"I can work from home. I've got an office. Send me the administration and the a.s.set management reports every week. I justaI can't leave them with a babysitter yet. I know I might have to. I'm just not ready. And besidesa" Though he didn't want to say what besides. He was hoping she would return soon. Which is something he didn't want to say to his boss, but Fredoso, for all his cluelessness, clearly knew what Jared was thinking.

Nodding full-heartedly, he said, "Yes. Leave of absence. Your kids need you." And then quickly turned and walked out.

So Jared stopped working. Barbara regretfully went back to Piermont, and with Emily's help, and Maggie's help, and Ernestina's help, he packed up what he could and in the middle of July took his family and his dog to Lillypond.

In Lillypond, the phone never stopped ringing. A distraught Doug apologizing so hard, as if Larissa had run off with him. I'm sorry, man. How could it have happened? Do you know who it was? Maybe something happened to her? MaybeaI'm sorry, man. I don't know what to say. Kate is devastated.

Evelyn; Bo; Maggie, subdued; Ezra, even more subdued.

Emily started making lists and Jared went shopping while she played mom and made them eggs and even tried Aunt Jemima b.u.t.termilk pancake mix and put blueberries in it just like Larissa used to. She made English m.u.f.fin pizzas for lunch, and even tuna the way Michelangelo liked it. At night Jared barbecued. They had chicken, burgers, steak. Afterward Emily served ice cream sundaes with homemade brownies. Cleaning the place was harder. No one wanted to do it. Michelangelo used Windex on all the gla.s.s surfaces. Also all the wood surfaces. All surfaces. He used one bottle per cleaning. Emily swept the plank floor. Asher did nothing, but under duress, once he vacuumed. Jared taught Emily and Asher how to do their own laundry, but it was Michelangelo who was the only willing and eager student, dragging the pillowcase full of his clothes to the washing machine, and asking, "Dad, is it detergent first or laundry first?"

They went swimming and boating, Jared worked for a few hours, answered calls, looked over banking and trust services reports that had been sent to him. One blind eye to the work, one blind eye to the life. He felt himself withdrawing, trying to remember the exact words of the note he left for Larissa back at the house. "We're at Lillypond. Kids really need to see you. J." Just like that. And while he was nested in the feet of the Appalachians, every day verdant and fragrant, he wondered if there could be anything more pitiable than to come back home and find the note just where he left it. He wanted to count how many days it had been, but he was afraid to. Would he soon have to measure the time in months, not days? And then? He watched Michelangelo collecting every twig he could find to build a house for a bear. Jared hoped it wasn't a real bear, but judging by the size of the twig pile, it was a false hope.

Like so many things these days.

At the end of July, Doug and Kate came to visit for a couple of days with their girls. Doug reported on things at work, while Kate judiciously avoided crossing even a pa.s.sing glance with Jared. He found her to be tongue-tied to the point of being mute. It was just as well. Jared could barely look at Doug's Jaguar parked in his drive.

It was just as well they were only staying for a few days, because on their last evening, Jared and Doug were on the porch and Doug, after clearing his throat for five minutes, asked Jared if he knew who the guy was.

"I don't want to talk about it, Doug."

Hastily Doug apologized and moved on, but not far enough. "You'll have to forgive my Kate. Sometimes she gets these ridiculous notions and I keep telling her to dispel them, but she just hangs on and won't let go. It's the writer in her."

"What notions? She's barely said a word to me."

"Yeah, she's upset." Doug laughed nervously. "You want to hear why?"

"Not really."

"A few months ago," Doug continued, "in the wintertime, remember Kate ran into Larissa in the city? Well, Larissa had been waiting for a girlfriend to show up for dinner, and suddenly bam, who shows up but the salesman from Jaguar."

Jared paled in the night. Kate had never mentioned that part, though he had heard the rest of the story several times.

"He just pa.s.sed them on the street and Larissa, of course, came home with Kate, so clearly Kate was imagining all the wrong things, and she thought no more about it, until youra"thing that'sa"happened, and then she started thinking again."

"Thinking about what?"

"Well, let me tell you how crazy she is. She went in for service recently on the Jag and asked to see our salesman, and they told her he no longer worked there! He split. So of coursea""

"Doug, I'm getting tired, sorry, man."

"Is that crazy, or what?"

"It's crazy."

"She can't get it out of her head, but I keep telling her he was just a kida"

"Not quite a kid. Twenty-one." Jared, defending his indefensible age! His life was becoming a Monty Python sketch.

"I'm just saying, that maybea""

"Kate's got an overactive imagination. You better watch out, Douglas. Good night." Was he going to have to get himself a new job? Was he going to have to move, sell the house, take his kids, leave everything behind? Maybe they could move to the Black Hills of South Dakota, to a small silver mining town in the woods, in the mountains. How could he continue to face his friends and their most trivial of questions?

And then not a week later, in the beginning of August, Maggie sat at his Lillypond Sat.u.r.day night table, with the kids happily playing with Dylan in the next room, and said, "Jared, you won't believe what I'm about to tell you."

"Not only won't I believe it, I don't want to hear it."

"Do you remember Larissa's birthday celebration?" she went on. "How Dora said she was going to come and then suddenly cancelled? Well, I just saw her for lunch last week, for the first time in months, and I told her about Larissaa"

"Why did you do that?"

"She asked me how Larissa was. I told her. What was I going to do? Lie?"

Jared said nothing.

"Do you want to know what she told me or not?"

"I don't."

"She saw them."

"Saw who?" Jared said tiredly.

"Them! She says that one night in April she got out of her cla.s.s at Drew around ten; she had parked the car by the train station and was about to drive away when they walked out of the Madison movie theater."

Jared said nothing. Was this ever going to come to a screeching end? Ever. He didn't look at Maggie, he stared blankly at the woodgrain in his pine table.

"Dora said they ran to her Jag, and he opened the door for her, and they kissed right at the door on the streeta"

"Maggie!"

That was both Ezra and Jared.

Jared lifted his palms up. "Stop. I get it. She saw them. I don't give a s.h.i.t. It's too late now, isn't it? What's the point of telling me now? Why didn't Dora come to me then? Why didn't she say something to me back in April when she called to cancel? She could've told me why she didn't want to come to our house. Why didn't Kate tell me earlier the snake oil salesman was also on that city street with her and Larissa? Back then it might've done some good. Or not. Why tell me this now?"

"Because I only know now."

"So what? Why are you telling me this now?"

"I thought you might want to know."

"Maggiea" said Ezra. "Why would you think that? Honestly."

"I thought this is what we were all about," Maggie said. "Honesty. Witnesses to truth." Her curly hair was nearly completely gray now, no red to speak of, and she had it cut to a bob. She looked a decade older than Ezra.

"So Dora and Kate were witnesses to truth and then carried it hidden for months?"

"But I didn't carry it hidden."

"Ah, see, but I wish you would have."

"All right," said Ezra, trying to mollify them. "All right. There's no pointa"

"Well, there's some point in knowing the truth, no?" Maggie said.

"I used to think so," said Jared. "But what good is the truth to me now? So Dora saw her at the movies. Maggie, they were f.u.c.king for eighteen months! And she left me. She left her kids! I don't give a s.h.i.t about Dora's confessions. Can you really be so thick and not see that?"

"Oh, yes, because you see so many things now," retorted Maggie.

"Yes!" exclaimed Jared. "In hindsight, it's true: I see plenty. Isn't it glorious to have perfect vision?"

"Guys, guys, okay," said Ezra, raising his palms. "Too much winea"

Maggie scratched the table with her nails. "I think back about how closed up she had become." Her voice sounded like nails on a table. "We stopped shopping. Our lunches became so short. And rare. And when we did meet, all we talked about was school or movies, just the lamest stuff, and she refused to talk to me about my illness. I didn't think it was normal even then, but now I knowa"it's because her life was being rearranged, and she was using up all her powers to hide it. She had nothing left for other people. How could we all not have noticed?" Maggie started to cry.

Ezra sat looking at Jared, glancing at Maggie. "That's true," he said quietly. "Mags's got a point. How could something like this go unnoticed?"

"I don't know," Jared said. "But I love these pointless f.u.c.king disquisitions."

"It's not pointless," returned Ezra. "How else can we make sense of it?"

"We can't, that's how. She is not here. Make sense of that."

"When I saw her last," Ezra said, "she was showing herself to me. Here I am, what should I do? I don't know what to do. And I didn't see it."

"That's right," Jared said scathingly. "She asked you for help. And you didn't see it. And look! She's gone. What did you say to her, Ezra, that made her cut and run?"

"No, no, stop it." That was Maggie, wiping her face, standing up, going over to Ezra, stretching out her arms to Jared. But Jared didn't stop it. And now neither did Ezra.

"But we didn't live with her!" Ezra exclaimed. "We didn't eat dinner with her every day, lie down with her, get up with her. I wasn't her husband, was I?"

Jared jumped up, and Maggie got between them, shaking, pulling Ezra down, pushing Jared away, crying, please, please, stop it, she'll come back, don't do this, it's not your fault, it's not anybody's fault, sometimes these things just happen, they justa "And no one knows? No one sees? How can that be? How is that possible?"

"Who cares? She's gone now! That's the only thing that matters. She's gonea"

Who said that with such naked anguish?

The next day Maggie and Ezra left.

Another day. Another day. Another day. Jared watched the ballgames just to get lost in something, in numbers, statistics, rules, strategies, to not think, to have the TV on, or music, anything to not be in grief or rage.

One night Michelangelo sidled up and sat by him on the couch, holding his yellow blanket and his favorite torn blue bunny.

"What's up, bud?" said Jared, taking his vacant eyes off the TV and focusing on his son. "You want to go to bed? Why aren't you watching Hercules with Asher? It's your favorite."

"I know. But I've seen it a bazillion times. What inning is this?"

"What inning is this?" Jared peered into the face of his seven-year-old son. "It's the fourth quarter. It's third period. Since when do you care what inning it is?"

Michelangelo pretended to thoughtfully a.n.a.lyze the TV screen. "Dad, watch the T V, not me," he said. "Look, the enemy almost scored a run."

"Yeah," said Jared. "Lucky for us they didn't. Because then we'd be getting trashed 14-3 instead of 13-3."

"Oh. That's not good, huh, Dad?"

"Not good, bud."

Michelangelo started watching baseball with Jared, sitting quietly with his bunny, staring at the T V, falling asleep, and when Jared would try to lift him to carry him to bed, he'd open his eyes, clutch the blanket, shake his head, and say, "No, no, I'm good. I'm awake. I want to watch with you."

Jared couldn't tell Maggie and Ezra about the money Larissa had taken, drop by drop, week by week, taken and taken and taken, slowly, methodically, out of their joint account, gradually so he wouldn't notice, but now all those sharp-edged twenties were falling like gla.s.s pain upon his heart as if Aeschylus had been writing about Jared's own despair. Taken it so stealthily and in such small sums that, against his will, wisdom was coming to Jared by the awful grace of G.o.d: Larissa had taken it as if she never did intend to come back.

O G.o.d! Mad fevered girl galloping toward destruction while the earth bloomed with moss and frogs and blue battered bunnies. Jared didn't know how he woke up every morning, brushed his teeth, put pants on, put his feet forward, breathed. He didn't know how the green air got into his collapsed lungs.

Ezra had tried to comfort Jared by saying this was nothing more but a random act of G.o.d. "Don't spend the rest of your life figuring out why you. Best to get on with it."

"I never say why me," said Jared, palming the last of the Mondavi Cabernet. "You know what I say? Why not me? What the h.e.l.l makes me so special? That's not what I'm trying to figure out. But this wasn't a random act of G.o.d, Ezra. She didn't get kidney disease that she didn't ask for and didn't want. She wasn't hit by lightning, she wasn't mowed down by a drunk driver. She was a rational, conscious, sentient being, with a choice, a free will, a conscience. With a heart that carried things in it. And this is the choice that person made, the heart of my wife, the mother of all those kids in my house. That's what I think about when I wake up cold and damp. Not why a random act of G.o.d. Rather, why a deliberate act of Larissa?"

Chapter Two.

1.

Parenting Plus

At the end of August, having been off work for seven weeks, Jared brought his kids back home. The note he had left for Larissa he threw in the trash.

He thought of calling Finney and Cobb; he hadn't heard from them since July; he wanted to ask if her pa.s.sport had been stamped with an exit visa, but then he picked up a summer's worth of mail from the post office and opened half a dozen desperate letters from Che, and he knew he didn't have to call Finney because Larissa wasn't in Manila. He couldn't get through all of Che's letters, about Lorenzo and kidney sales and jail, but he got through the gist of them. Larissa hadn't been in touch. Her silence was breaking Che's heart.

Jared attended to two pressing things when he returned.

The second thing was looking into hiring permanent help. How did one go about doing something like that?

Hadn't Larissa said something to him? Right before Memorial Day, when they were discussing her visiting Che, she said he could callawho? You can call so and so, they'll come and help you, she said. And he said, what, call someone for two weeks to come and help? Yes, she said. To come and help. You can calla He sifted and sifted, battled against the encroaching amnesiac denials. Finally it came to him on a rush-hour drive home. Parenting Plus! Larissa, while readying the wrecking b.a.l.l.s was also laying out new bricks to rebuild, stone by stone.