Wes argues: If they ever need a gun, they will have it. And, if they never need a gun—“Better yet.”

  No one was prepared for July 1967—the notorious Detroit “race riot”—but he, Wes Jarrett, will be prepared for next time.

  “It wasn’t a ‘race riot,’” Hannah tries to point out. “It has been called a ‘civil disturbance’ …”

  “Ridiculous! It was all about race, and it was certainly a riot.”

  Wes isn’t afraid of Babysitter, personally. Still, he’s a husband and father, he intends to be prepared.

  • • •

  “No. Please.”

  “Yes. Take it, for Christ’s sake.”

  In the privacy of their bedroom Wes is insisting that Hannah hold the revolver, at least. In her own hand.

  “But—it’s ‘loaded’ …”

  “Just hold it. Take it. It won’t fire if you don’t pull the trigger.”

  “Wes, no. I don’t want to.”

  The Smith & Wesson Magnum isn’t as large as Hannah might have expected, with a short barrel, but it is heavy, Hannah dreads dropping it.

  Dull blue-black metal, from a little distance you might mistake it for plastic, could be a child’s toy. If you didn’t look too closely.

  “Just hold it. It won’t go off if you don’t pull the trigger.”

  “Wes, no. I don’t want to.”

  “If you ever have to use the gun it’s because things have gotten desperate and if things have gotten desperate, you’ll be Goddamned grateful to have a gun.”

  But Hannah refuses, shrinking away. No.

  “Hannah! Goddamn.”

  Wes relents, the gun will be kept loaded but it will be kept safely locked in a cabinet in the bedroom where the children will never, never find it.

  An unloaded gun is useless, Wes says. He isn’t skilled enough and in a time of excitement and fear he wouldn’t be calm enough to put bullets into the gun’s chamber, one by one, so best for a homeowner like himself to anticipate surprise, and panic, keeping the gun loaded at all times but securing it in a cabinet in their bedroom.

  Loaded at all times. These words carefully enunciated so that Hannah cannot miss their meaning.

  And the key to the cabinet is kept in the nightstand drawer on Wes’s side of the bed.

  “It will never be anywhere else, Hannah: that key. Take my word.”

  Happiness

  My happiness is my children, my husband. My marriage. My happiness is not myself but …

  Words of dignity, calm, precision Hannah has prepared to repeat to Y.K. when/if he calls her.

  … better if we don’t see each other again. I’m sure that you can understand.

  A dozen times a day even while beside Katya’s bed in Children’s Hospital with a part of her brain rehearsing My happiness is …

  But a week passes. Weeks.

  Hannah doesn’t really expect Y.K. to call. Nor does Hannah want Y.K. to call, she will take no pleasure in speaking politely, calmly, coldly to the man.

  A mystery that their bodies had been “intimate”—yet Hannah knows little about Y.K. as an individual, scarcely any memory of him that isn’t (merely) physical, sensual. Her body has been invaded as by a plunging and pitiless scalpel, a surgery without anesthesia after which amnesia has numbed her brain. The physical trauma, the invasion and the insult of the invasion, and afterward numbness, amnesia.

  The forgiveness of amnesia. The solace.

  Better not to think of it. No.

  What is crucial in Hannah’s life is that Katya has been discharged from Children’s Hospital after three days, the raging infection has been countered by antibiotics. An air of enchantment lies upon the Jarrett household, everyone speaks in hushed voices, even Conor has become unusually subdued, somber.

  Hannah is touched, Conor behaves differently now around his little sister. No longer boisterous, bossy, but gentle, tentative, thoughtful. Can a seven-year-old comprehend death?—Hannah wonders.

  We have all had a scare. We will love one another more now!

  The challenge is to coax Katya into eating normally. She is frail, weakened, tires easily, has little appetite. In the hospital she’d lost three pounds, a considerable loss for a child weighing only thirty-seven pounds. Her eyes are enormous in her face.

  Hannah and Wes have been told by the pediatrician that Katya is seriously underweight, which brings with it a danger of weakened bones, stunted growth, even neurological damage … The clinical expression is failure to thrive.

  Hannah has thought failure to thrive an expression of pathos, applied to the children of the inner-city poor. Not applicable to children in Far Hills, Michigan.

  On good days Katya will eat the foods prescribed for her—nutritious, rich in vitamins and calories—at least in small portions. On other days she rejects such food, has to be tempted by Hannah and Ismelda to eat anything at all—sugar-coated cereals, jams and jellies, peanut butter, pizza, mashed potatoes, SpaghettiOs, Froot Loops, smoothies, chocolate chiffon pie, chocolate ripple ice cream.

  In sympathy with his pale, wan sister, or slyly wishing to take advantage of the situation, Conor, too, has become a finicky eater.

  Mealtimes have become Events. Patience is required, and a kind of adult cunning.

  At least Wes is spared; he eats dinner late, with Hannah, often after the children are in bed, if he eats dinner at home at all. Which is good, Hannah thinks, since Wes hasn’t the patience to deal with his angel children when they are behaving badly.

  Thinking—They are my responsibility. To keep alive.

  Often Hannah sees Conor watching Katya covertly, with a kind of adult sobriety unnatural in a seven-year-old, and to Wes observes guiltily, “It’s as if Conor knows how we might have lost Katya. The way the poor child looks at his sister now …”

  “We weren’t going to ‘lose’ her, Hannah. Sinusitis isn’t fatal.”

  “Sinusitis is rarely fatal. But if it spreads to the brain …”

  “Well, it didn’t! Katya was put on antibiotics immediately. We have first-rate medical care here, we aren’t aborigines living in the wild.”

  Hannah hears the exasperation in her husband’s voice. Wisest for Hannah to remain silent.

  Wes says hotly, “If Conor acts strangely around Katya it’s something you’ve put in the poor kid’s head. He’s seven years old, for Christ’s sake. He isn’t you.”

  How frail the vessel—family. How desperate to keep family from pitching into the rough, devastating waters of oblivion, a frail vessel held together by love.

  And what is love but emotion. And what is emotion but a wisp of smoke, a motion of the air, invisible.

  By the end of April Hannah has ceased thinking of him. Hannah has ceased awaiting a call from him.

  Yet out of curiosity Hannah wonders if he has returned to Detroit, without having called her. Without her knowledge.

  Y.K. has frequent business dealings in Detroit, Hannah knows. He has friends, business associates in Detroit. He always stays in the same suite on the sixty-first floor of the Renaissance Grand Hotel overlooking the Detroit River.

  That suite. That bed. Hannah feels faint, recalling.

  Hannah wonders: What is his business?

  With the excuse of checking financial accounts for the March Madness fundraiser Hannah examines computer printouts in the office of the Friends of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in Far Hills, to which as a cochair of the event she has access; she spends nearly an hour scanning printouts of names, long columns of names, hoping to see a name that jogs her memory—the name of the person who’d given Y.K. a complimentary ticket to the event.

  Unfortunately she’d failed to ask Y.K. who his friend was. Would not have dared ask, for fear of offending him.

  The kind of man you don’t interrogate. No.

  Hannah has the vague hope that she might recognize a name if she looks closely. She doesn’t even know if Y.K.’s host had reserved an entire table or had simply had an extra ticket on hand, there were relatively few tables purchased in their entirety, at five thousand dollars, most of these were corporations like GM, Ford, Chrysler, the reservations made by secretaries. Eventually Hannah discovers seven tables purchased by individuals of whom five are known to her personally; it will be no effort for Hannah to seek out these individuals if she happens to encounter them somewhere, greeting them in a friendly manner and then casually bringing up March Madness, what a success it was, and from there leading the conversation into specifics: who was seated where, who was at which table, until by chance, or nearly, Hannah learns from the wife of Wilbur Mears, a Birmingham attorney, that a “single, solitary bachelor” had been one of the guests at their table—not a friend of Connie Mears, nor of her husband, but of a mutual friend whom Hannah might know, Marlene Reddick …

  Marlene Reddick. Hannah recalls that she’d been speaking with Marlene at the cocktail party when Y.K. approached her, seemingly out of nowhere.

  His fingers, brushing her wrist. That immediate intimacy, she’d turned in an instant to see …

  But Y.K. was Marlene’s friend, before he’d become Hannah’s friend. That seems likely.

  Hannah asks Connie Mears if she can remember the name of the “single, solitary bachelor” who’d been a guest at their table and Connie Mears says no, she doesn’t; Hannah asks if possibly his initials were “Y.K.” and Connie Mears says she has no idea. Hannah hesitates before asking Connie another question, not wanting to arouse the woman’s suspicions, but Connie volunteers that she and Wilbur never met Marlene’s guest—“After Marlene assured us the ticket wouldn’t go to waste, her friend didn’t show up.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “Not for dinner, at least. He may have been at the cocktail hour but left then. So a seat was vacant at our table. Rude.”

  Which means, Hannah thinks, excited, that Y.K. has to be that man, that absence at the table; and Marlene Reddick, whom Hannah knows socially, but not well, knows him.

  Happiness. Katya is safe. Hannah’s family is safe. Hannah herself is safe.

  A full month after Good Friday, he has not called.

  Sexual Rival(s)

  Marlene! Hello.”

  The sexual rival. Hannah knows.

  In an instant, Hannah is aflame. Her mouth is an ugly smile, she must refashion it, quickly.

  At the Far Hills Country Club where Hannah is meeting her Thursday-luncheon friends, and Marlene is meeting friends of hers, in the open, airy, main dining room.

  Hannah waves to Marlene, gaily. Marlene is caught, cannot turn aside.

  Before her quarry can elude her Hannah tells Marlene that she has a question for her, she’d hoped to run into Marlene to ask: At the fundraiser, her husband, Wes, had had a very interesting conversation with a guest whose name he doesn’t know, only the initials—“Y.K.” Or Wes thinks those were the initials.

  “Do you know his name, Marlene? Connie Mears thinks you might.”

  A glimmer of a shadow in Marlene’s face. Inscrutable.

  Shaking her head no. She does not.

  “He’s a friend of the governor’s, Wes said. They’d gone to the Air Force Academy together. Wes thinks he’s in real estate development. They were talking about something interesting and were interrupted—never got back together …”

  Marlene frowns with the effort to recall something so plainly of little significance in her life. Explaining that yes, she’d received an extra ticket from Wilbur, he’d wanted to get rid of it, so it wouldn’t go to waste—“But the person I gave it to, a friend, must have passed it on to someone else, this ‘K’—maybe …”

  “So you don’t know who Y.K. is? You’ve never met him?”

  Marlene’s gaze shifts. Marlene reconsiders.

  “I—I may have met him at the cocktail party, without knowing who he was. I met so many people that night—we all did—hard to hear names, the music was so loud …”

  Hannah says helpfully: “Wes said he was—is—about his age, Wes’s age, early forties. He’s tall, with dark hair—a kind of thick, stiff hair … He seemed to have a kind of accent, but Wes couldn’t describe it. And he wasn’t wearing ‘black tie’ exactly … You don’t remember him, I guess?”

  Marlene seems to be avoiding Hannah’s eyes. Politely shaking her head No, sorry.

  She knows him. Yes.

  Hannah feels a shiver of contempt for her rival. She is younger, and more beautiful.

  Marlene’s face has become solid, fleshy. Pale-peach cosmetic mask, poreless. Her mascara-lashed eyes are puckered at the corners. Her fingers are somewhat short, stubby; the skin on the backs of her hands is loose. Her leather handbag is larger than Hannah’s, arguably more expensive. It is rumored in Far Hills that Marlene has become a secret drinker.

  In Far Hills there are social drinkers, and there are secret drinkers. Of course, the two can overlap.

  “You don’t know what his business is, Marlene? This man Wes met.”

  “How would I know? I’ve just told you I don’t know him.”

  This is a sharp rejoinder. Hannah’s air of naïve curiosity has become grating to the other woman.

  Then, in softer tone: “Really, Hannah, I have no idea what any of them do—I mean, what they really do.”

  “‘They’—?”

  “Our husbands.”

  Hannah laughs, startled. This is unexpected.

  Our—as unexpected as a nudge in the ribs, and not entirely welcome.

  Hannah has but a vague idea of what Wes’s business is really. She’d never known what her father’s business was, nor had her mother known in any detail, she is sure.

  She knows, or thinks that she knows, what Wes’s company does, in a vague sort of way. Investments. Money management. She has a vaguer sense of what stocks—stocks and bonds?—Wes has invested their money in; she has been told the difference between stocks and bonds many times but would not have been able to explain. She’d assumed that Wes and Harold Rusch were involved in some sort of business deal—but Wes seems to have refuted that. Certainly she doesn’t know what deals have been made to float enormous loans of millions of dollars for financial ventures in which Wes is involved, with others or independently. From time to time Hannah hears that someone they know is declaring bankruptcy—a business is going under—but how, why, what this entails Hannah isn’t sure.

  The few times she’d inquired about the distribution of their finances Wes had spoken so earnestly to her, at such length, spread out documents on a table for her to peruse, smothered her with details as if pressing a pillow over her face until her eyes had glazed over—Enough!

  In a confiding voice Marlene is telling Hannah about a mutual Far Hills acquaintance who’d consented to a no-fault divorce from her husband of twenty-six years only to discover too late that the husband had been depositing most of his income in a Cayman Islands bank, inaccessible to the wife …

  “Poor Catherine! Dwight has taken ‘early retirement’ and claims that his salary is something like twenty thousand dollars a year now—of which she can hope for half. She has no choice but to settle, her lawyer has told her.”

  Hannah murmurs how terrible. She is sorry to hear …

  “And there’s another woman, of course. A ‘junior executive’ at his firm.”

  Why are they speaking of these others?—Hannah wonders. Regarding her rival suspiciously.

  Of course. He has made love to her, too.

  Squirmed, gasped, shuddered, struggled to breathe as the man’s predator fingers closed about her throat—relenting at the last moment.

  Has she wanted to die, too?—extinguished by those hands.

  After the women part Hannah feels a small mean thrill of satisfaction: He has ceased calling Marlene, she is sure.

  “Stupid C__t”

  And then, in Neiman Marcus, a chance encounter with Christina Rusch.

  Hannah on an ascending escalator, Mrs. Rusch on an adjacent descending escalator, the dignified older woman oblivious of the younger woman staring at her, as she’d been indifferent to Hannah for most of the fundraiser dinner in March.

  “Mrs. Rusch?—Christina …”

  Hannah calls out the name even as Mrs. Rusch regally descends out of Hannah’s range of vision, not deigning to hear.

  A figure elegantly dressed, dove-gray clothing, pastel scarf around her neck, carrying a designer bag in soft creamy leather and a Neiman Marcus shopping bag. Aloof, indifferent, not the sort of person inclined to glance over her shoulder when her name is called excitedly/rudely in a public place.

  As soon as she can Hannah takes the descending escalator intent upon catching up with Christina Rusch on the first floor, but on the first floor Hannah can’t seem to find her.

  You take the risk, for the risk is worth it. Not helpful to ask why.

  Christina Rusch seems to have disappeared. Hannah looks about, perplexed.

  (Fortunately, no one has seen Hannah. He has not seen her making a fool of herself chasing after the auto executive’s wife who, at the fundraiser, as Hannah’s guest, all but snubbed her.)

  After minutes of wandering about the luxuriantly wide aisles of the store like a stubborn child searching for an elusive mother, Hannah sights Christina on the farther side of women’s gloves, headed for an exit.

  Unabashed, undeterred Hannah follows Christina outside the store, along a walkway. Christina turns a startled face to her as Hannah calls, “Hello? I thought that was you, Christina …”

  Christina. It’s clear that Christina Rusch is offended by this first-name familiarity, frowning at Hannah without (evident) recognition; yet, as a prominent member of the local aristocracy, a woman whose face is likely to be well-known, Christina manages to smile, if stiffly. Though saying nothing as Hannah hurriedly introduces herself, chattering nervously, not above reminding Christina Rusch that she and her husband were guests of Hannah’s at the art museum dinner …

  Vaguely, Christina seems to recall Hannah. Yes.