The summer before, there'd been a male cub wandering around in the backyard. They'd decided it must have been orphaned. There'd been an article in the Bad Axe newspaper about a black bear found shot in a cornfield outside of town. (Someone had taken the bear's head, and left the body, and the farmer who'd found it had called the Department of Natural Resources.) Everyone knew there were bears in the area, but there were not so many that it didn't make the news when one was found shot and beheaded.

"You're sure it's the same one?" Perry asked.

"Well, it's a lot bigger this year, and it's got a chewed-off ear, but it has to be the same one, don't you think?"

"Sounds like it. Is it causing trouble?"

"It figured out how to take the lid off the trash can without making any noise-but, no, otherwise, no trouble. Dad got a chain for the lid. Tiger doesn't want to go outside much, though."

They laughed. Tiger was the world's most timid tom. He'd sit outside on the back steps for a few seconds every day, and if a squirrel or a bird landed in the yard, he'd start scratching at the screen door frantically to get back in.

"I saw Nicole's parents at church last Sunday, honey."

"Oh. How are they?"

"Not well at all, Perry. Mrs. Werner's ill. They don't know what's wrong with her, but Mr. Werner talked to your dad, and told him it's a 'wasting disease,' which means, I guess, that she's losing weight and they don't know why. I thought he looked as weak as she did. His hair's all fallen out."

"Oh, man." Mr. Werner hadn't even been balding when Perry last saw him. "Is it cancer? I mean, Mrs. Werner?"

"Well, of course that's what we all think, but I guess the doctors say no. They've even been down there, to the university hospital, for some tests, and they wanted Jenny to come back in six weeks, but Mr. Werner said they couldn't go back. They just can't be in that town, because of-"

"Of course."

"And I saw the baby. Mary's baby."

It took Perry several seconds to realize who his mother was talking about. For a startled second he thought-when she said, "baby," "Mary"-of his imaginary friend, and the sister who'd died as a baby before him. "Baby Edwards." But then he remembered, both with relief and a stab of bitter pain: Mary.

"How is she?"

"Well, she's living with her sister now. The father, you heard what happened?"

It occurred to Perry then that his mother thought Bad Axe news made the news all over the state. "No. What?"

"Oh, he was injured. Brain damaged. He was in a hospital in Germany until last week, and now he's in North Carolina. One of those crazy bomber people."

"G.o.d," Perry said, and could think of nothing more to say.

"Perry, you still don't sound right."

"I'm fine, Mom." He rubbed his eyes with the hand that wasn't holding the phone, trying hard to sound "right." "Look, I'll call you in a few days about when I can come home. I just have to check on some things, okay?"

"That's fine, darling. You just keep up with your studies. That's what matters. You're keeping up?"

"Yeah, Mom. I'm doing well."

"I knew you would be. I knew you would. I love you, Perry."

"I love you, too, Mom."

"Bye, baby. Talk to you later."

Perry had put the phone in the cradle and was headed to the fridge (peanut b.u.t.ter? crackers and cheese?) when the apartment door slammed open, and Craig burst in, hair wild around his face and his eyes wide with-what? Horror? Awe? Joy?

"Read it. Read it," he said, holding a small square of paper out to Perry in a trembling hand.

41.

The dean of the music school and his administrative a.s.sistant were waiting for Sh.e.l.ly in his office when she arrived.

Sh.e.l.ly hadn't slept that night but she'd run enough scalding hot water, followed by freezing cold water, over herself in the morning, and then consumed enough caffeine, that she thought she might at least look like someone with a heartbeat. She'd worn her gray suit, which hadn't been out of the dry-cleaning sheath in the closet for two years, and some pastel makeup, brown mascara, eyeliner. She was trying to look s.e.xless, she supposed, but not like a s.e.xless lesbian. Low-heeled pumps. Pantyhose. Some lace along the collar of her blouse. She'd painted her fingernails peach. She reached out and put her hand on the threshold of the dean's doorway before stepping in, and tried to breathe slowly-in through her nose, out through her mouth, counting to four, although she forgot to stop at four, and found that she had been exhaling a long time before she realized she was still counting, and that the dean and the administrative a.s.sistant were looking up at her gravely.

The dean seemed to be choking with embarra.s.sment in his necktie. The administrative a.s.sistant, who was very young and very pretty and new enough in her position that Sh.e.l.ly hadn't met her in person yet, looked up, but not at Sh.e.l.ly. Her blue eyes traveled across the wall and fixed on the ceiling. She folded her cool little hands on a yellow legal pad in her lap.

Looking at those lily-white hands, Sh.e.l.ly reminded herself, inhaling, that she must not faint. And she must not cry. And she must not let her voice shake. And she must not put her own hands over her face and stifle a terrible little sobbing scream-although she'd done this at least once each hour since getting the news that a formal grievance had been filed against her, and that she should probably consult with a lawyer.

"h.e.l.lo," the dean said, rising from his chair just long enough to get his b.u.t.t a few inches off the seat before setting it back down, tightening his tie as if to hang himself, and then gesturing with a flat open hand to his administrative a.s.sistant. "This is Allison. She'll be taking notes. Have a seat, Ms. Lockes."

The dean hadn't called Sh.e.l.ly "Ms. Lockes" since he'd hired her. Although she would not have called him a personal friend, they had known each other a long time now. She'd watched him go gray. She'd sent cards to his children when they graduated from this or that, and a bouquet to his house when his sister died. He'd always liked her, and she him. They had, she thought, seen one another as occupying together an island of good taste in a sea of philistinism. Early on, he'd complained bitterly to her about the new Jazz Department, but that turned out to be nothing compared to the folk/rock, and then the pop/rock, course offerings that followed with the years. Their only disagreement when it came to music was about Mozart, whom Dean Spindler saw as superior to Handel. Sh.e.l.ly had insisted on her own a.s.sessment: that Mozart was a youthful machine, brilliant but soulless, and that Handel was a mortal who'd gotten a glimpse of eternity and put notes to it. Dean Spindler had charmingly pretended to be offended, but for Christmas she'd given him a recording of Giulio Cesare, and during Christmas break he'd emailed her telling her he'd been listening to it nonstop: You've nearly convinced me, Sh.e.l.ly. I am surprised, and grateful, for this late-life awakening. I hope we have many years as colleagues ahead.

"Did you bring your lawyer?" he asked.

Sh.e.l.ly shook her head. She sat down in the empty chair across from him. "I don't have a lawyer," she said.

"But you were advised to seek legal counsel?"

Sh.e.l.ly nodded, but he seemed to be waiting for her to speak. "Yes," she said, and the administrative a.s.sistant scratched lightly across her pad without looking either at Sh.e.l.ly or at the words she was writing, as if she were trying to take notes without being accused of taking notes.

"We need to have that for the record-that you were advised to bring a lawyer, and chose not to do so," the dean said.

Sh.e.l.ly nodded.

"Also, we need to have it on record that you understand what this disciplinary action is about." He cleared his throat then, but he seemed less embarra.s.sed now, emboldened by the high moral ground on which he safely stood. "So, do I need to show you the photographs, or can I simply describe them, and you can tell me whether or not you're one of the subjects in them?"

"You don't need to do that," Sh.e.l.ly said. There was no way to keep her voice from cracking. It was as if it belonged to someone else.

"Actually, I'm required to do that. Believe me, I'd rather not. But if you don't confirm that the photographic evidence we're using is the same evidence you're familiar with, later you could claim confusion, and this could go on forever."

Now he sounded bitter. Put out. She was, she knew, probably adding all sorts of tedious tasks to his day, not to mention the discomfort, the unsavory nature of this.

"It won't go on forever," Sh.e.l.ly said, "believe me," and then she put her face in her hands and began to weep, exactly in the manner she had vowed not to. With hysterical abandon. With deep wrenching sobs. With bottomless grief and self-pity and self-loathing. She had no idea what the dean and his a.s.sistant were doing as she wept, but no one said a word, or seemed to move, stand, leave the room, sneeze. It was as if they were frozen in time, and in horror, somewhere beyond her weeping. She wept and wept, and it was only when she realized that she had no choice-that she was going to drown right there in her own palms, her acc.u.mulated tears, if she didn't ask for a tissue-that Sh.e.l.ly finally looked up and saw that the administrative a.s.sistant was gone.

The dean, it seemed, had been paralyzed into silence. He managed to hand her a tissue, but the expression on his face as he did so was that of someone who'd been staring into an abyss of shame so long that its reflection was permanently etched on his face. She took the tissue from him, and then he handed her the whole box. He was squinting, as if Sh.e.l.ly were very far away from him, or incomprehensible in every detail, and then he said, like an actor stepping off a stage, "Sh.e.l.ly. Jesus. What the h.e.l.l happened here? How did this happen?"

She opened and closed her mouth, but finally quit trying to speak. There were tears running off her lips. She could only imagine what her face looked like.

"You do understand," he asked her, "don't you, that this means the end of your employment with the university? And that's the best-case scenario. Who knows what other complications could follow? Lawsuits? Investigations?"

Sh.e.l.ly nodded, and he rubbed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, addressed the ceiling: "You can have a day or two to clean out your office, and until the final paperwork, all of that, and the various committees, et cetera, you'll officially be on leave, with your salary. Again, you can get yourself a lawyer, but I have to tell you in all honesty, especially with our new policies regarding inappropriate use of power in student/faculty and employer/employee relationships, it's-"

"I know," Sh.e.l.ly said. "I know. I know."

He looked at her again, and then he nodded gently toward the door, and Sh.e.l.ly stood.

He said good-bye as she stepped out the door, but she couldn't turn around.

42.

Even with the distraction of Lucas and Perry and teaching and meetings, Mira had been bereft without the twins. She found herself lingering in the doorway of their room, staring into it, feeling the kind of grief that would have been more suited, she thought, to their deaths than to their being gone for two days to visit their grandmother. When she found the UPS package with their Halloween costumes in it, she'd ripped it open, and her eyes had welled with tears.

She had ordered them off the Internet: Little cow hoods with little cow horns, little hoofed hands, black and white spots.

The boys had been going through a cow phase for months. At the petting zoo they'd stood enraptured before one particular enormous bovine ma.s.s of weight and skepticism, humid nose pulsing, as if recognizing something from their previous lives.

The cow chewed her cud with such pensive blankness, looking from Matty to Andy, Andy to Matty (both were struck dumb in her presence), for so long that Mira finally felt the need to pull them back, fearing that this cow was either as in love with them as they were with her or was about to let loose her many years of petting zoo resentment and frustration on them.

But as Mira tried to take the twins' arms and guide them over to the llama, they began to shriek with the kind of outrage she'd seen on doc.u.mentaries about parents trying to kidnap their children from cults.

And, after that day, everything was cows.

Cows in books. Cows in magazines. Cows in pastures glimpsed in pa.s.sing from the freeway.

Mira had delighted the twins with two stuffed Beanie Baby cows one afternoon. She'd stopped and bought them at the bookstore on her way home from the office. Each of them had s.n.a.t.c.hed one of the cows up and now guarded it jealously from the other. She had no idea how they could tell the cows apart, but they could. Once, she accidentally tried to tuck Matty's cow into bed with Andy, and he'd sneered at it in disgust and tossed it over to his brother, exclaiming what sounded to Mira like, "Buckholtz!" or "Bulls.h.i.t!" She was hoping it was bulls.h.i.t, which would mean that the "imitative stage" of their language development, as the books she was reading called it, was getting on schedule. She had no doubt that they'd heard both her and Clark utter that word on numerous occasions.

They slept with the cows. They carried the cows with them everywhere. And, unlike every other toy they'd had so far in their short lives, they never lost the cows. The cows were never dropped and forgotten at the supermarket. They were never left behind in the backseat of the car overnight.

So, after that success, Mira had brought home a couple of plastic cows one night after teaching, and Matty and Andy had gone crazy with delight. A few days later, she bought a couple of cow-decorated cookies at a specialty bakery that she pa.s.sed on her way to the parking ramp. They loved the cookies, licked the cookies, but they shrank from Mira when she pointed to her own teeth, her own open mouth, suggesting that they eat the cookies.

"You're overcompensating," Clark had said.

"What?"

"Overcompensating," Clark said. "Trying to buy them off."

"Buy them off?" Mira had tried to follow him down the hallway, to ask him what exactly she'd be overcompensating for, but he'd gone into the bathroom and shut the door and stayed in there until she had to leave for work.

In the nursery, Mira tacked up a poster of a cow grazing on a gra.s.sy hillside in Vermont, and every morning before they were taken out of their cribs the twins would stand and gaze at the poster, babble to each other in their language about the cow: "Descher neigelein harva stora."

"Gott swieten mant brounardfel."

Mira imagined they were speculating. Was the cow happy? Did she have a family? Would her future be as peaceful as her present seemed to be? But when Mira herself pointed at the cow and said, "Cow!" and then waited for them to say the word, they looked at her blankly. "Haller," one or the other would say. "Haller," one or the other would reinforce. Then, they mirrored her own expectancy, waiting, it seemed, for her to say the word. To confirm it. To show that she understood what a haller was-that it was black and white and grazing on a gra.s.sy hillside in Vermont right in front of her face-and it was all Mira could do to keep from saying it (clearly they were talking about the same thing here, trying to give it a name), but she said, "Cow," again, more desperately this time, and with less a.s.surance, and they looked, she thought, disappointed in her.

When Clark had finally walked in the door with the twins that afternoon, Mira got on her knees and embraced them so tightly for so long that Matty, who could never get enough, finally pulled away, looking alarmed.

"Mommy just really, really missed you," she said, and Matty gave her a rea.s.suring kiss on the crown of her head and patted her shoulder as if she were an old woman in a nursing home. She'd looked up then and caught Clark's eye, and they'd both laughed. She stood and embraced him, and he seemed to take her in his arms with genuine warmth. "I missed you," Mira said, and they kissed-not a lingering kiss, but she'd felt the goodwill in it. He must have missed her, too.

Now she was hoping they'd have a good, peaceful evening. She'd bought two tuna steaks from the expensive gourmet market near campus. The woman behind the fish counter had wrapped them in several layers of white paper, and Mira had carried them hopefully home. Clark used to like to cook tuna steaks in sesame oil-pink in the middle, seared white on the outside. It had been at least a year since he'd done that, but she recalled that they were always delicious, and Mira fantasized that he'd make the fish that night after the boys went to bed, while she tossed a salad and boiled rice.

Maybe, after dinner and a last gla.s.s of wine, they would make love.

Clark seemed refreshed, in a better mood than he'd been in for a while. The only jab he'd made when she mentioned his good mood was, "It was nice to have some help."

Maybe, then, he'd seen the look on her face and was as eager as she was to avoid a fight, because he'd qualified it right away: "My mother really takes over, you know. She'd have spoon-fed me for two days if I'd let her. She had the boys up and dressed and playing with an old set of my blocks before I woke up both mornings."

Since then they'd had only one stiff exchange-he couldn't find his running shoes, which he'd left under the bed, but which, before finding them, he accused Mira of having put "in the toybox or something" while he was gone-and one argument that had ensued when she found, after Clark had left to go running, a note in his handwriting on the kitchen counter: 2:20-Your boyfriend called again. I told him you were in your office, to try your number there.

Mira had held the torn piece of notebook paper in her hand for quite a while, staring at it, trying to discern its meaning. For a crazy second she imagined he was referring to Jeff Blackhawk, but never once had she spoken to Jeff Blackhawk on the phone. Still, Jeff was honestly the only man who'd even looked at her, as far as she could tell, since before the twins were born.

Surely, she thought, Clark couldn't be referring to any of the boyfriends she'd had before they were married?

When he came back in the door, Mira held the piece of paper up, and said, "What is this?"

Panting, red-faced, sweat trickling in zigzagging rivulets down his cheeks, Clark didn't meet her eyes. He brushed past her to the bedroom.

"Clark?" she asked, following him.

"You know perfectly well, Mira. Your Eagle Scout. Your 'work-study' student," he said, making air quotation marks around the word, and sat on the edge of the bed and began unlacing his shoes.

"Perry Edwards? Perry's my boyfriend now?" Mira laughed. "Perry's nineteen." Relieved, Mira thought, It's a joke, that's it, and reached out to ruffle Clark's sweaty hair, but when he felt her hand on his head, he flinched away from her.

"Clark?" Mira said. "You're joking, right?"

"Yeah," Clark said. "That's right. I'm a big joker. Or, I'm a big joke."

He took his shirt off, soaked with sweat, tossed it on the bedroom floor, and walked past her. He was, Mira saw for the first time, losing a bit of weight. He didn't have the chiseled look of a few years before, but he was getting there. The extra ten (fifteen?) pounds he'd put on was coming off.

"What's this about?"

Mira whispered it, following Clark past the twins' room. They were blessedly asleep an hour earlier than usual.

"Clark?"

He'd continued to the bathroom and gotten in the shower. She stood outside, staring at the bathroom door until, finally, she went into the living room and tried to read the newspaper. When he came back out, he seemed to have forgotten the argument.