Ariel

One

Was there a noise that woke her? Roberta was never sure. The old house was full of night sounds. Floorboards creaked. Curtains rustled. Windowpanes, loose in their frames, rattled at the least touch of a breeze. She had been a light sleeper all her life. Caleb had just recently taken to sleeping through the night, and she had not yet entirely adjusted to his new schedule. The slightest sound could rouse her.

Or had she dreamed a sound? There might have been music, that thin reedy music Ariel made on her flute. Roberta sat up in bed, curiously troubled, straining to hear something in the silence.

Then she saw the woman.

A dark shape hovered in the far corner of the room near the window. A woman, wrapped in a shawl, her face averted.

Roberta pressed one hand to her breast. Her heart was fluttering, her mouth dry. She thought David, and her other hand reached out to her side, patting at empty air.

In the other house they had shared a bed, and she had always been able to reach out and touch him in the night. Now they slept in twin beds separated by the width of a night table. She had selected the bedroom furniture and donated the old double bed to Goodwill Industries. And she had been the one who picked this house. And now David slept, his breathing audible now in the room’s stillness, while this woman lurked in the corner of their bedroom.

There was a lamp on the night table. Roberta’s hand left off patting the air between the two beds and groped tentatively for the lamp. Her fingers found the switch, then hesitated. She was afraid to turn the light on even as she was afraid to remain in the dark.

She closed her eyes, opened them. The woman was still there.

Then a windowpane shook in its mullions and suddenly the woman was gone. It was as if she were a creature of smoke, and as if the wind that rattled the pane had slipped into the room and dispersed her. Roberta stared, blinked her eyes.

There was no woman in the room.

But she had seen—

An illusion, of course. Some trick of lighting, some shadow cast by moonlight through the old handmade windowpanes. But how extraordinarily real it had appeared to her! And what menace the shape had seemed to hold!

Unafraid now, she switched on the bedside lamp, then flicked it off again. There had been nothing and no one in the bedroom. Some forgotten dream must have awakened her, an unpleasant dream that left her anxious and suggestible. And so she’d seen a shape where there was no shape, and her imagination had cloaked that shape in a woman’s shawl and touched her with a sense of evil.

Roberta lay down, closed her eyes. After a few moments she opened them again and stared at the corner of the room where she had seen the woman.

Nothing.

She closed her eyes again and tried to summon sleep. But it wouldn’t come. Her mind was racing, and every stray thought that came to her seemed to increase her anxiety and focus it upon the baby. She had seen a woman who wasn’t there, and now she was worried about her son.

It was ridiculous, and she knew it was ridiculous, but she also knew that she would not be able to sleep until she had checked Caleb. And wasn’t it even more ridiculous to lie awake until daybreak? She sighed, then slipped out of bed and padded barefoot across the bedroom floor. David had wanted to carpet the whole upstairs, even as the other house had been carpeted wall to wall. She’d explained as patiently as possible that you didn’t buy a house almost two hundred years old and cover its random-width pine floor with Acrilan broadloom. Now, though, she could almost sympathize with his position. The floorboards were cold underfoot and she found herself setting her feet down on them with exaggerated care to lessen their creaking.

Halfway down the hall, she hesitated at the open door to Caleb’s room, then entered and approached his crib. There was enough light so that she could easily see his face. He was sleeping soundly. She stood there for a long moment, listening to the night sounds and gazing down on her son.

Before returning to her own room, Roberta walked the length of the hallway and stood outside Ariel’s door with her hand on the knob. Then, without turning the knob, she went back to her bedroom.

Of course there was no dark shape in the corner. She shook her head, amused at her own fear, reassured now by the sight of her sleeping infant son.

Funny what tricks the mind played...

David stirred in his sleep and she looked down at him. The smell of alcoholic perspiration touched her nostrils. It was a sour smell and she wrinkled her nose at it.

Odd, she thought. He was never drunk, not as far as she could tell, but after dinner he would sit reading in his ground-floor study and during those hours he always had a glass in his hand. It didn’t seem to change him — as far as she could tell it didn’t do anything to or for him — but while he slept his body eliminated some of the alcohol through the pores, and in the morning his sheets were often damp with it. But he never staggered and he never slurred his words, and if he had hangovers in the morning he never mentioned them.

She got into bed, settled her head on the pillow, let her thoughts drift where they wanted. Now the night sounds comforted her — the wind in the branches of the live oak outside her window, the loose windowpanes, the occasional creak of a floorboard, the inexplicable sounds that come from within the walls of an old house, as if the house itself were breathing.

Once she thought she heard the piping of Ariel’s flute. But perhaps she was already asleep by then, already dreaming.

She was up later than usual the next night. She often went to bed right after the eleven o’clock news, occasionally hanging on for the first half hour of the Tonight show. But something kept her in front of the television set. She watched Johnny Carson through to the end. Even then she was faintly reluctant to go upstairs, and she dawdled on the ground floor, rinsing out a couple of cups and glasses she’d have ordinarily left for morning. She checked the pilot lights of the large old six-burner gas range. There were three pilots, one for each pair of burners, and they were forever going out in the damp brick-floored kitchen. One was out now, and she took a moment to light it.

She checked both outside doors, making sure they were locked and bolted, and she found herself testing the window locks and became impatient with herself. She felt like an old maid checking under the bed for burglars. What on earth was she afraid of?

She checked the children. Ariel was asleep, or pretending to be asleep. She lay on her back, her arms at her sides under the covers, her breathing deep and regular. Caleb, too, was asleep, and while Roberta stood beside his crib he stretched and made a sweet gurgling sound. Air currents in the room shook the mobile suspended over his crib, an arrangement of gaily-colored wooden fish equipped with tiny bells that sounded when the air moved them. Caleb made his gurgling sound again, as if in response to the light tinkling of the bells, and Roberta felt a rush of love in her breast. She lowered the side of the crib, bent over and kissed Caleb’s forehead.

How sweet he smelled. Babies had the most delicious scent...

In her room, David was already sound asleep. Maybe that was what the drinking did for him, maybe it enabled him to get to sleep and sleep soundly. Maybe she should have had something herself. But that was silly — she was tired, she would sleep with no trouble, she had never needed help getting to sleep.

And indeed it wasn’t that long before she slept. Nor was it too long after sleep came that she was suddenly wide awake, fearfully awake, with her heart hammering against her ribs and a pulse working in her temple.

Her eyes were open and the woman, wrapped in her shawl, was standing by the bedroom window.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

There was a gust of wind. She heard it in the live oak, rustling the leaves, tossing the bunches of Spanish moss. It rattled the window glass and seemed to blow the woman about, as if she were a bundle of old rags. But she was a woman, it was very clear that she was a woman, the same woman who had been there the night before. Her form was quite distinct in the dim corner. She stood facing the window, her hip and shoulder toward Roberta, her face invisible.

Roberta reached for the bedside lamp. Her fingers rested on the switch. She thought David, but did not speak his name aloud.

The woman turned toward her. She had a quick impression of a pale face. And the woman was holding something in her arms. Roberta squinted, trying to focus on the woman’s face, trying to see what she was holding, and even as she narrowed her gaze the woman began to fade away, to merge with the shadows.

She switched on the light. The woman was gone.

She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She was drained, exhausted, and for several minutes all she could do was remain where she was, breathing raggedly, willing her heartbeat to return to normal. David slept on. She checked the time on the alarm clock, something she hadn’t thought to do the night before. It was a quarter to four.

She told herself to go to sleep. She turned off the light and tried to lie still but it was impossible. She had to get up, had to check the baby.

She hurried down the hall. Caleb was sleeping like a lamb. The sight of him was evidently all she needed. She sighed with relief and tiptoed out of his room, returning to her own room without bothering to check Ariel.

In her own bed, she had a sudden impulse to go downstairs again, to check the doors and windows, to make sure none of the pilot lights had gone out. But she resisted the urge and sleep came to her with surprising swiftness.

When she awoke a light rain was falling. She changed Caleb and fed him, then went downstairs. David had made his own toast and coffee and was sitting behind the morning paper. Ariel had helped herself to orange juice and a bowl of sugared cereal. Roberta joined them at the table with a cup of black coffee and a cigarette.

No one spoke during breakfast. Twice Roberta was on the point of mentioning what she’d seen in the room the past night, but both times she repressed the impulse. The sentences she tested in her mind proved inadequate. “I had the strangest dream last night.” But had it been a dream, last night and the night before? If so, it was unlike any dream she’d ever experienced before. “I thought there was someone in the room last night.” But it was more than that, more than a trick of lighting and shadow. She’d sensed a menacing presence, had seen the woman turn to her before disappearing. “There was someone in our bedroom last night.” But was there? Or was her own mind conjuring up images?

David was the first to leave. They chatted briefly, perfunctorily. Then he carried his briefcase to the car while she poured a second cup of coffee and lit a third cigarette and picked up the newspaper he’d abandoned. As usual, it told her precious little about what was new in the world and rather more than she needed to know about Charleston. She scanned an article about plans for the next Spoleto festival, skimmed a report on activity in the state legislature at Columbia, and read wire service pieces on arms-limitation talks and congressional maneuvering without really taking them in. She turned with some relief to Ann Landers and immersed herself in other people’s problems. A secretary found her boss’s wife domineering, a man felt guilty about putting his old mother in a home, and an adolescent girl felt unloved, unwanted, and singularly unpopular. Ann told her to make a list of all the positive things in her life.

“Time for school, isn’t it?”

Ariel nodded, rose from the table, carried her dishes to the sink. How pale the child was, Roberta thought. Pale skin, pale blue eyes. Expressionless eyes — looking into them gave her a feeling that verged on vertigo, as though one could fall through the child’s eyes into a bottomless abyss.

“Have a good day, Ariel.”

”Thank you. I will.”

“You’ll be home afterward?”

”Where would I go?”

Where indeed? The child didn’t seem to have any friends. She spent all her time alone, reading or doing homework or playing her horrible flute. Had she been as isolated when they lived in the suburban split-level? It seemed to Roberta that Ariel had been less thoroughly alone, that she’d had a playmate or two, but it was hard for her to be certain. That had been before Caleb’s birth and so many things had been different.

But she was always a solitary child, Roberta thought. She seemed most content that way, as if she required solitude as other children required companionship.

The door closed. Roberta hesitated a moment, then went to the front room and drew the drapes a few inches apart. She stood at the window long enough to watch Ariel walk to the end of the block and turn the corner, disappearing from view. Then she opened the drapes all the way.

Back in the kitchen, she rinsed the dishes and thought about Ann Landers’ column. Perhaps she ought to make a list of all the positive things in her life. Well, there was the man she’d married, the daughter they’d adopted, and the son she had recently borne. And there was this house, historic and well-preserved, on one of the best blocks in the Old Charleston section south of Tradd.

An impressive list. So what if the marriage had turned loveless? So what if there was something strange, almost frightening, about Ariel? So what if the house made sounds in the night, and the pilot lights wouldn’t stay lit, and the damp was so pronounced you could grow mushrooms on the kitchen’s worn brick floor? So what if sleep was interrupted by nightmares, or visions, or whatever had possessed her two nights running?

Caleb fussed in his crib, demanding her attention. “I’m coming, sweetie,” she called out, crushing her cigarette in the ashtray, hurrying up the stairs, grateful for the distraction from her own thoughts.

The rain stopped by late morning, and shortly after noon the sky cleared and the sun came out. Roberta gave Caleb a bottle, lunched on leftovers, then bundled the baby into his carriage and took him for a walk. She headed aimlessly up one street and down another. She never seemed to tire of walking in the neighborhood, its houses dating clear back to Colonial times, its narrow streets free of heavy traffic, its walks shaded by ancient live oak and crape myrtle and magnolia.

Soon, she thought, the leaves would be turning. It was her favorite season, autumn was, a welcome relief after a summer that was invariably too hot and far too humid. Caleb had been born in the spring, and summer had been hard on both of them, but it was autumn now and autumn was a long season on the Carolina coast. Winter, when it finally came, was brief and not too bad, yielding before long to spring.

“And in the spring you’ll be able to sit up in a stroller,” she told Caleb, cooing the words to him. “You’ll be able to see everything — dogs and children and people. You’ll be a big boy in the spring.”

He beamed at her and something clutched at her heart.

Around one-thirty she was seated on a green-slatted park bench at the Battery, gazing out at the ocean. Off to her left, several old men were fishing, their poles extending over the iron railing.

“They don’t be catching nuffin but a cold,” a voice said. Roberta turned to see an old black woman ease herself down onto the far end of the bench. She had frizzy white hair and very dark blue-black skin. She was tiny, small-boned and gaunt, and her skin clung to her bones like leather that had been soaked and left to dry in the sun.

“A million fish in the ocean but they don’t be catching none of ems,” the woman said. “You got a fine baby. A manchild, innit?”

“Yes.”

“What do his name be?”

“Caleb.”

The woman nodded, halved the distance between them, got up on her feet and peered down at Caleb. She nodded again, smacked her lips once and sat down. “You live round here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“One of them old houses?”

“Yes. Just a few blocks from here.”

“Do there be haunts in it?”

“Pardon me?”

“Do there be haunts or ghosts?”

Roberta stared at her. “Last night,” she said. “And the night before.”

“You saw sumpin?”

“An old woman. She was standing by the window. And then she... disappeared.”

The woman nodded. “A haunt,” she said, satisfied. “Must be she lived and died there.”

“I thought she was a real woman. And then I thought I was seeing things, and—”

“Haunts is like that. She lived there and died there. Happens sometimes a body dies and don’t know it. Could be she were murdered. Killed of a sudden.” She rubbed her old hands together and shivered with delight. “All them old houses has their haunts,” she said. “That’s what you saw.”

“I was afraid.”

“Only natural. Anybody be fraid. Nuffin to be fraid of, though. Haunts don’t do nuffin. They just be.”

“I never saw her before. And then I saw her two nights in a row.”

“Maybe it be the season. Fall comin on.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe it be she died this time of the year. Haunts will do that. One house I lived, long long ago, you could hear a dog. He would howl the night away. And there were no dog in that house. He were nuffin but a haunt, and you never did see him. You only did hear him.”

“I think I really saw her.”

“Course you did.”

“I thought maybe it was a dream, or a lighting trick. But I really saw something.”

“What you saw were a haunt.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Haunt won’t never hurt nobody,” the woman said. Then her face grew animated and she was pointing. “Look at that! I said they wouldn’t catch nuffin and look at that! That be a flounder.” The man who’d caught him, an elderly white man in bib overalls, gripped the fish in his right hand while deliberately disengorging the hook with his left. This done, he held the fish aloft for a moment, then dropped it into a galvanized pail. “Them flatfish be good eatin,” the old woman said. “Flounder be sweet clear to the bone.”

Just a ghost, Roberta thought. A mere haunt. Nothing to be afraid of. An asset, really, on the house’s balance sheet, like the original glass panes in the mullioned windows and the brick floor in the kitchen. An authentic touch of pre-Revolutionary Charleston.

She wondered idly who the woman might be. Perhaps she’d been around at the time of the Revolution, when Francis Marion, the old Swamp Fox himself, had harried the British with his own brand of guerrilla warfare. Perhaps she’d occupied the house in the early days of the Republic, perhaps she’d known John C. Calhoun when he was the clarion voice of South Carolina. Or was the Civil War her time? Roberta hadn’t felt anything of the southern belle in her aspect. She’d seemed more like an immigrant woman in one of those sketches of nineteenth-century slum dwellers in New York, a new arrival freshly transported from Ellis Island to the Lower East Side. Huddled in upon herself, wrapped in a shawl, carrying something—

She didn’t mention the woman, not at dinner or afterward. Ariel spent the evening doing homework in her room, interrupting her work now and then to pipe tuneless music that pervaded the old house. David talked with her a bit over coffee, telling her about something that had happened at the office. She kept up her end of the conversation without paying much attention to what he was saying, and in due course he withdrew to his den to smoke his pipes and drink his brandy.

But she did talk to Caleb as she readied him for bed. “We’re not scared of haunts, are we?” she cooed, powdering his soft little bottom, fixing a clean diaper in place. “We’re not scared of anything, Caleb.” And she kissed him again and again, and Caleb gurgled and laughed.

David went to sleep early, taking himself off to bed without saying goodnight, and she was grateful to hear his heavy step upon the stairs. She had spent a solitary evening, but now she could enjoy the special solitude that came when one was the only person awake in the household. She sat in the front room with coffee and cigarettes, her coffee flavored just the tiniest bit with some of David’s brandy.

Would she see the ghost again?

She hoped not. It helped, curiously enough, to think of it as a ghost, although she was by no means certain she believed in such phenomena in the first place. Believing that the house was haunted, however, seemed to be rather less threatening than believing either that the woman was a real living creature or that she, Roberta, was going quietly mad. Perhaps that was how people had come to believe in the supernatural, she thought; perhaps they were relieved to latch onto an alternative to something even less acceptable.

If there was a ghost, did that mean she had to see it every damned night?

Perhaps not. Perhaps she could sleep through the nightly appearance of the ghost, even as Caleb had learned to sleep through his two A.M. feeding. The fact that she had only just taken to seeing the ghost did not mean the ghost had never walked before. Perhaps the ghost had appeared every night for years but she’d slept through the performance until the night before last, even as David had continued to sleep on through it.

And perhaps familiarity would eventually breed some form of contempt, so that if a night sound woke her she could sit up, blink at the apparition, say “Oh, it’s only the ghost again,” and drift calmly back to sleep.

Had Ariel seen the ghost?

The child had certainly said nothing, but would she? She was so secretive she might have witnessed the apparition nightly for weeks without seeing fit to mention it.

If Ariel encountered the ghost, she thought, it would be the ghost that ran screaming.

She giggled at the thought, then flushed with guilt. Something was happening, some change in the way she related to Ariel, and she didn’t know what it was or what to do about it. She penned a quick mental letter.

Her own thoughts disturbed her. She frowned, crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray, and tried to force herself to substitute thoughts from an earlier time. Images of the three of them immediately after the adoption, she and David going on long walks with Ariel, then a montage of mental family pictures over the years. Ariel growing, learning to walk and talk, developing over months and years into a person.

A person Roberta knew less with every passing day.

She gave her head an impatient shake. This would all pass, she told herself. She had a new baby now, and any negative thoughts and feelings she had toward Ariel were almost certainly part of the process of nurturing that new baby. Older children were traditionally assumed to resent infants, and it struck her that their jealousy was well-founded.

In time, when her great love for Caleb became less obsessive, when she took his presence a little more for granted, her feelings for Ariel would be what they had once been.

Or had they started to change before Caleb was born? Even before he’d been conceived? She was a strange child, curious and remote. There was no gainsaying that. Even David admitted as much, although he seemed to take delight in the very strangeness that Roberta found unsettling.

And just when had she begun to find it unsettling? Before Caleb’s birth? Before his conception? Well, she’d been so unsettled herself during that stretch of time that it was hard to separate causes and effects. Twice-weekly visits to Gintzler for maintenance doses of therapy and Valium.

The whole business with Jeff was going on then, impossible to handle but more stimulating than the therapy and more addictive than the Valium. She could see now that she’d been skating closer to the edge than she’d ever realized. Now that she’d come back from the edge, now that she was settled again with a baby and a house and a stable daily routine, she could begin to appreciate just how unstable her life had been for a while there.

She put her cup down. Shouldn’t drink coffee late at night, she thought. It made her mind race. She’d come a long way from ghosts and haunts and things that went bump in the night.

She lit another cigarette. If she just stayed up late enough, perhaps she’d sleep through the ghost’s command performance.

She was dreaming. In the dream the old black woman from the park bench at the Battery was sitting on her haunches beside an enormous wicker basket filled with fresh fish. She was taking up one after another, gripping each fish in turn in one bony hand while with the other she wielded a nasty little knife, slitting the fish up the belly and expertly gutting it. While she did this she spoke of the supernatural, of ghosts and haunts and the walking dead, of voodoo curses and the power of a mojo tooth. The wicker basket gradually emptied and the pile of gutted fish at the woman’s feet grew steadily.

Then she was holding not a fish but a human infant. “The manchild, he be good eatin,” she said, and smacked her lips. Roberta noted for the first time that she had no teeth. Her mouth was black and bottomless.

Roberta tried to move. She was frozen, incapable of motion. She could neither act nor cry out. The old woman cackled, and the knife flashed, and Roberta sat up in bed and wrenched herself out of the dream.

It was a dream, she thought, fastening onto the thought and repeating it to herself.

Then, in the corner of the room beside the window, she saw the woman. As on the previous night, the figure was facing the window, with hip and shoulder toward Roberta. Tonight, however, her form was more completely defined, as if her presence became more concrete with each appearance.

She’s a ghost, Roberta tried to tell herself. Ghosts are harmless. You had a bad dream and now you’re seeing the ghost, but dreams can’t hurt you and ghosts are harmless.

It didn’t help. The dream had shaken her badly and the sight of the woman was considerably more frightening than it had been on the two previous nights, her thoughts notwithstanding. An air of evil was present in the room. The woman bore it like a perfume and it was palpable in the thick night air.

“What do you want?”

Had she spoken the words aloud? Was she talking to this apparition?

Slowly, like a statue on a revolving platform, the woman turned to face her. Roberta saw the heart-shaped face, the bloodless lips, the pale eyes burning in the pale face.

The eyes held Roberta’s own eyes. Something unspoken and unspeakable passed between the woman at the window and the woman on the bed. Then, against her will, she dropped her eyes to see what the woman was holding in her arms.

A baby.

A male infant, his body swaddled in a part of the woman’s shawl, only his face visible. His face was as pallid as the woman’s own and his wide eyes burned with the same pale fire.

Slowly and magically, like trick photography in a television commercial, the baby’s face lost flesh and turned to a gleaming skull. And the woman, too, was a bare polished skeleton wrapped in a shawl. And she drew away, the skeletal infant in her arms, floating through the closed window and out into the night.

Roberta cried out. She opened her mouth and screamed.

There was a gap, a blank space. Then she was being held, a hand patting awkwardly at the back of her head. She breathed in the smell of alcohol sweat and knew then that David was holding her, trying to comfort her.

“A dream,” he was saying. “You had a bad dream. That’s all.”

She wanted to correct him but she couldn’t, not right away, because her heart was racing and she couldn’t catch her breath, and if he didn’t continue to hold her very tight she felt she might shake herself apart.

Then, when she could speak, she tried to explain. She told about what she’d seen for three nights running.

“A dream,” he said.

“Night after night?”

“A recurring dream. I’ve had one off and on for years, I’m someplace dangerously high and trying to get down from it, endless fire escapes and catwalks, and I’m frightened and I can never get back to ground level. Variations on a theme. You know about dreams, all those months with Gintzler, stretched out on his couch.”

“This wasn’t a dream.”

“All right.”

“I had a dream first, a crazy dream about a black woman cleaning fish.” She hurried on, not wanting to recall the dream’s ending. “Then I was awake and I saw her again. She was standing right there.”

“She’s not there now.”

“Of course not.”

“You think you saw a ghost?”

“I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know anything about ghosts. It was some sort of... some sort of spiritual presence.”

“A being of another world.”

“It had that feeling to it, yes.”

“Why was it so frightening?”

“She was holding — I can’t say it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t make myself say it. I’m afraid.”

He looked at her.

“Hell,” she said. “She was holding a baby.”

“So?”

“The baby died. She turned to show me the baby and I watched while the baby turned into a skeleton. Then the woman was a skeleton too, and they went out the window and disappeared.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m telling you what I saw, David.”

“Now tell me why it’s frightening.”

“Are you crazy?”

He shook his head. “Why’s it frightening to you? What are you scared of, Roberta?”

“You know.”

“Tell me.”

“Why do I have to say it?” She turned her eyes away. “The baby,” she said.

“You’re afraid of the kid she was holding?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think you should say it.”

She closed her eyes, lowered her head. “Caleb,” she whispered.

“What about him?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“God damn you!” She made a fist, struck out at his chest. “I’m afraid my baby’s dead, you son of a bitch!”

He said nothing. Her hands dropped and her shoulders sagged and she wept soundlessly, the tears streaking her cheeks. After a time the crying stopped and she wiped her tears away with the back of her hand.

“Roberta?”

“What?”

“Do you really believe—”

“I don’t know what I believe. I never believed in ghosts until I saw one. Or whatever the hell I saw.”

“Why don’t you go check Caleb.”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t — I’m afraid.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“I’m afraid. Isn’t that ridiculous? I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“You had a bad dream and then you either saw something or thought you did, and maybe it amounts to the same thing. Would you like me to check him?”

“Would you?”

She sat up in bed and waited for what seemed like a very long time. He returned with a comforting smile on his face. “He’s fine,” he said.

“You’re sure he’s all right?”

“He’s sleeping like a baby. Do you want to see for yourself?”

“No.” She took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m crazy tonight, I really am.”

“You had a rough time there.”

“Thanks for going. And thanks for making me work it out.”

“You’re all right now?”

“I think so.” She looked at him, drawing from him a sense of strength he hadn’t given her in years. His body was growing softer with the years. A sedentary life had changed his body shape, and the droop in his shoulders mirrored the quiet desperation of so many nights spent in his study with his pipes and his brandy. He was bare to the waist, his chest hair matted with perspiration, and as she looked at him now she felt an unfamiliar surge of desire.

“Well,” he said. “We’d both better get to sleep.”

“Could you—”

“What?”

“Could you come into my bed for a little while?”

He slipped out of his pajama bottoms and joined her under the covers. She really only wanted to be held, but when he began making love to her she was surprised by his passion and at least as surprised by her own. Afterward she held onto him but he deliberately extricated himself from her embrace and returned to his own bed.

She felt herself drifting off to sleep. She was on the edge of it when he spoke.

“When you screamed,” he said. “Do you remember what you said?”

“I just... screamed. And then you were holding me.”

“You don’t remember what you said.”

“No. What did I say?”

She didn’t think at first that he was going to answer. Then he said, “I don’t know. I was asleep. Maybe you just cried out. I thought you might remember.”

“Maybe I called your name.”

There was a pause. “Sure,” he said at length. “That must have been it.”

She heard his alarm clock when it rang. But she stayed in bed until he had showered and dressed and gone down for his breakfast. Then, reluctantly, she dragged herself out of bed. There was an emptiness within her, a hollow void, and she didn’t know what it meant.

She went to Caleb’s room. He was lying on his back in his crib. His eyes were wide open, rolled back in his head, and his face had a blue tinge to it. She made herself extend a hand to touch him. His skin was cool beneath her fingers.

Then she must have turned from him, because the next thing she knew she was in the doorway of his room, her back to the crib. Ariel was just emerging from the bathroom. Roberta stood still, feeling her breasts rise and fall with her breathing, as the child approached.

Ariel said, “Is something wrong? Is something the matter with Caleb?”

Roberta couldn’t answer.

“That’s what it is, isn’t it? What’s the matter with Caleb? Is he dead? Is Caleb dead?”

Roberta threw her head back and howled like a dog.