"Hey, you."

Briefly, painfully they talked about the impossibility of taking another day like the one they had.

"Every day now feels like seven years," she said.

"I can come to Sugar Notch," he said. "Just thirty minutes away from you up river. I can come Monday afternoon."

But Monday afternoon Maggie, Ezra, and Dylan were going to be here, staying for the week.

"You can't get away? Not even for an hour?" For the first time he said to her, "I wish you could get on my bike right now."

"Me, too, Kai."

"I'm not being metaphorical, Larissa. I mean, really. Get on my bike, we speed away from here."

"Speed away from here to where?"

"I don't know. I don't know the way out. No one knows where they're going. As long as I'm with you, I wouldn't care."

Larissa lived on those words, flew on them, as her house filled with guests, and what should have been, and always had been a pleasurea"them together, relaxing under the stars, under the suna"instead became torture, as she tried to make herself more present, yet failed at everything, even dinner conversation.

5.

The Cagesweepers

"Man is not free. Freedom is an illusion. Who is free?" This is what happened when the evening ran long, when the children were happy and entertained in the other room watching a Jim Carrey comedy and Riot was asleep under their feet. This is what happened when Ezra had too much of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti.

"You're being ridiculous," said Jared, loosened up on Romanee himself. "Right, Lar?"

"Right, darling." She was barely paying attention.

Ezra turned to Larissa. "Larissa, can you not pick up the kids from school? Can you not cook dinner? Well, maybe Maggie over here can not cook dinner, but all the other wives, like you, can they?"

"Ezra, you're being a pedant," said Jared. "I'm talking about big things, not stupid bulls.h.i.t."

Ezra shook his head. "Picking up kids from school is not stupid bulls.h.i.t, Jared." He shook his head, swirled the wine around in his mouth. "No one is free. Not you. Not Larissa. Not me."

Maggie was pensive. "Ezra, that's not what Jared means. He's saying at any time we can change our life, if we put our minds to it."

Ezra laughed. "You think so?"

"I know so," said Jared. "Larissa and I were trapped in a life that was wrong for us. It started out pretty good, and then soured real quick. So what did we do? We didn't sit and whine about it. We changed our life. So the answer to your question is yes. We really think so. Right, Lar?"

"Absolutely." She couldn't connect the threads of the words.

Ezra snorted. "That's not freedom," he said. "You've just switched cages."

Jared laughed, unbaited. "Well, give me the cage of Lillypond and Bellevue Avenue any day of the week."

"I'm not saying life is not good in the cage," said Ezra with an agreeable nod. "Life is very good. The cage is clean. The straw is fresh. You can even see the outside if you come real close to the bars. And every once in a while you can go out for a walk. Are you free to just keep on walking?"

Larissa was silent. That she heard.

"Exactly! Not in any meaningful way are you free to keep on walking. Loosening the bonds is not possible. This is your life. Accept it."

Jared and Larissa and Maggie exchanged an inebriated, exasperated glance.

"You can do many fun things in your cage," continued Ezra. "You can watch T V, you can paint, like Maggie here, you can read, keeping your mind fresh, thinking up ideas." He swallowed the rest of his wine. "Honestly, I think it's impossible to lead a life too examined. I don't think a spiritual death is leading an unexamined life. I think a spiritual death, and many other kinds, is leading a too examined life. That's when people go nuts."

"And you're the proof, man," said Jared.

"Ezra, are you really saying there is no way out?" asked a skeptical Larissa.

"I am saying," Ezra replied, "that there is no way out. Pa.s.s the wine, Jared."

"It's all gone, dude. The good stuff is gone. Down your gullet. I have beer."

"Chasing down a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Romanee-Conti with Bud? There's poetry in that. I'll take a cold one." Ezra turned back to Larissa and Maggie. "In all ways, girls, in your small yet delightful ways, you are free to make your corner of the world liveable. That's about all you can do. Here's my final statement on the meaning of life: Drink with grace from the cup you've been given. Both of you, by the way, excel at that. We picked ourselves some fine women, Jared."

Jared came back with two Buds, two gla.s.ses, patting Larissa on the shoulder as he pa.s.sed the beer to Ezra perching on the bench next to his wife.

"But, say, you don't have a family or kids like us," Larissa said pensively. "You're alone. You and your guitar. A hitchhiker by the side of the open road." She managed a small smile. "Aren't you free then? Free to think only of yourself?"

"No!" Ezra was jolly like Roger. He took a swig of Bud. "You're much worse off."

"Get out. Worse off without the kids?"

"Of course. Then you're just a slave to your needs. You're a slave to your petulant wants, different every day. Every day you'll want another thing. There'll be a new desire you must satisfy at all costs. Now that you're not swayed by the needs of people who depend on you, you'll be corrupted by your moral emptiness, because you'll be drowning in yourself with the full approval of your so-called conscience. Are drug addicts free? Are thieves, petty con artists free? Are prost.i.tutes free? Alcoholics?"

"He's like this every day," said Maggie to Jared and Larissa. "It's stand-up every night at our house."

The uneroded Ezra continued. "This freedom business is the wrong approach to figuring stuff out. It's bound, by the limitations of its own argument, to lead us to destruction or manic depression. It's much better to focus on other things. Which are: how closely does the life I'm living resemble the life I've always wanted to live? Am I making the best of the hand that's been dealt me? Do some of the things I do every day bring me joy? Is there something more I would like to do, would like to be?" Ezra nodded. "Those are good questions. Unlike those false choice Scruples questions you keep tormenting us all with, Margaret."

Larissa knew how much Jared loved evenings like this, spent renegotiating the motivations of Oth.e.l.lo's murder of Desdemona, debating free will and the fifth proof of objectivity of the existence of G.o.d. Jared's mind was filled to the brim with the details of his work, weekend and weekday, and he loved it except for the gray erosion of the cliffs of soaring argument that had once allowed him to shine like the intoxicated Ezra, to talk with reasonable likable people about things that mattered most.

Larissa knew these evenings were Jared's way of drinking with grace from the cup he had chosen. Jared, in a crisp white tee and a gray sweatshirt, his gray-brown hair s.h.a.ggy all month, the eyes inside his black frames so smart, so sparkling. She put her arm around her husband, smiled, and raised her own emptied gla.s.s to her lips for the last red swallow.

Every time she went to the store, Maggie said, I'll come with you. And of course, why shouldn't she? They went out to lunch. Once they went to the movies. They played gin rummy and Scrabble, watched the Yankees and Die Hard. They swam. They fished. Not a day of rain, except the down-pouring in Larissa's heart. The prepaid cell phone criminally without signal, except when she'd go to Natic.o.ke, and there'd be ten text messages from him that she would read and one by one erase. And once she was in produce, getting peaches, thinking of him, of his back, of the small scars that adorned him, of the one long scar, her hands were on his stomach feeling it, moving lower, as she was in the store buying peaches! and the ding dong of the text message sounded, and Maggie, right by her side, said, "Look, you got a message."

Larissa didn't know what to do. Why hadn't she put the phone on silent! Well, she couldn't remember everything, could she? The web of Kai spun the sticky treacly poisonous thread of sham through every detail of her life, so that even something as simple as turning off the "You Got a Message" alert became a source of danger. Like hiding her pill wheel in Lillypond. What to do now?

"Aren't you going to see who it is? What if it's Jared and he wants more beer?"

She couldn't pull her prepaid phone out. Maggie knew Larissa's regular black phone, and this one was silver and red. She should've bought a phone that matched her regular phone. d.a.m.n. So many things she just couldn't think of.

"It's Evelyn," said Larissa, pulling out her regular phone, glancing at it quickly and then snapping it shut. "She says hi."

When Maggie turned to get a plastic bag, Larissa read the text on her prepaid. I CAN'T LIVE, the screen read.

Slightly trembling, she pressed several b.u.t.tons in a row with her thumb, to delete all messages, even that one, the one she wanted to engrave and hang on a plaque nailed to her heart.

"Evelyn, huh?" said Maggie, squeezing the peach too hard, pulsing the juice out, and then gingerly putting it broken and oozing into a plastic bag so she could pay for it. "I thought you told me they went to Montana to visit her family?"

"They did. She is texting me from Montana."

They moved on. "I didn't know you and Evelyn were on such intimate texting terms."

"Well, you don't know everything, do you?"

"Clearly."

6.

Miami

After the DeSwanns left the following Sat.u.r.day, the Starks packed up and left too. They said goodbye to the woods and the frogs and drove back, past Split Rock, past Lake Harmony. Jared drove the Escalade with Michelangelo and Emily, Larissa drove the Jaguar with Asher in the pa.s.senger seat.

"Mom, isn't that the place you were telling us about?" asked Asher, pointing to the billboard off the Interstate. "The place with the indoor waterpark and the sing-alongs?"

"Yeah, maybe. I think so, son." But Larissa got stuck on the billboard next to it, peeking out from behind, where a single question blared at her in bold black caps: "Where on earth are you going?"

"It looked really fun in the brochure. Sad we didn't get to go. Maybe next summer?"

"Yeah, maybe." What was that even an advertis.e.m.e.nt for? Where on earth are you going? What a strange question.

"Or, you know, it's open year round," Asher continued. "The indoor waterpark in January might be fun for a weekend. We never go anywhere in January. Maybe we can go in the wintertime."

"Yeah, maybe."

The following day, which happened to be a Monday, Larissa told Jared she had to go to the mall. They were scheduled to fly out to Miami and she had deliberately booked their flight for Tuesday morning, knowing that Mondays Kai was off. "I guess I have no choice but to go buy me some bathing suits," she said to Jared. "I can't be in Miami without appropriate attire."

"Absolutely. Don't come back without something extremely s.e.xy. Maybe a two-piece?"

"You're crazy. I'm forty years old. I'm not buying a two-piece."

"Okay. Maybe we can find you a nice topless beach, then." Jared grabbed her to fondle her. "One of those European-style beaches, where you and your teenage b.o.o.bs are lying out in the sun, burning up, browning."

Lightly she wrestled out of his arms. "Hardly teenage. And is that a topless beach with the children, Jared, or without? You're thinking of a different sort of vacation."

"Clearly, but interestingly, I'm suddenly not thinking of vacation at all."

And after they had s.e.x, in the middle of the afternoon with all the children awake, in the house, and downstairs, Jared announced he was going with her! He was going with her to the mall. He said, I might as well come. I have to buy some shorts.

"To the mall, Jared? I can buy those for you."

"I know, but I want to try them on, plus, we can have lunch at your little Neiman's Cafe." He nuzzled her. "It'll be my way of saying thank you for some rare love in the afternoon." He was humming happily. "Emily! Come here. She'll be thrilled to watch Michelangelo, won't she? Emily! Did you hear me? Get your b.u.t.t over here!"

"Dad! No!"

What was Larissa going to do? What excuse could she make? Her husband, in a rare display of spousal affinity, was coming shopping with her! For bathing suits. Shopping. Normally you couldn't catch him driving past a mall. Wasn't there a ball game on or something? Apparently Monday was the Yankees' traveling day. Larissa was out of excuses. She couldn't even pick a fight. She couldn't even call Kai to tell him she wasn't coming.

And then Miami, a two-bedroom ocean front suite at the Alexander Resort, the sun, the green warm ocean, the Spanish guitar playing nylon string melancholy all day and night, Black Orpheus day and night with seafood and salsa, and beautiful sun dresses and burns on their faces. The kids all went to tennis camp, though Larissa wished they hadn't. Kai had stopped texting her, never responded to her message apologizing for skipping out on him on Monday.

In a cover-up tied around her waist, Larissa took walks by herself around the hotel grounds in the simmering heat. Miami in August was not the smartest of vacations; it felt as if they were wading through the steam from a boiling pot of water underneath them while above them the ruthless sun beat down. Oh, but how brown she got, how perspiring and tan with white crisscross lines on the tops of her feet from the flip flops. She took a picture of herself and sent it to Kai when the signal was strong. What a dream. What a fantasy. How hot, how unbearable it was.

How unbearable.

While Jared golfed with his new buddy Mark, Larissa lay out by the pool, near the ocean, near the beach, big black sungla.s.ses on, in a Christian Lacroix black bikini; she was slim and long legged, graceful and burned, and she dreamed of Kai, wished only for Kai to see her like this, tanned like in high school, or maybe like an Island girl in a peach tube top around her brown b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a floral bandana and pink flip flops. He could kneel between her legs, pull down the tube top and suck her nipples in full view of the admiring public by the shimmering blue pool, near the warm ocean. And then he would take her non-stop right on the chaise longue, under the blistering afternoon sun while the nearby flamenco singer strummed Albeniz's Malaguena to drown out her desperate moaning, her desperate coming, her legs splayed, quivering.

And then one afternoon, when they were both out by the pool, she in reverie, Larissa opened her eyes and saw Jared reaching into her purse to find some singles to tip the man who brought the Mojitos, because all Jared had were twenties. Larissa watched in horror as he opened her purse, rummaged around to find her wallet, underneath which, in full view, next to the pink gum, the Kleenex, the lipstick, and the Band-Aids was her silver and red prepaid cell phone.

"Here we are," he said, giving the patiently waiting boy four dollars.

"Gracias, senor."

"De nada." Jared turned to Larissa. "What's wrong with you? You've turned positively white."

"I think too much time in the sun," she said in a weak voice, her heart down in her stomach. "Can I have my bag, please? Must put some more gloss on."

"Yes, we like you nice and glossy. Drink up. Nice and glossy, and tipsy." He leaned over, smiling. "And naked."