Sam drank a lot, perhaps more in a week than Ike had, but it didn’t fall into him and explode as it had with Ike, so after the fatal car wreck, when they tested his blood for alcohol content, it was a great shock, almost an insult, that they referred to him as intoxicated. Christine was three, and though Claire was pregnant for the second time, soon to bear twins, Anna could not get over the notion that the charm was broken, that for each man and each baby there would be a hard fight, that the family would never again be in the midst of busy, bubbling fertility. Instead of cruising on Helen’s great ship of the future, they had scrambled: the twins were small, and Jimmy almost died. Claire herself was very sick, and the obstetrician discouraged more pregnancies. And then Hanson divorced Susanna, and Helen met Alfred—older, already successful and disillusioned, the father of three teen-aged children by his first wife—Christine was enough for him. Helen and Christine did then move away, first to Chicago, then to New York. And they lived in Paris for a year. But Helen’s confidence had been devastated by Sam’s death. She saw every yearned-for prospect with the eyes of worry and of cynicism reflected off Alfred. The schools were terrible, the baby-sitters suspect, Christine reacted badly to the food.

  At home, the toys and clothes so carefully chosen and put away slipped everyone’s mind, and never came out for the twins, until at six they raided the attic, broke into the boxes, and spread everything far and wide. How to control them became a bit of a sore point between Claire and her parents.

  Anna’s memories were very still, and when she heard a sound—a groan and the creaking of bedsprings from the adjoining room—she realized that she had been holding herself completely motionless, so given over was she to visions of Helen and Sam. She got up. “Ike?” From the doorway, the lightest part of the room, Anna could see nothing, so she went to the window and pulled back the curtain. She had forgotten the fog, pale but without light. She shivered and drew the curtain again, half expecting Ike to speak to her, but when she could see him, she saw that he was still sleeping. The covers had fallen down, and his pajamas had come unbuttoned. As she touched a button, he frightened her with another groan, and his eyes opened white in the darkness. Her hand flew away. “Ike?” Still he hadn’t seen her.

  Once, in school, on a sledding trip, some of her friends had run into an empty house ahead of her, and when she came to the black doorway, she had been unable to enter, so thoroughly did the noises she heard them making seem transformed by the strange place into the creakings and bangings of ghosts. She had grown afraid even of their reappearance, so that, though she was straining her eyes after them, the sight of their faces had shocked her heart into pounding so hard that her body trembled. She felt on the verge of such fear now, afraid of touching Ike, yet wanting to grab him, afraid of his eyes opening again, yet wanting to yank him safely into wakefulness. The book he had been reading so long ago teetered on the edge of the bed. Ever so carefully, muffling even the rustling of her clothes and the cracking of her bones, Anna leaned over and touched it. It retained its purchase. She touched it again, hoping to precipitate it to the floor with a sharp smack. It slid on the bedspread, balanced on its end, then tipped over onto the rag with hardly a sound. Her annoyance pushed back the fear so that she could breathe “Ike?” once again, and then the sound of her own voice enabled her to stand upright, put her hands on her hips, and pretend that he was merely inconveniencing her. In a moment, she was briskly buttoning and smoothing and patting, arranging his clothes and the bedclothes as well as she could around him, jostling against him half on purpose so that he would snap at her for waking him up. And he did wake up, but the process was so slow, his disorientation so complete, that she failed in her busyness again, and caught herself watching, sensing in her sudden self-consciousness that her brows and lips were screwed into concern. “Daddy!” she barked. “What’s the matter? Wake up! You’re okay, aren’t you?”

  “Ahhn-nnah?” He spoke as if he couldn’t move his mouth, and tossed his head from side to side.

  Gripped by anger and fear, for he was so odd-looking, so weak and unlike himself, she continued to order him to sit up, to tell her what was wrong with him, to become healthy. Hearing her own harsh tone, she thought, Oh God, oh my God.

  He took a deep breath, which she instantly echoed. “Mother?” He spoke in his usual voice, a trifle subdued.

  “Daddy, you’ve been . . . talking in your sleep. You woke me right up. What were you dreaming about? You see, I heard you fine. Now sit up, and let me button your collar right and straighten your sheet. You keep kicking the covers off, and lord knows, it’s plenty cold tonight. It must be the damp from the fog. Just seems to get in everywhere. How’s that? Now, look, even the sleeve is all twisted. Would you like some aspirin? There, now. How about a little glass of water, anyway? Daddy?”

  He coughed and drew his lips in over his dentureless gums, then reached both hands to the top of his head and patted down his hair. Still his motions were so slow that Anna bit her lip. “You know who I’ve been thinking of tonight? I can’t sleep a wink.” She hastily thought over everyone they had known. “Remember Jane Pownall? I suddenly just thought of that blue dress she made, with the pink squares on it and the giant bow in the front. Remember how she wore it to that grange dance we went to, and it was cut so low in the back that you could see goose bumps? Remember, Ike? I do think she was sweet on you.”

  “Who, Mother?” His tone was annoyed.

  Anna sighed and smiled slightly. “Miss Jane Pownall! Jane Marie it was.”

  He grunted.

  “Daddy, I’m going to turn on the light. And remember Ida Franks? She just couldn’t stand me after I moved to Sheridan. Now shade your eyes. I do believe she had her eye on you all along. She married that boy from Green River who looked just like you from the back.” Oh, the spectacle of him, covering his bony eye sockets with his livid hands, his shoulders still flat and broad like a shelf, but his upper arms so thin that it seemed you could see the hinge of the shoulder joint open and close like a drop-leaf table. He brought his hands down from his face and put them in his lap. Electric light in the middle of the night gave his lips and cheeks an odd clayey color, and brought out the liver spots on his forehead. Though she knew it must be the light, she was taken aback. She pressed her mouth to keep talking, as she pressed her hands to keep picking things up and putting them straight. “Oh, and I haven’t thought of Bertha Carswell in years!” The name sprung straight from nowhere. Anna had never spoken it, and no one had ever teased with it. Bertha Carswell had been younger than Anna by twelve years, the daughter of a neighbor when they first moved to Des Moines, a student at Drake. She had fallen in love with Ike, but only Ike knew what happened then, and why her name disappeared. Not even Claire and Helen, who surely remembered her, ever reminisced about whom she had married or what she had done after the war. She taught them all—Ike, Helen, Claire, and Susanna—to play tennis. Anna, beginning to get heavy and to feel middle-aged, refused to learn.

  She sat down on the bed next to Ike, whose response to Bertha’s name was invisible but absolutely certain, and said, “I thought Bertha was a very nice girl, you know. Smart, pretty, and athletic, too. She didn’t make a fool of herself like all those others that were crazy about you.” And a knife stood up in the back of her throat, just for a second, the same knife that stood there nearly forty years before, and she almost felt young again.

  Ike groaned.

  “Well, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned those women. But I haven’t slept a wink, and they just came to me. It was funny.”

  Ike waved his hand, dismissing all the women, even Bertha Carswell.

  “Are you okay, Daddy?”

  There was no response, no angry denial. Anna bit her lip, wishing she had never heard the groans, never gotten out of her own bed, never turned on the light. Especially never turned on the light that made everything about their whole lives seem worse than it could possibly be. “I’m going to get you some of that stuff we got from the doctor. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Ike nodded a centimeter. His eyes were closed.

  The medicine was just in the bathroom, but Anna wanted a clean glass and water from the kitchen. She set the house ablaze with light; the bathroom, the hallway, her room, even the guest room, the living room, the dining room, and of course, the kitchen. And she did not shut them off behind her. Without letting herself know what she wanted, she turned up the heat. Then she gave Ike his medicine with more equanimity, briskly, with confidence, as if it were aspirin and he had a cold. “Feel better?” she demanded, before it even had time to take effect, and when he nodded and muttered, “Mmmhm,” she felt vindicated, triumphant, annoyed that she still hadn’t gotten any sleep, and god knew what time it was.

  He said, “Mother?”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Funny, Bertha looked so much like Helen.”

  “Well, Ike—” Bertha hadn’t looked a thing like Helen that Anna could remember. Bertha was just a blond girl. Helen at eleven looked sleek, like water was running off her somehow.

  “You don’t remember. Do you think Helen loves me?”

  “Of course, Daddy.”

  “Don’t palm me off, Anna! You always palm me off with some—”

  “You should see them downstairs! All they talk about is you!”

  “She never wanted to be at home, remember? And it wasn’t boys, either. Even when she was little. You’d bring a toy home to her from town, and she’d meet you at the front door, and you’d give her the toy, and always, even while she was squealing and grinning, she’d be looking over your shoulder, out the door.”

  “Helen’s just like that, Daddy.”

  “No, I think—”

  “Ike, she—”

  “Don’t interrupt me, dammit!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “When Claire came, it was all different when Claire came. Maybe she didn’t think it was her home after that. You don’t know what kids are thinking at that age.”

  “Remember Mama, Ike? She was the same way. It’s the pioneer spirit or something. Mama always used to say that.”

  “You never thought that if she loved us—Helen, I mean—she would have wanted to stay home?”

  “I never even thought about it, Ike.”

  “She was so pretty. I never saw anybody who was so pretty.”

  There was no possible reply. Anna shifted her position and pursed her lips. Ike closed his eyes, as if the effort of speaking had exhausted him. Finally, Anna said, “How’s that medicine working?” He waved his hand.

  “I’m going to bed then.” But something held her in the room, possibly concern, though possibly simple curiosity. The stark change in his appearance seemed to be a moving thing, like a snake slipping its skin, which she might witness if she watched. She watched. Although he twitched under her gaze, his usual challenge was not made; his lifelong annoyance at being the object of any observation that was not admiring had vanished. He wanted her to stay. She did, pushing aside the pile of clothes in his armchair and settling down there. In order not to make him uneasy, she directed her gaze to various parts of the room, but she didn’t really see anything until she realized with a start that the place had gotten very dingy.

  The wallpaper, once a rose and dove gray stripe, had darkened to charcoal and maroon. The arms of the stuffed chair had frayed and the door of the closet bulged ajar with coats and bathrobes and outmoded dresses. The little rug she had braided needed washing, and interspersed with his books were letters and papers and old bills. She could not help thinking of the refurbished bathroom, the neat downstairs. She had pushed the television back to the wall, recovered his chair in flowers, rearranged the record player and the objects on the coffee table. She had removed his old cigarette box to the mantelpiece, out of the way. The changes recurred to her vividly, as if lit by accusing rays of light. She remembered how she came down the stairs first thing each morning, the way she glanced around the room with a smile and even, sometimes, spread her hands a little, as if embracing her domain. Surely she hadn’t shouldered him into this little room? It was he who had gotten sick, he who preferred his sickness to be private. She remembered her sense of spreading out, like a person suddenly alone in a big bed, and cringed. Her pleasure, in retrospect, seemed too ready, too greedy. The rest of the house was light, neat, colorful. Only in this room did the overhead light have a parchment shade, hastily painted with a few dots of violets.

  “Ike . . .” Of course, you could set against this her constant attendance; for example, the cup of cocoa she had made earlier in the evening (grudgingly), the trays and drinks and newspapers and magazines, the endless trips up and down the stairs (complaining more often than not), the night wakings (resentful). She thought again of that sunny moment when she stepped off the last riser, when the living room blossomed in her eye, her little knickknacks and projects set out, neat and sparkling like round dew drops. Of course, Ike’s things had been everywhere for years, golf clubs on the couch, tennis racket on the kitchen table, hats, sweaters, dirty socks on the steps, on the dining room table, on the floor of her room, but that was ages in the past.

  “Oh, Daddy, I—”

  “Anna, dammit, this mattress is slipping again. The whole damned foot is cockeyed!” His voice was weak, but he managed a snort as eloquently put upon as ever.

  He was settled again, in clean pajamas in a straight bed, covers off the floor, the light off. Anna perched on the edge of the armchair, not quite certain about going back to bed. Actually, she was hungry. She tried to imagine, without really wanting to, eating something delicious. In fact, she could not not imagine it. The lighted house outside this room promised a quiet, orderly pleasure that further attempts at sleep denied. Ike was at rest. His breathing, while not robust, was smooth and even. Still she perched. His breathing calmed her, distanced the fears she had just felt, that in retrospect seemed disconcerting, like coughing and hiccuping at the same time. The thought of going into the kitchen pleased her. She could imagine the refrigerator and cabinets, arrayed neatly, modestly, like a bank vault. She could make something with onions, which Ike hated, or with lemons, which he maintained he couldn’t eat.

  She could get out a cookbook and try something new, always a risky business with Ike to think of. He liked beef and potatoes, chicken once in a while, the infrequent pork chop, and plenty of pie, as well as ice cream (but not sherbet), saltines, and milk with white bread torn up in it. He did not like different types of food mushed together and masked with a gravy, and he could detect the merest fragment of garlic in any dish. Her gorge had risen (she did not know what a gorge was, but did know that sense of the heart and lungs beating up into the windpipe and catching) an insane number of times in the past fifty years, whenever she had said, “We’re having a big salad,” or “I thought I’d try a souffle just this once,” and his response had been a curse or an argument. He saw dinner as the food he had a right to enjoy after a hard day at work. She saw it as a theater of activity. She had persisted ridiculously, it seemed looking back, but every single time, from the first curse to the last, she had caught her breath in anger, thinking he was going to doom her to a life of meat loaf. Now, with him safely medicated and asleep, she could mix up anything and eat it by herself. Since his illness she had stocked the house with ingredients. In the dark she crossed her arms over her chest and smiled, thinking of the household magazines, with their recipes, in abundant splendor on the coffee table in the living room.

  But then it came over her again. Possibly it was the thought of the coffee table given over solely to her activities. At any rate, her insides dropped together in a feeling much like fear, and she saw herself loading the kitchen shelves, leafing through cookbooks, and passing Ike off with oatmeal and bananas and vanilla ice cream. She imagined, or remembered, her own hands, competent and fatly satisfied, measuring and leveling off, stirring, pouring. They had characteristic little motions when they chopped—short synchronized scoopings and graspings that she could see perfectly, and the image shocked her with its horrible eaten-up complacency. Only hands; where was the thought in cooking? Where were the ears to hear Ike’s shouts, the eyes to see what he needed? How had she made the whole garishly lit house her own, and relegated Ike to this black cubicle? Already?

  “Mother?”

  “Huh? Ike? I thought you were asleep.”

  “Unhuh.”

  “Daddy, I’ve been sitting here thinking, and I think we should move—”

  He did not even seem to hear her. “What was her name?”

  “Whose?”

  “That woman who came over all the time.”

  “Margaret Lacina?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Listen, Daddy, I’ve been thinking about your room, and—”

  “That other woman.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “You do! Mother!” His voice rose angrily, like a fist being lifted.

  “Ike, explain to me. Where were we living?”

  “In that town!” He cursed in a weak but vehement undertone. She saw that he couldn’t remember even simple things, things that he had remembered a day or so before. She made her voice as soothing as possible. “Sheridan, Daddy? You mean Sheridan?”