"Uri was always hinting at being in the midst of a terrible religious crisis. But he never went into details. I'm not even sure what religion. Russian Orthodox, I suppose."

"He sounds like quite the character," Jeremy says. "Was he actually a good pianist, or more of a dilettante?" He's uncomfortable discussing Rose and trusts that the abundant world of the others will a.s.sert itself again if given the least opportunity, as it quickly does. Colin and Zoe spent lots of time with Uri, it turns out. He was a regular visitor at the farm for a time. Oh, G.o.d, remember when... Oh, G.o.d, remember when...

He misses her terribly, sitting there. Saying her name has done it, tipped him over some kind of brink. He misses the soothing quality that first attracted him when they started talking on their shared front porch. He misses her skin, her smell, the daily walks, their funny domestic arrangement. He misses the comfort of sleeping in her little apartment on his third floor, an unexpected womb in the aging body of his home.

I never believed him about having trained horses in his Soviet youth...

It seems to be going on forever, the supply of Uri stories never-ending, the relationship Cathleen described as longish longish eternal in the recounting; but eventually Zoe pushes her chair back from the table and stands, saying she's tired and thinks she'll turn in early. eternal in the recounting; but eventually Zoe pushes her chair back from the table and stands, saying she's tired and thinks she'll turn in early.

"Are you all right?" Cathleen asks. "You look pale."

"I'm fine. Just tired."

Jeremy tries not to take either her weariness or her early exit personally. Colin says he'll do the clearing up and turns down Jeremy's immediate offer to help.

"Mom, do you mind showing him his room?"

"No, of course I will."

It's unexpectedly painful to have become a p.r.o.noun. "I'm sure I can find it," he says. "Just point me the right way."

"I wanted to ask you..." Zoe turns toward him. "I was wondering. I'm giving a chicken to our neighbor for some work he did on our roof. Tomorrow, if you want to see how it's done... ?"

It's the first time she's really looked at him, the first time he can see that her eyes haven't changed, brown and almond shaped, sorrowful even when she isn't. A poignant camouflage, he'd always thought. "I'd like that very much," he says.

"We'll do it in the afternoon, then. After lunch."

"I'll be there. Thank you. For asking me."

"See you all in the morning," Zoe says and she walks out into the hall.

"Nothing says rapprochement like slaughtering a bird," Cathleen whispers to him a few minutes later, on the stairs.

The ceiling of Jeremy's bedroom slopes so drastically that he has to slide into his bed as though negotiating a limbo bar. He's brought his laptop with him, and in the magical way of these things it quickly finds the wireless network that then finds the universe that then brings him the woman he loves.

When Rose appears, alive and speaking, listening, smiling through the screen, it's as though some kind of angel were making a visitation to this small, simple room, carrying a message of comfort and hope. Rossetti's Annunciation Annunciation comes to mind. As he watches her, he feels something akin to what he had on seeing Cathleen earlier, that same impression of inevitability, but he feels a kind of surprise as well. He's perpetually stunned that he hasn't made her up. Rose doesn't just make sense to him, she seems to make sense comes to mind. As he watches her, he feels something akin to what he had on seeing Cathleen earlier, that same impression of inevitability, but he feels a kind of surprise as well. He's perpetually stunned that he hasn't made her up. Rose doesn't just make sense to him, she seems to make sense of of him, and he can feel himself emerge from behind the stiff and frightened version of Jeremy Piper he's worn all day. A thaw spreads, loosening him up, allowing him to expand back into himself. him, and he can feel himself emerge from behind the stiff and frightened version of Jeremy Piper he's worn all day. A thaw spreads, loosening him up, allowing him to expand back into himself.

But then, as he tells her about the proposed visit to the abattoir, he grows aware of a certain shyness-even with her. Not because of the act itself but because of the significance he's beginning to attach to it. It's embarra.s.sing to admit, but what Cathleen said in jest resonated with him. It's strangely appealing to imagine himself and his daughter slaughtering a bird, engaging together in so blessedly impolite and uncivil an act, making it impossible to keep the niceties so unremittingly nice after that, impossible to ignore life's darker, more difficult side. And it's more than that. They would be killing something. It's fitting somehow. He's hesitant to pin the symbolism down, to let the thoughts go very far, but he's aware of a longing in himself that he hadn't thought possible. The desire to solve a problem without working it through for once, the hope that a ritual might do all that labor for him.

"I don't want to make too much of it, though," he says. "The fact is, she barely said a word to me all day."

"Well, it's something that she wants to do this. That's the real meaning. Why would she invite you, if she didn't care?"

"I suppose that's right." He is amazingly stupid about people sometimes-still. About his daughter, anyway. "Of course that's right," he says.

Later, after telling him this and that about her day, Rose leans toward her computer, toward Jeremy, a smile like mischief incarnate on her face, and she propositions him. They had joked about it before he left, about having every possible form of distance s.e.x while he's away. Phone. Email. Skype. "We've lived together since before we were going out," she said. "We've never experienced the pleasures of absence."

And Jeremy, to whom absence had brought such great pain, signed on for the idea, only because it was hers, because it seemed just possible that she could make even that cruel quality beautiful.

But now, in this small, soft bed, his daughter down the hall, his former wife across the way, it's unimaginable. He tells Rose he's just too tired, too jet-lagged still to be of much use along those lines. He makes a joke about his age.

She says he should watch her then, just watch. "I need it," she says, in that straightforward way of hers. "You only have to watch."

As she moves, she dissolves into pixels-Seurat from too close-then rea.s.sembles; and unmoored as he feels, it's that process of dissolution and resolution that mesmerizes him. The way the tiny squares of cream and pink and red and brown and white fall apart into nothing, then emerge reorganized as a nipple, an eye, her hand between her legs, her smile. It's as though the computer screen is complicit in the tease of it all and complicit, too, in some greater, grander conspiracy of elusiveness. Finally, with a response he'd thought impossible, he joins her as she evaporates with each shudder of release, as she gasps from behind a curtain of shimmering color blocks.

It takes him some time in the morning, when he wakes, to pull the simple fact of where he is into his consciousness and once he has, he lies in bed for a while, staring up at the ceiling, its slope like a lid about to close on him. Eventually, though, he showers and dresses, then makes his way down to the kitchen, where he finds Cathleen sitting at the table, her elbows resting there, her hands folded together in front of her chin.

"Good morning," he says. "It's quiet today. The farmers off farming?"

"Zoe's not here." She frowns. "They're not here. Zoe had a miscarriage during the night." She looks up at him. "I'm sorry, Jer. I should have done that better. I'm not thinking well."

The wooden chair creaks ridiculously as he sits. "I didn't even know..."

"She didn't want anyone to know. Not yet. It's actually their third. Third miss. They're at the doctor now. Colin's calling as soon as there's anything to report." She lifts the cup in front of her, peers into it, then looks back at him. He didn't think one way or the other yesterday about whether she was wearing makeup, but can now see the difference. Her features aren't so clearly defined; her face is paler. He always preferred her this way. She stands-slowly. "You must need coffee," she says. Her back is to him as she opens a drawer and takes a paper filter out, opens the freezer and takes a bag of coffee out. "f.u.c.k it, Jeremy. She was all the way through the first term. Fourteen weeks. We were all starting to relax."

He asks if they know what the problem is, and she says no, it's all a big mystery.

"Last time, at Christmas, she made a point of telling me she'd never had an abortion. That it wasn't that kind of damage. I felt awful because of course that's exactly what I'd been thinking. That she was probably paying for those crazy years she had. Okay," she says. "Coffee will be ready soon."

When the phone rings, Cathleen walks it out into the yard. Jeremy watches her through the window, her face drawn, her body somehow tiny, as though she's retreated into a smaller self.

"She's more or less okay," she says as she walks back in. "He says there was no great blood loss, which is the big concern. She has to have a D&C though. They'll be there for some time." She puts the phone back in its charger. "Jeremy, he's asked if we can clear out. Being Colin, he was very nice about it, but she's upset and they need some privacy. He's upset too, of course, though he's being the stoic one. There's a schedule here somewhere. The trains run every hourish, I know. He told me just to drive her car to the station. They have a friend who can bring it back. All I have to do is change the sheets on their bed before we go. Apparently they're a mess. I'd like to do the dishes too. Colin never finished them last night. The place should be clean when she gets home."

"I can help," Jeremy says, standing up. He walks over to her, meaning just to put a hand on her back, but then she falls a little into him.

"f.u.c.king children," she says, into his shoulder. "f.u.c.king heartaches. All of them."

They move through the house together as though every task requires four hands. He washes the dishes; she dries them and puts them away. They strip the bed upstairs, then remake it, tugging at opposite corners of the fitted sheet.

"I'm just throwing these out," Cathleen says, bundling up the old, b.l.o.o.d.y ones. "I'll buy her new sheets. I don't want these waiting here when she gets home."

Jeremy notices a white pitcher filled with wilted flowers atop the chest of drawers. "These are depressing as h.e.l.l," he says.

They decide to go out to the garden for new ones.

"I know nothing will cheer her up," Cathleen says. "But at least when she gets home it will look like someone cares."

It's the same phrase she used over and over thirteen years before, during those terrible two weeks. When she gets home. When she gets home. When she gets home When she gets home. When she gets home. When she gets home.

"She isn't ever coming home, Cathleen," he finally said. "You have to stop saying that."

They a.s.semble a bouquet of red dahlias and small purple flowers Jeremy doesn't recognize. Cathleen points to the ones she wants, while Jeremy cuts the stems, handing them to her, one at a time.

"Where's the minister?" she asks as she carries the bouquet just in front of her chest. "Honestly, if I weren't so miserable, I could laugh."

At the station, she parks the car in the same small lot.

"Should you be taking those?" Jeremy asks, seeing her put the keys into her bag.

She looks at him as though he's crazy; then the penny seems to drop. "Oh, their friend has a set. I'll bring these back next time I'm here."

Inside, Jeremy springs for two first-cla.s.s tickets. "Why not?" he asks. "We could both use it."

"I'm not arguing," she says.

On the train, they sit across from one another. Jeremy thinks she looks as though the morning's news has literally taken the air out of her. Her skin seems to have drooped, her body to have crumpled, softened. She seems emptied, somehow-as though she's physically connected to Zoe still.

"You look tired," he says.

"Tired and sad." She adjusts her seat and leans back.

When the train starts to roll, Jeremy watches the same scenery he watched the day before. It's oncoming this time, but again he is filled with a terrible sense of leaving something behind. So much for optical stimuli tricking his brain. Apparently, it's just his fate to carry this sense of departure in himself.

They speak very little for the first hour, just a few pa.s.sing comments about the pa.s.sing scenery, how endlessly pretty, how English.

"Believe it or not, I miss the ugliness sometimes," she says. "There's nothing like the Jersey Turnpike over here. Hideous as it is, it was home."

"But you love it here."

"I do. I love it the way you love something that isn't ever going to be yours. Not really. I hate the idea of being buried here, you know. Funny, isn't it? Odds are I'll have lived here for decades by then, but I still hate the idea."

He almost asks what keeps her there, but catches himself. "It's good for Zoe that you're here," he says instead.

Cathleen shrugs. "I don't seem able to protect her," she says. "You know, I think it's all these pregnancies that made her... made her agree to you being here." He doesn't say anything. "I couldn't tell you this yesterday, but that's what I meant about her changing. She's a more sympathetic person now. More tender. I see her trying to take care of people now. And I'm sure it's because of all this heartache. I don't know if that makes sense."

It makes perfect sense. "It must be terrible for her," Jeremy says. "I can't imagine it."

"Terrible all around." Then, with a sigh of resignation to something greater than having to pee, Cathleen pushes herself up and goes to use the loo.

Alone, Jeremy stares out at the painterly landscape, thinking it all through, and it begins to be obvious to him that he's gone about this all wrong. All of it. Not just the shameful thirteen years during which he more or less abandoned her, but this visit too. This meekness. This civility. Why did it never seem real to him that time was a limited quant.i.ty? Only with Rose is he aware of moments flying by, of a strand of pain running continually through him because of that. What did he think he was doing? He should have taken Zoe aside and begged for her forgiveness right away. He should have asked outright how he could make amends. Or not taken her aside at all but begged in front of Colin and Cathleen and the wandering cow and the old man on the tractor and the cat and the dog.

What had he been waiting for? A slaughtered bird?

When Cathleen comes back, she trips over the handle of the little leather bag tucked beneath her chair and he steadies her with his arm.

"It's a wonder I didn't walk in front of the train," she says. "I'm barely in my own head."

She pushes the bag back under the seat. It isn't much more than a big pocketbook, he realizes, nothing possibly big enough for the many days she'd been planning to stay. He asks her if she's forgotten her things at the farm. "It would be understandable," he says. "Given what's going on."

She frowns, looks puzzled.

He points to the bag. "I just mean, that can't be enough luggage for all those days."

"Oh no, it isn't." She seems to hesitate. "I keep some clothes up there."

"Right." Of course she would.

The train comes to a halting stop at a dingy little station. The building's brick is practically black, the windows either boarded or shattered. As far as Jeremy can tell, no one gets on or off.

"She told me last time it's an impossible kind of grief," Cathleen says as they start up again. "That people are always hurrying you past it. Telling you just to go get pregnant again. I feel bad sometimes that it never happened to me. It was so easy for us. I feel guilty about it."

"I can't believe the doctors have no explanation."

"You know, she wasn't letting herself think about there being a real baby, this time. She told me that. Christ, it was just yesterday. Right before dinner. Not even wondering about the s.e.x. She and Colin had a pact not to talk about it."

When the food cart comes through, they both shake their heads no.

At one point, his phone vibrates in his pocket. He lets it go, then checks. Rose. Just waking up, no doubt. "Not feeling very chatty," he says to Cathleen as he puts it back.

"No. Nor am I. Was that her?" she asks. "Rose?"

"Yes."

After a few seconds, she says, "I can't tell, Jeremy. Is this something serious?"

He thinks for a moment. "Not really," he says. "It's not frivolous, but it's not what you mean."

She nods, turns to the window.

This is where they failed, all those years back, he believes. In taking care of one another when tragedy struck. It broke them, broke them all. The truth about his life can wait for a better time.

"I suppose neither of us has had much luck along those lines," she says. "Finding true love."

"Not yet maybe," he says. "But there's still time."

It isn't romantic jealousy he's protecting her from now. It's something else. Not that he's found love with another but that he's found love first. That he's leaving this limbo they've shared for thirteen years.

The train makes another quick stop and this time a quartet of boys get on. To Jeremy's surprise they settle in first cla.s.s. "I hope to G.o.d they're not too rowdy," he says.

"I can't believe anyone buys kids first-cla.s.s tickets." Cathleen checks her watch. Then, just a couple of minutes later, she checks it again. He can't imagine her hurry.

"I was thinking we could have lunch somewhere," he says.

Little furrows appear in her brow. "I'm sorry, Jeremy," she says. "I should have told you. There's somewhere I need to go." One of the boys laughs raucously and another pa.s.senger shushes him. "I have to leave you at the station, I'm afraid. I'm heading the other way."

He almost asks, "The other way from what?" since he doesn't have a destination, no hotel room, nowhere he has said he needs to be, but he catches himself. It isn't a mistake, he realizes. It's a lie. "That's fine," he says. "I know my way around."

"Maybe another time." She's looking down the open, empty corridor. He watches as her brow's furrows begin to smooth, some knot of tension leaving her face. Gradually, the ridges vanish, the shadows disappear. A network of thin lines remains. Lines that weren't there a decade before.

When she catches him staring, he smiles without much conviction, then turns to the window once again.

It doesn't make any sense. There's no reason for her to lie. Though it's possible that she made an appointment, a rendezvous, while in the bathroom. It occurs to him that she may be protecting him in precisely the way he just protected her. The thought is an appealing one. Two lies told for kindness, a bookend to the parallel confessions they made years before.

Outside, the landscape begins to show unfortunate signs of civilization. Beige, concrete buildings spring up like the mushrooms he has studied all these years. Just as ugly, just as poisonous in their way.

"We're going to be late," Cathleen says, just as they enter a tunnel. "A little over fifteen minutes. Nothing to do about it, I suppose. Did you notice, Jeremy? I'm not afraid of tunnels anymore. Remember how bad I used to be?"

In the darkness, the gla.s.s has become a mirror. He watches her reflection as she checks her watch again, then begins to drum her fingers on the armrest. She's clearly impatient to meet whoever it is.