy. She studies the ground. Her lips are moving almost angrily, and Bit can’t believe his mother is the kind of woman who, in her loneliness, would begin talking to herself. He imagines a slippery slope; a roil of cats, a trashcan full of bottles, Hannah as bag lady. He scans behind her for Abe without thinking. He hasn’t seen his parents apart since he was little.

Then Grete bounces and shouts, and Hannah looks up, and when she sees Grete, her face is young again, and she is the great golden Hannah, dropping to her knee to hug her granddaughter. The part in her hair has the same warm sourdough smell when he kisses it. His head swims; he feels awakened.

They have a luxury of time together, almost too much. Grete clings to her Grannah, squeezes her, leads her from toy to toy and store to store, plants long slow kisses on her mouth. They are so absorbed in one another that Bit feels a flush of jealousy and laughs at himself: which one is he jealous of? Whose attention does he miss most?

At the old-fashioned ice cream parlor, as Hannah and Grete whisper and feed spoonfuls of frosty sugar to one another, he has an idea. Hannah, he says, and she looks up, her face rosy. Would you mind watching Grete all day tomorrow? I’m thinking I want to take the train to Philadelphia.

She fumbles in her purse and hands Grete two worn dollar bills. Monkey, she says, your Grannah desperately needs a chocolate chip cookie. Grete skips off: ordering at counters is her favorite thing to do.

Hannah looks at Bit. You’re going to see Ilya? she says.

What? he says. You think it’s a bad idea.

It’s just. What are you hoping to find?

Maybe she went to him, he says. Maybe she chose him. It’d be bad, but not as bad as not knowing.

You didn’t call him when she first vanished? You don’t think the detective would have dug her up, if she were there? She reaches her hands toward his, and he is shocked at the feel of them; bird-boned, tissue-skinned.

I did call him. I don’t know about the detective. But I didn’t go look, myself.

Hannah blows a graying wisp from her eyes and says, What, you think Ilya lied?

Bit says, softly, as Grete begins to speed back with a cookie raised high, I would have, if I were him.

Hannah plays with a red-and-white straw, thinking. Grete climbs up into her lap, and Hannah says, All right. Maybe not finding her there will give you something. Closure. You can live again.

Maybe, Bit says. I think I have to try.

Hannah pulls Grete to her, wrapping her long arms around Bit’s daughter, nestled and calm. Two versions of the same girl, peeping at him.

My potbellied Orpheus, Hannah says, theatrically, toward the light fixture that just came on overhead with a warm sizzle. My Orpheus descending into the underworld, whistling his gentle tune.

Grete, who couldn’t possibly understand, hears the laugh in her Grannah’s voice and guffaws, showing her tiny crooked teeth.

Bit takes the predawn train and walks through the awakening city. He likes Philadelphia, the no-nonsense hardness of the place. The day is already crisp and bright. It takes much longer than he thought it would to get to Ilya’s; he has to walk a bike path by the Schuylkill for miles to get there. The water ruffles under the wind bounding off it, blasts him with cold, whistles merrily into his ears. Sculls dart elegantly by, eights like crawling monsters muscle their way up the river. At last, he sees again the church where the schoolchildren mass in their uniforms, waiting for school. He’d come here once before, with Helle, when she took her things away from Ilya’s house and home to Bit’s. He stands in front of the brick house for a few minutes, unwilling, then knocks. The door opens.

For a moment, Bit feels like he is staring in a mirror that reflects his own future. It isn’t good. A small man, dark-haired, jaw like an andiron; but his once-handsome face is clotted, like milk left out for days. Ilya, Helle’s previous husband, reaches out a white hand and guides Bit in.

It is cold in the apartment and smells feral, and there are so many beer bottles and takeout boxes that Bit knows immediately Helle is not here. She cannot abide a mess.

They stand in the glum kitchen, and Ilya says in what Bit thinks is a Russian accent, Tell me. So. She is dead.

She is? Bit says.

I don’t know, Ilya says. I thought that is what you have come to say.

No, Bit says. May I sit?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, Ilya says, clearing a chair of newspapers. I am sorry I did not ask first. I believed you were the bearing of bad news.

No news, Bit says. I wanted to see you.

No news is bad news, Ilya says and smiles, showing briefly his brown teeth, the recessed gums. He sits also and fiddles with a cigarette and draws on it, pulling his yellow skin against his bones. When he breathes out, his face is soft again.

And so you have come to ask if Helle is here or if I have seen her. I can only say, No. To my greatest sorrow, as you understand.

Bit does understand. Helle had come to Bit just after her marriage with Ilya had dissolved. He is a violinist with the orchestra and a troubled man. Helle had told Bit about the rages, the furniture splintered on the walls, the time he held her by the throat over the upstairs banister. They had met during Helle’s last time in rehab, the time in her early thirties when she spent a whole year there. She had left Ilya when he grew so sad he tried to stab himself in the heart. He only grew sadder when he woke in the hospital to find her gone. It took him two years to emerge from the hospital and play his instrument again. By then, Helle was with Bit, and Grete was already one.

I should be happy if she were to come to me, Ilya says, now with great effort. But, alas, she will not. I am going home.

Home? Bit says, looking up. Russia?

Odessa, Ilya says gently. I am dying, and would like to die around my own. And this country has lost what has made it magic, of course. The exuberance, you know. Things, I am afraid, are soon to fall apart. The center cannot hold, all that. As it is, it is no different from Ukraine. So, to go back, in the end, from whence I come. There is a certain lovely symmetry, yes?

Bit isn’t sure what to say. A bell chimes down the hill and Bit loses count. He says at last, I am sorry you’re sick. I know we’re not friends, but it makes me very sad to hear that.

Oh, no, I am dying, Ilya says. Not sick. I am born dying. But I am not so unusual. There are many like me in the world. And you, why should you say that we are not friends? You and I are not enemies. Quite the contrary. Brothers-in-arms, the walking wounded. A connection to Helle. We are not so different.

He looks at Bit for a long moment, then looks away. However, if you ask me, and it does strike me that you have not, you might stop looking for her.

Why? Bit says.

I do not think she is alive. I have had a feeling for some time. I am sorry if this hurts you.

Well, I feel strongly that she is, Bit says.

Yes, says Ilya, we are similar in many things, it is true, but we are not the same. You have idealism still.

They sit for a very long time in the sour kitchen. There is a plastic clock on the wall that ticks and ticks and ticks.

Would you like to have my house? Ilya says suddenly.

Oh, Bit says. He imagines Grete here, space, peace, privacy, going to the school at the bottom of the hill. She could have a whole playroom: he could have a darkroom. A quieter pace, the river down the hill murmuring in their dreams at night. But he wouldn’t have his job, his friends.

The house is beautiful, he says, but our lives are in the city and I have no money.

Ilya flicks his delicate violinist’s fingers. No matter, he says. I do not need money where I am going.

Ukraine? Bit says, and Ilya laughs and puts out his fourth cigarette in the short time they have sat together.

I give you it. The house. You can sell, do whatever with it, I don’t care. On one condition, he says and seems almost hysterical with the idea in his head. He leaps up and begins to pace. His hands, loose in the room, seem like spiders, too big for his small body.

What would that be? Bit says, feeling a little sick.

You give me a photograph of the little girl. Helle’s daughter. Your Margrete.

With this, Ilya laughs and laughs, a warm laugh full of a strange dark joy.

Bit takes a moment to think. There is no harm in showing the picture. Bit would have sent photos regularly had he known Ilya wanted them. Yet somewhere within him a small beastie protests, urgently opposed. He waits, trying to understand why.

When Ilya’s smile seems about to break, Bit pulls his wallet from his pocket and takes out the most recent photograph he’d developed of his daughter, Grete holding a jack-o’-lantern, feet sturdy, her smile as broad as the pumpkin’s. There is Abe’s calm confidence in her gaze, Hannah’s lush lips.

Ilya takes the photo and stares at Grete for a long time. Bit squirms. He is just about to ask for it back, but then Ilya looks up and there are tears in his eyes. He smiles, but there is something of the crushed insect to his mouth. He shakes Bit’s hand and Bit squeezes back too hard, and belatedly remembers the tender violinist’s bones. Ilya winces, holding his hand to his chest.

I’m sorry, Bit says.

Ah. I won’t be needing the hand either, Ilya says. So. We have a deal. He shows Bit out, patting him gently on the shoulder.

Have a good trip home, Bit says. Yes, Ilya says, slowly. Yes, I think it will be good. And with a wink, he shuts the door.

Bit comes home on the clacketing train. There is a woman at the end of the car, facing him, whom he had barely noticed when he first got on, but who becomes more beautiful the more he looks at her. She has long wing-black hair and heavy brows and the kind of nose that reminds Bit of Greek statuary. Her earrings catch the glint from her overhead reading lamp, and gold coins of light dance on her jawbones. He would capture her in collodion, with its beautiful imperfections, its long, slow stare. Her hands are quick and nervous when she turns the pages of her book, and her face so sensitive and mobile that it is almost as if he is reading along with her: here a beautiful moment, here a tense one, here a release into a laugh, here a love scene. She bites her lip, and her face fills with a gladness that makes Bit know how she would be in bed, giving, soft, bird cries rising up from her throat. He could love this woman, he knows. There is nothing between them but an aisle and some seats and a quantity of air to move through; nothing to keep him from sitting down and her shy smile lifting from the book.

Hello, he would say. Hello, she would say. And the rest of his life could begin.

There is nothing keeping him, that is, but Helle. Her invisible hands are fetters, her invisible eyes watching. Her parsnip white body that he cannot stop believing is, just now, waiting for him at home, in the small close apartment, dozing until he slips back into the sheets they bought together those very few years ago.

The woman stands at an anonymous stop and moves to the door. She goes out to the platform and the train begins moving again. One blip in the window, shining with street light, and there goes the woman, forever gone to him.

In the morning after their first night back together in over twenty years, he ran out for Nutella sandwiches and coffee, and found Helle crying great ripping sobs when he came back. It took hours for her to say, I’ve done so many bad things in my life. I don’t deserve you.

The city was toxic to her, full of temptation and fear. He’d had no money. He was assisting photography shoots and selling only a few pieces a year, and his salary at the university was laughable. His apartment was above a Chinese restaurant; he thought his heart palpitations were coming from the MSG aerosoled into the air. But he borrowed from Cole, from Sweetie, from Regina and Ollie, and rented a little stone farmhouse in the country for a year.

If asked what time in his adult life was nearly as round and full as his childhood, nearly perfect, Bit would have said this year in the drafty old farmhouse. Every day waking to Helle in tattered pajamas and woolen socks, at the kitchen table, a cup of tea steaming in her hands. Those months of lying in the grass, of walks through the hills, of wanders through damp, chill barns overladen with antiques. Helle could spend an entire afternoon watching a swallow build its nest in the eaves. They drove all the way to Vermont for the farmers’ markets. The spring eased into summer, into fall. Helle let her hair grow out, gained weight so she looked flushed, not skeletal, and, to her delight, grew breasts for the first time. By October, she was showing Grete.

They had the luxury of time. They spent hours talking, and Bit would describe the life he longed for their baby to have, what kind of a world they would build for her. One night, watching the long angle of Helle under the tented sheet, he described a tight, beautiful community, filled with people he loved like family, living closely and relying on one another, a world with music and stories and thought and joy, of earthy happiness. He realized as he spoke that it sounded like Arcadia and laughed as he said so.

Helle’s voice, so distant, when she said: You’re not remembering right. Your memory’s doing some kind of crazy gymnastic routine to get happy out of our childhood.

What? Bit said, feeling a creeping sickness in him.

Oh, Bit. I can’t believe you don’t remember. It was cold, Helle said. We were never warm. We never had enough to eat. We never had enough clothes. I had to wake up every single night to someone fucking someone in the Pink Piper. Everywhere I was smelled like spunk. Handy let me drink the acid Slap-Apple when I was like five. What kind of hallucinations does a five-year-old have? For two months, I saw flames coming out of my mother’s mouth every time she talked. We were like guests at the Mad Hatter’s table, but didn’t even know the world was flipped around.

Helle turned to him, her belly swollen. Her eyes were red at the rims. She said, I’m dying of boredom, Bit. I want Thai food. I want life. This was good for a little while, this isolation, the little house in the middle of nowhere. But two people isn’t enough, Bit. It’s not enough. Let’s go back to the city. Please, please.

He didn’t say, Not enough for what? He didn’t say, Do you think you’re ready for that? He said, All right, and called the landlord and began to pack.

Amenable Bit, good-hearted Bit, gentle and generous Bit. He hates that man. Wishes he’d had any kind of backbone, the guts to say No. If he had, she would still be here. If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.

The black-and-white darkroom is in the basement of the arts building, which has long shadowy hallways and furnaces that clank and murmur. When he is alone here at night, the wood floors release the pressure built up over the day in sharp cracks that sound like footsteps. The only time he can use the darkroom for his own work is during the holidays, like this Thanksgiving week, when his students are all home, getting drunk, seeing their high school sweethearts in bars.

Hannah and Grete are at a play for children tonight, dressed like glamour queens, with sparkle on their cheekbones. Bit will use his time as well as he can. He had felt the old flame in himself. The tingle in the fingertips. He is eager to begin. He comes in whistling; someone has left the safelight burning, he sees with dismay, and takes off his coat and rolls his sleeves. When he looks up, he sees that the dark heap by the bank of enlargers is a person, watching him.

Hello, Professor Stone, says Sylvie.

A claustrophobic feeling thickens in the room. Bit frowns and says, Sylvie. What are you doing here?

I’m passionate about my art, she says, and she laughs.

Bit wavers. What is it about this girl that bothers him so much? He is half ready to get to work, start developing his film, damn the impropriety, when she speaks.

Actually, she says, I’m getting away from my family. Everyone is drunk and fighting. My dad is off somewhere doing work, per usual. We’re such a mess. Her voice throbs a little.

Sorry to hear that, he says. Families are tough.

You getting away from your family too? she says.

No. Holidays are when I get my own work done here. I can only work alone.

She smiles, her cheeks dimpling in the dim red light. But with me here, she says, you’re not alone.

Exactly, he says. He puts his coat on again. Happy Thanksgiving, he says and goes out the door, and even though Sylvie calls out, Wait, I’m sorry, he doesn’t stop.

He is irritated, irrationally angry. To calm down, he stops on the way home at an all-night diner where he has a linoleum table and a pot of coffee to himself. When people come in, he tries to guess who they are. Tonight it is too cold to tell. The insomniacs could be whores, could be drunken revelers, could be wealthy divorcees hungering for a hand on their skin. They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or a bomb.

It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won’t, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won’t let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.

He imagines snapping his fingers, making all the people in the diner stand, at once, and become their better selves. The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages. The man with a monk’s tonsure, muttering to himself, leaps onto a table and strikes music from the air. Out of the bowels of the kitchen the weary cooks, small brown people, cartwheel and break-dance, spinning like upended beetles on the ground and their faces crack into glee and they are suddenly lovely to look at, and the dozen customers start up all at once into loud song, voices broken and beautiful. The song rises and infiltrates the city and wakes the inhabitants, one by one, from their own dark dreams, and all across the island, people sit up in bed and listen to it lap around them, an ocean of kindness, filling them, making them forget all the evil leaching out of the world for a very long moment, making them forget everything but the song.

He laughs to himself and the vision dissolves. There is lassitude, the door opening to the cold air and single bundled bodies coming in. The silent waitress ministers to those who sit down. The night draws into morning. Here they are forever, sitting at their tables, separate, alone.

It is Thanksgiving Day.

Grete is napping. The Tofurky roasts among the root vegetables, and Hannah has just sat down beside Bit at the kitchen table, taken a long breath, dived in. She is saying, The trouble is, Bit, that you can’t start to live your life again until you make yourself let go — But the doorbell interrupts her.

Grocery delivery, Bit says, though he knows it isn’t. He feels a little ill. You can give me the business after I tip the man.

All right, she says, disgustedly. She was early at the booze, is on her third tumbler of bourbon already.

Bit buzzes without answering and holds open the door. The elevator pings and the doors part to Abe’s beaming face. He is the same, always. His face has as few wrinkles as Bit’s, and his shoulders and arms are vast from wheelchair racing. He gives Bit a kiss on the cheek, and here is the old scour of beard against Bit’s skin. Abe gestures at the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon on his lap, Hannah’s favorite, and winks.

Just what we need, Bit says loudly. You can put the groceries down on the kitchen table.

Hannah is rehearsing her interrupted argument with Bit when Abe wheels in. She goes very still. He pushes himself to her. They are the same height, sitting, and he takes her hand. She lets him.

Oh, Abe, she says, after a while. She can’t keep the happiness from her face.

I know, he says. I’m an asshole.

Yes, she says.

But you love me.

Unfortunately, she says.

Haven’t I been punished enough?

Hannah wipes her eyes, still smiling. The problem is, she says, I’m really only punishing myself.

So you think, says Abe. I can’t live without you, my Hannah.

Well, that was my plan, she says. I wanted to kill you.

I know, he says. But wait until you see the house. Honestly, it’s a thing of beauty.

Was it worth it? she says, sour again.

Not a single day of our separation, he says. Not a moment. But if you come back to me, I can have both. The answer, then, would be a solid maybe.

She looks at Abe, her face drawn with exhaustion. Bit is wrenched for a moment out of his own sorrow. He sees now what he should have been attentive to all this time: the terrible hollowness of Hannah’s days. How her body at night would reach for the warmth of Abe beside her, as it had lain there for forty years, only to find a cold sheet; the dry, dusty feel of her anger, how stuffed she was with it, how bitter it tasted on the back of her tongue.

She scowls. Abe smiles and touches her nose with the tip of his finger.

Oh, all right, she says at last. I thought I’d make you beg more, but who cares. We’re not getting any younger. She looks at Bit significantly and says, You only have so many days in your life to try to be happy.

She turns back to Abe and says, Give me a few more weeks until the semester is over and I’ll drive back home to you. You irresponsible, irritating, lying old man.

Abe smiles and leans to kiss her, but she’s not ready for that and pulls away. God. You always get what you want, she says.

Although his voice is apologetic, Abe says quietly, I do.

They eat at four, when the city is so quiet it could be a village. It is dark enough that the thousands of windows Bit can see from his apartment have begun to glow.

This is nice, says Abe, looking out the window at the flicks of falling snow. I always thought it was odd, you living in the city when you were born and raised on a commune in the middle of nowhere. Having to deal with all the pollution and stink and poverty and rats and junk. But days like this, I get it. It’s almost sweet, today. Or, at least, palatable.

Bit tried to live in the country, Hannah reminds Abe. For a little while.

It startles Bit to hear Hannah imply that it hadn’t worked out. Grete, who is chasing a Brussels sprout across her plate with her fork, was the result of that year. How could it have gone better? He thinks of Helle holding Grete for the first time. He had longed for the old way of childbirth, naked behind Helle, helping her rushes, smoothing back her hair, but she had been adamant: No way in hell we’re doing that dirty hippie shit, she’d said, and had scheduled the cesarean. Bit stayed planted at Helle’s head during the surgery in a fug of grief. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. The nurse hustled Grete away and brought her back clean, her face red and round with skin as ravaged as her mother’s, Helle’s as raw as the baby’s, a perfect match, a dovetail of need. At home, Helle’s hunger for her baby surprised Bit. He thought he would be the caretaker, the one who would get up, who would change, who would sing. It was Helle, though, who took over, and he knew the love she had for Grete for what it was: a seamless accord between souls. He tried not to be jealous that neither of the souls was his.

The loss cudgels into him again. His fork full of mashed potatoes is heavy in his hand. He’ll never understand how anyone would walk away from the tiny perfect place between Helle and Grete. He doesn’t believe anyone could.

His parents speak to each other; Hannah dabs cranberry sauce from Grete’s cheek. Bit can only look into the soft sift in the windows where he sees what his parents can’t; not knowing the whole, they can’t understand the lack. He, Bit, had let a coffee go cold in his hands, as he listened to the radio announcer describe how the two planes had flung themselves into the buildings there. Nearly two decades earlier, when he and his parents came into the city, he had named the buildings after Hannah and Astrid, playing with the way everyone in Arcadia had called the women the Twin Towers for their height and blondness; no matter that the buildings themselves grated on his sense of beauty, too awkward in their ambition. He’d grown accustomed to their silhouettes on the skyline. He gave them characteristics shared with their namesakes: Astrid colder, Hannah’s antenna the crown he’d always imagined for his mother. Almost twenty years after he first saw them, the one called Astrid collapsed in a skirt of dust. After that, the one called Hannah. He turned off the radio and felt the sadness well blackly up, and there was no way to tamp it down. It was absurd; thousands had died; his personal loss was a hole in the sky. But he couldn’t help it. He knew enough to get out, on foot, to go to Jincy’s neatnik house in the suburbs, to let her care for him.

The city, he’d thought at first, would do all right: there was hurt but a terrible rage to temper it. He was wrong. Even now, years later, it hasn’t quite rebounded. It winces and holds itself more closely. Even before the global downturn it seemed to Bit as if people were making do with their second-best coats, withholding their fullest joy. On the days that he swings through the city on his walks and watches his fellow creatures move with tight, clipped steps, he can almost grasp what they lost. It wasn’t what they believed; it wasn’t real estate or lives. It was the story they had told about themselves from the moment the Dutch had decanted from their ships onto the oyster-strewn island and traded land for guilders: that this place filled with water and wildlife was special, rare, equitable. That it could embrace everyone who came here, that there would be room and a chance to thrive, glamour and beauty. That this equality of purpose would keep them safe.

It isn’t important if the story was ever true. Bit manipulates images: he knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital. He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.

Bit surprises himself by interrupting what Abe has been saying, something about curmudgeonly old Titus winning a thousand bucks from a lottery ticket. His voice is loud and fast with an urgency that startles Grete out of her dreamy play.

Abe, he says, it wasn’t the country that was so beautiful about the whole Arcadian experiment, don’t you see? It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can’t you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We’ve gone urban because we’re all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection. Do you understand? It doesn’t exist anymore anywhere else.

He feels himself close to tears. The others stare at him. Grete puts down her fork and slides off her chair and climbs into Bit’s lap and pats his cheeks with her starfish hand. His parents send looks across the table to one another, as if to say, He’s finally going off the rails.

I’m not going off the rails, he says.

We never said you were, they say at once, and smile at each other. Jinx, says Hannah. You owe me a sodapop, says Abe, and they laugh in relief that they have deflected Bit, at least for now, at least a little.

Classes are like shoals of fish, Bit thinks at this week’s photography critique: something hungry gets into them and they surpass their natural speed. Sylvie’s group has begun to astound him. Their subjects are adult, deeply thought, riskier than undergraduates usually work (one boy takes photos of his little cousins in the bathtub, flirting with the line between art and child pornography; one girl takes a series of hands disappearing into the folds of fabric, silks and burlaps and muslins and cotton wool, gorgeously sensuous). There is a strange heat in the room whenever he enters it. And Sylvie of the shredded teeshirts, the knee-high boots, Sylvie whose face is so naked and pleading, smiles and praises when praise is due, and when it isn’t, she looks at Bit and holds her tongue and seems to be saying, Go on, please. I’m waiting.

It is a year to the day that Helle went missing. Bit hires a baby-sitter and takes Sharon from downstairs to dinner.

Are you sure? she said this morning, handing him the coffee, trying to keep from looking too pleased. This could ruin everything, you know. She passed her hand through her short black hair, blinked her dark eyelashes prettily.

I’m sure, he said and carried her smile with him through the day.

They go to the Italian place down the way. The food isn’t wonderful, but it is fine: Chianti out of straw-trousered bottles, fettuccine Alfredo, cannoli. It feels odd, good, to walk with a woman who is smaller than he is, even in heels. Sharon looks surprisingly beautiful tonight in her neat blue dress, sleeveless to show off her sharp shoulders, her face carefully outlined with makeup. She smiles a lot. Only her hands are nervous, patting the menu, straightening the silverware, plate, votive again and again.

They talk about the children, about their exes, about the weather. They relax. Now they’re on the subject of books. Without other media, never a television, never a computer, books have always made up much of Bit’s life. Sharon leans forward, her brownish lipstick worn off at the center of her lips. Her eyes kindle. She begins talking about Ayn Rand.

She changed my life, she says breathlessly. Howard Roark! Dominique Francon! Ayn is the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. Objectivism. I read Atlas Shrugged in college and thought, Oh, my God, everything’s coming into focus, finally. You know what I mean?

Bit listens, trying to make his face neutral. And talks, in turn, about George Eliot, whom Sharon had never heard of. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, he quotes, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Sharon takes a long slow sip of wine. I don’t get it, she says finally.

They go back to Sharon’s apartment. Frankie and Grete are asleep upstairs at Bit’s, with the babysitter. Sharon’s place has the same floor plan as Bit’s, and it is almost as bare as his, as if she, too, had been reared in a bread truck the size of a closet. But Bit’s has color and comfort and heat, and Sharon’s is white and very cold. Sorry it’s so chilly, she calls from the bathroom. When Frankie’s not here, I turn down the thermostat. Saving pennies. Times are tight.

When she comes back, she sits next to Bit and without much ado presents her mouth to be kissed. She is a good kisser, involved and slow. Her belly is slightly springy to the touch, but warm.

Bit extracts himself. I’m sorry, he says.

Oh. Me too, she says glumly. She bites her cuticles. I’m not beautiful like your ex.

No, he says, and when she looks startled, he says, Oh, yes you are. I meant, no, that’s not it. It just doesn’t feel right to me.

They hold hands and listen to the clock on the mantel ticking. They can hear the baby-sitter upstairs, the movie playing on her laptop.

He says, I think it was the Ayn Rand.

Sharon laughs and laughs, and when she stops, she squeezes his forearm. Oh, I always seem to have a hopeless crush on you handsome bleeding-heart liberals. I need to find me a nice old conservative.

Good luck in this city, he says, standing. If you want, I’ll carry Frankie down.

Well. Could you let him sleep? she says. If you don’t mind watching the kids, I’ll call a friend and go out on the town. The night’s still young. And so are we.

You are, he says.

You will be young again someday, too. If you let yourself, she says, and she gives him a sisterly kiss on the cheek. Now scram. I have to get on my dancing duds. He climbs the stairs and imagines Sharon in some flashing club, closing her eyes to the music, something throwbacky, full of synth and falsetto, and wishes that she could have been different than she was, a thinker; or, better, that he could have relaxed his personal code and pretended to be a different man than he is, even for the space of one night.

He goes to his last classes of the semester and collects the portfolios. His students, suddenly beautiful and dear to him, thank and touch him as they file out the door. Claps on the shoulder, hugs, handshakes. Their warmth surprises him. He thinks of himself as strict, not the kind of professor to whom anyone would feel close.

Free, he spends an hour wandering. He feels the urge to look for something, but needs nothing; he goes into and out of stores, buys a cookie and a toothbrush and a penguin for the bathtub for Grete.

Finally, he sits in the train station, watching the people go back and forth.

Once, when he was on a shoot in Europe, he went off for a few days at the end to travel. In a Swiss station filled with honey wood and clerestory light, he saw a woman on a bench, weeping. She was enormous; pieces of her hung over the armrests and into the surrounding seats. She wore a smock printed with faded blue puppies and Chinese slippers with spangles, and her feet looked like baked potatoes split out of their skins. But her hair was upswept elaborately as if she were about to attend the opera, and the hands she held in prayer before her mouth were small as finches.

Bit stood, frozen in the current of people, watching her. Not a soul stopped to ask what was wrong. He moved in indignation toward the crying woman; the crowd parted. When he was very close, he saw the broad straw hat upended and the sign propped on the woman’s belly: Weeping Woman, it said in four languages: Femme Sanglotante; Donna Piangente; Weinende Frau. The clock struck a ponderous hour. The pigeons in the rafters lifted and settled. The weeping woman turned off her sobs like water from a faucet and gathered her sign and hat. In a blink, the great mass of her dissolved into the crowd, and Bit was alone again.

Remembering this, he feels the old, hot prickle in his eyes. He thinks, Yes. But it vanishes. His angry heart calls for his attention, a fist on the door of his ribcage, beating.

Over squash ravioli and the tender new vegetables from the farmers’ market, Bit says to Grete: The sharpness of radishes on the middle of the tongue. A hot shower after a cold day. Feeling how strong you are when you squeeze my neck. A spritz of lemon in my water.

Grete has stopped eating. She is staring at her father.

The taste of an icicle, he says. The feeling of floating in a pond. A chocolate Kiss in its little foil wrapper. He smiles.

Grete says, slowly, Pumpkin pie? And when a puppy licks you on the mouth?

When a cashier’s hand touches yours when they hand back change, Bit says.

The way Hannah smells, says Grete. Abe’s funny little knock knees. Pom-poms!

And his daughter is off, so excited she is standing on her chair, invoking the tiny domestic gods of grape cough syrup and Japanese beetles and the cedar bed in the preschool’s hamster cage. Bit thinks of Helle, the long, dark path she had been for him and how the light at the end of it was this plump blondie just now spraying pesto on the floor.

Sylvie comes into his office without knocking, and locks the door behind her. He sits back. He should be grading portfolios but, with astounding inappropriateness, has been reading Duras’s The Lover again. It was Helle’s favorite book. He puts the book under his files, but Sylvie teases it out. She leans on the desk beside him, her legs long and pale and bony, and he thinks of the chill outside, the sleet coming down and the sludge coating the sidewalks, the goosebumps she would wear on her skin. She reads, making a moue with her lips. Her hair seems excessively clean. If someone drew lines between the moles on her face, there would be the Big Dipper on her cheek and chin. He waits. She puts the book down, bracelets clinking.

You know, she says. After you’ve graded my portfolio, you’re no longer my professor.

I’ve graded it, he says. A-minus.

When she looks hurt, he sits back. What is it about this girl that makes her so easily wounded? How easy it would be to take his anger out, to crush something good in her. There is a piece of him that is sorry she isn’t five years older, that would find her a fascinating woman when she’s been more toughened by time. Something in her could soothe him.

Well, she says. As I said, you’re not easy.

Right now I’m distinctly uneasy, he says, trying to lighten things.

She slides a foot between his. Good, she says and leans forward, her mouth coming close. He can smell the cinnamon on her breath and, deeper, the coffee.

Oh, honey, he says. No. You’re lovely, but no.

Why? she says. I’m of age. You’re not my professor.

I’m not that kind of man, he says. And you remind me of someone.

Who? she says.

Me, he wants to say. He smiles at her.

My wife, he says. When she was a little younger than you.

She leans back, chewing her lip, thinking this over. She looks as if she’s going to mention Helle’s disappearance, and he is grateful when she retracts the thought. She says, I don’t think I mind. She flushes when she holds the book up. To be a mistress. Fine with me.

I mind, he says.

I don’t get it, she says, her eyes shining. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

He takes her hands in his and leads her to the hall. He kisses both of her moist and shaking palms. The smell there, photographic chemistry, touches him.

All the more reason to refrain, he says and shuts the door.

Spring a stirring of the world’s optimism. Inside him, too, a tendril grows. He sees women every day in their too-early espadrilles and hopeful light coats. Soon, soon, he will approach one over the protestations of his shy heart and begin a conversation. You should always wear flowers, he’ll say to one, pretty in a floral blouse. Or, if that’s too embarrassing, maybe a simple Hello, like a window thrust open.

There is a whiteout, then a thaw. Hannah returns to Abe in their little Green house in the woods, telling everyone, My husband couldn’t live without me, though Bit knows it was mutual. The desert’s broad heavens, full of vultures, were sucking her dry.

In the mail one day, a shattering surprise: a letter from a lawyer, a clipping of an obituary, Ilya, so young and so beautiful in the picture, his face soft with hope.

Bit goes in to see the lawyer and emerges with a bouquet of papers and a key.

At home, he goes over and over what had happened and only ends up more confused. The house in Philadelphia is more than enough, but there also is a small amount of money. Bit’s head swims for days.

He and Grete run through the old brick house on the weekend that they sell it. The cleaners have been in, and the place no longer stinks of cigarettes and sorrow. For a moment, he can see their lives in Philadelphia spinning out before them, a parallel existence, bright and good in this house with its original hardware and picture rails. He has a great urge to call the Realtor, to throw everything up, to move to this smaller city, this slower one.

He knows he won’t. If they moved, Helle wouldn’t be able to find her way back to them. He opens a door to the garden, and the winter light and cold air pour in. Sun falls onto the old floorboards, and his daughter spins and spins and spins into the light, out of it, into it again, her red skirt flaring, ablaze.

Newly flush, he says to Grete, Where do you want to go for vacation? He knows she will say Grannah and Grumpy’s. Arcadia.

But she surprises him. She considers her toes. At last she says, Greece, shyly, watching him from under her brow.

He carries his bemusement with him for an hour, and when he understands, he is on the subway among all the pressing anonymous bodies. Helle. The story, Hellespont. In his daughter’s mind, Helle is infinitely falling from the back of the golden ram and through the air, a coin tossed, winking and cheery, into the water below.

They can wound, stories, they can blister. He had begun one that night he fell in love with Helle again in the gallery. It went like this: a vast expanse of time unrolling before them, he waking to Helle’s sour breath and rumpled hair every morning, making one Grete or even two, Helle’s and Bit’s bodies aging over endless mugs of coffee, endless dinners, the days shortening as they grow old, the pair at last helping each other gently into death. He lost this story the night she left. Now time stretches just as vast, but he doesn’t know what he should do. He doesn’t know what magic words are necessary to get their story back, to return her from her chosen darkness.

Up near the stone farmhouse during their year away from everything, there was a little river that cupped a spit of land that they could walk out onto. After heavy rains, the river overran the bank so that the spit became an island. Out there was the frantic smell of spring, all mud and buds, the broad slow swoop of clouds. The wind was rougher, without the trees to moderate it.

Helle and Bit would wade out with a picnic and lie in the sun and swim in the frigid river.

There was a moment on that island that lives in him when he rises in the morning, when he showers, when he walks, when, as now, he wakes to the devastating night.

Over and over, he sees Helle pulling herself up out of the river, hair sleeked, water coursing in glad drops over her skin, a flush from the cold across the whole white stretch of her. The chill sun loves her, touches her, plays prisms on the fine hair on her arms.

Are you happy? he says, inches from Helle’s mouth.

I’m so happy, she whispers. Her cold breath, her cold skin. Her cold lips upon his.

Bit has stopped looking for Helle. He never stops looking.

There is a hole in his life where Helle had been, a vacuum. Yet, for years afterward, Bit finds her. For a glimmering breath, he finds an astonishment of Helle that crumbles into dust when he looks harder and she is gone again.

He finds her at home, in her bed, where she had been all this time, waiting for him: white sheet undraped from her chest, bare nipple in the daylight. Where have you been? she says, voice humid with sleep. I’ve been waiting for you.

He finds her in a graduate student bar. He is buying his MFAs a round of beer. Her hair is hennaed; she wears black leather and walks past him, her face a blade, and out the back door.

He finds her one night as he shuts the window against a storm and a woman in a clear plastic trench coat runs across the street, the knobs of her spine vivid under her silk blouse, her white hair plastered to her cheeks; and when he runs out into the torrent to chase her, she is gone, and the bum on the vent insists there was nobody there at all.

He finds her in the hospital in Thailand, after he brushes up against a stonefish on a dive and goes into toxic shock, and dies there on the table, and is being restarted; just after the electric pulse, he sees, above the doctors’ heads, Helle’s face silhouetted against the light, a halo, a spherical aberration; and then she moves and her face shifts into that of a nurse, pale and old and thin and smiling gratefully at him for being alive.

Mostly, he finds her in his daughter. He carries Grete from a child’s party to her room, and pulls up the coverlet, and when he turns out the light and closes the door and waits there, resting his head against the wood, he knows Helle is there, inside, sleeping. She is in Grete’s face as she grows. Her fat melts away and her mother’s cheekbones emerge and those same gold-flecked eyes grow complex; Helle is in Grete’s voice as she looks at him and puts her head on his shoulder and says, Oh, Dad, why are you crying? His daughter, a gentle girl with plenty of Bit in her also, laughs up at him, saying, You’re always crying, Dad. Why are you always crying?