“Don’t,” said a husky voice from the door. It was MaryJo, her eyes red-rimmed, her face looking slept in.

  “Don’t what?” Mark asked her. She didn’t answer, just glanced down at his hands. To his surprise, Mark noticed his thumbs were under the lip of the coffin lid, as if to lift it.

  “I wasn’t going to open it,” he said.

  “Come upstairs,” MaryJo said.

  “Are the children asleep?”

  He had asked the question innocently, but her face was immediately twisted with pain and grief and anger.

  “Children?” she asked. “What is this? And why tonight?”

  He leaned against the coffin in surprise. The wheeled table moved slightly under the weight of his body.

  “We don’t have any children,” she said.

  And Mark remembered with horror that she was right. After the second miscarriage, the doctor had tied her tubes, because any further pregnancies would risk her life. There were no children, none at all, and it had devastated her for years. It was only because of Mark’s great patience and dependability that she had been able to stay out of the hospital. Yet when he came home tonight . . . He tried to remember what he had heard when he came home. Surely he had heard the children running back and forth upstairs. Surely . . .

  “I haven’t been well,” he said.

  “If it was a joke, it was sick.”

  “It wasn’t a joke. It was—” But again he couldn’t, or at least didn’t, tell her about the strange memory lapses at the office, even though this was even more proof that something was wrong. He had never had any children in his home; MaryJo’s and his brothers and sisters had all been discreetly warned not to bring children around his poor wife, who was quite distraught to be—the Old Testament word?—barren.

  And all evening he had talked about having children.

  “Honey. I’m sorry,” he said, trying to put his whole heart into the apology.

  “So am I,” she answered, and she went upstairs.

  Surely she isn’t angry at me, Mark thought. Surely she realizes something is wrong. Surely she’ll forgive me.

  But as he climbed the stairs after her, faking off his shirt as he did, he again heard the voice of a child.

  I want a drink, Mommy.” The voice was plaintive, with the sort of-whine only possible to a child who is comfortable and sure of love. Mark turned at the landing in time to see MaryJo passing the top of the stairs on me way to the children’s bedroom, a glass of water in her hand. He thought nothing of it. The children always wanted extra attention at bedtime.

  The children. The children. Of course there were children. This was the urgency he had felt in the office, the reason he had to get home. They had always wanted children, arid so there were children. Tapworth always got what he set his heart on.

  “Asleep at last,” MaryJo said wearily when she came into the room.

  Despite her weariness, however, she kissed him goodnight in the way that told him she wanted to make love. He had never worried much about sex. Let the readers of Reader’s Digest worry about how to make their sex lives fuller and richer, he always said. As for him, sex was good, but not the best thing in his life; just one of the ways that he and MaryJo responded to each other. Yet tonight he was disturbed, worried. Not because he could not perform, for he had never been troubled by even temporary impotence except when he had a fever and didn’t feel like sex, anyway. What bothered him was that he didn’t exactly care.

  He didn’t not care, either. He was just going through the motions, as he had a thousand times before, and this time, suddenly it all seemed so silly, so redolent of petting in the backseat of a car. He felt embarrassed that he should get so excited over a little stroking. So he was almost relieved when one of the children cried out. Usually he would say to ignore the cry, would insist on continuing the lovemaking. But this time he pulled away from her. put on a robe, and went into the other room to quiet the child down.

  There was no other room.

  Not in this house. He had. in his mind, been heading for the room fried with a crib, a changing table, a dresser, mobiles, and cheerful wallpaper. But that room had been years ago, when they were full of hope, in the small house in Sandy, not in the home in Federal Heights, with its magnificent view of Salt Lake City, its beautiful shape, and its decoration that spoke of taste and shouted of wealth and whispered faintly of loneliness and grief. He leaned against a wall. There were no children. There were no children. He could still hear the child’s cry ringing in his mind.

  MaryJo stood in the doorway to their bedroom, naked but holding her nightgown in front of her. “Mark, she said, “I’m afraid.”

  “So am I,” he answered.

  But she asked him no questions, and he put on his pajamas, and they went to bed. And as he lay there in darkness, listening to his wife’s faintly rasping breath, he realized that it didn’t matter as much as it ought. He was losing his mind, but he didn’t really care. He thought of praying about it, but he had given up praying years ago, though of course it wouldn’t do to let anyone else know about his loss of faith, not in a city where it’s good business to be an active Mormon. There’d be no help from God on this one, he knew. And not much help from MaryJo, either; for instead of being strong, as she usually was in an emergency, this time she would be, as she had said, afraid.

  Well, so am I, Mark said to himself. He reached over and stroked his wife’s shadowy cheek, realized that there were some creases near the eye, understood that what made her afraid was not his specific ailment, odd as it was, but the fact that it was a hint of aging, of senility, of imminent separation. He remembered the box downstairs, like death appointed to watch for him until at last he consented to go. He briefly resented them for bringing death to his home, for so indecently imposing on them. Then he ceased to care at all—about the box. about his strange lapses in memory, about everything.

  I am at peace, he thought as he drifted off to sleep. I am at peace, and It’s not all that pleasant.

  “Mark,” said MaryJo, shaking him awake. “Mark, you overslept.”

  Mark opened his eyes, mumbled something so the shaking would stop, then rolled over to go back to sleep.

  “Mark,” MaryJo insisted.

  “I’m tired,” he said in protest.

  “I know you are,” she said. “So I didn’t wake you any sooner. But they just called. There’s something of an emergency or something—”

  “They can’t flush the toilet without someone holding their hands.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be crude, Mark,” MaryJo said. “I sent the children off to school without letting them wake you by kissing you good-bye. They were very upset.”

  “Good children.”

  “Mark, they’re expecting you at the office.”

  Mark closed his eyes and spoke in measured tones. “You can call them and tell them I’ll come in when I damn well feel like it, and if they can’t cope with the problem themselves, I’ll fire them all.”

  MaryJo was silent for a moment. “Mark, I can’t say that.”

  “Word for word. I’m tired. I need a rest. My mind is doing funny things to me.” And with that Mark remembered all the illusions of the day before, including the illusion of having children.

  “There aren’t any children,” he said.

  Her eyes grew wide. “What do you mean?”

  He almost shouted at her, demanded to know what was going on, why she didn’t just tell him the truth for a moment. But the lethargy and disinterest clamped down, and he said nothing, just rolled back over and looked at the curtains as they drifted in and out with the air conditioning. Soon MaryJo left him, and he heard the sound of machinery starting up downstairs. The washer, the dryer, the vacuum cleaner, the dishwasher, the garbage-disposal unit. It seemed that all the machines were going at once. He had never heard the sounds before. MaryJo never ran them in the evenings or on weekends, when he was home.

  At noon he finally got up, but he didn’t feel like showering and shaving, though any other day he would have felt dirty and uncomfortable until those rituals were done with. He just put on his robe and went downstairs. He planned to go in to breakfast, but instead he went into his study and opened the lid of the coffin.

  It took a bit of preparation, of course. There was some pacing back and forth before the coffin, and much stroking of the wood, but finally he put his thumbs under the lid and lifted.

  The corpse looked stiff and awkward. A man, not particularly old, not particularly young. Hair of a determinedly average color. Except for the grayness of the skin color, the body looked completely natural and so utterly nondescript that Mark felt sure he might have seen the man a million times without remembering he had seen him at all. Yet he was unmistakably dead, not because of the cheap satin lining the coffin rather slackly, but because of the hunch of the shoulders, the jut of the chin.

  The man was not comfortable.

  He smelled of embalming fluid.

  Mark was holding the lid open with one hand, leaning on the coffin with the other. He was trembling. Yet he felt no excitement, no fear. The trembling was coming from his body, not from anything he could find within his thoughts. He was trembling because he was cold.

  There was a soft sound or absence of sound at the door. He turned around abruptly. The lid dropped behind him. MaryJo was standing in the doorway, wearing a frilly housedress, her eyes wide with horror.

  In that moment years fell away and to Mark she was twenty, a shy and somewhat awkward girl who was forever being surprised by the way the world actually worked. He waited for her to say, “But, Mark, you cheated him.” She had said it only once, but ever since then he had heard the words in his mind whenever he was closing a deal. It was the closest thing to a conscience he had in his business dealings. It was enough to win him a reputation as a very honest man.

  “Mark,” she said softly, as if struggling to keep control of herself, “Mark, I couldn’t go on without you.”

  She sounded as if she was afraid something terrible was going to happen to him, and her hands were shaking. He took a step toward her. She lifted her hands, came to him, clung to him and cried in a high whimper into his shoulder. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said, puzzled.

  “I’m just not the kind of person,” she said between sobs, “who can live alone.”

  “But even if I—even if something happened to me, MaryJo, you’d have the—” He was going to say “children.” Something was wrong with that, though, wasn’t there? They loved no one better in the world than their children; no parents had ever been happier than they had been when their two were born. Yet he couldn’t say it.

  “I’d have what?” MaryJo asked. “Oh, Mark, I’d have nothing.”

  And then Mark remembered again (What’s happening to me?) that they were childless, that to MaryJo, who was old-fashioned enough to regard motherhood as the main purpose for her existence, the fact that they had no hope of children was God’s condemnation of her. The only thing that had pulled her through after the operation was Mark, was fussing over his meaningless and sometimes invented problems at the office or telling him endlessly the events of her lonely days. It was as if he were her anchor to reality, and only he kept her from going adrift in the eddies of her own fears. No wonder the poor girl (for at such times Mark could not think of her as completely adult) was distraught as she thought of Mark’s death, and the damned coffin in the house did no good at all.

  But I’m in no position to cope with this, Mark thought. I’m falling apart. I’m not only forgetting things, I’m remembering things that didn’t happen. And what if I died? What if I suddenly had a stroke like my father had and died on the way to the hospital? What would happen to MaryJo?

  She’d never lack for money. Between the business and the insurance, even the house would be paid off, with enough money left over for her to live like a queen on the interest. But would the insurance company arrange for someone to hold her patiently while she cried out her fears? Would they provide someone for her to waken in the middle of the night, when nameless terrors haunted her?

  Her sobs turned into frantic hiccups and her fingers dug more deeply into his back through the soft fabric of his robe. See how she clings to me, he thought. She’ll never let me go. And then the blackness came again, and again he was falling backward into nothing, and again he did not care about anything. Did not even know there was anything to care about.

  Except for the fingers pressing into his back and the weight he held in his arms. I do not mind losing the world, he thought. I do not mind losing even my memories of the past. But these fingers. This woman. I cannot lay this burden down, because there is no one who can pick it up again. If I release her, she is lost.

  Yet he longed for the darkness, resented her need that held him. Surely there is a way out of this, he thought. Surely a balance between two hungers that leaves both satisfied. But still the hands held him. All the world was silent, and the silence was peace except for the sharp, insistent fingers, and he cried out in frustration. And the sound was still ringing in the room when he opened his eyes and saw MaryJo standing against a wall, leaning against the wall, looking at him in terror.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

  “I’m losing,” he answered. But he could not remember what he had thought to win.

  And at that moment a door slammed in the house and Amy came running with little loud feet through the kitchen and into the study, flinging herself on her mother and bellowing about the day at school and the dog that chased her for the second time and how the teacher told her she was the best reader in the second grade but Darrel had spilled milk on her and could she have a sandwich because she had dropped hers and stepped on it accidentally at lunch—

  MaryJo looked at Mark cheerfully and winked and laughed. “Sounds like Amy’s had a busy day, doesn’t it, Mark?”

  Mark could not smile. He just nodded as MaryJo straightened Amy’s disheveled clothing and led her toward the kitchen.

  “MaryJo,” Mark said. “There’s something I have to talk to you about.”

  “Can it wait?” MaryJo asked, not even pausing. Mark heard the cupboard door opening, heard the lid come off the peanut-butter jar, heard Amy giggle and say, “Mommy, not so thick.”

  Mark didn’t understand why he was so confused and terrified. Amy had a sandwich after school ever since she had started going—even as an infant she had had seven meals a day and never gained an ounce. It wasn’t what was happening in the kitchen that was bothering him, it couldn’t be. Yet he could not stop himself from crying out, “MaryJo! MaryJo, come here!”

  “Is Daddy mad?” he heard Amy ask softly.

  “No,” MaryJo answered, and she bustled back into the room and impatiently said, “What’s wrong, dear?”

  “I just need—just need to have you in here for a minute.”

  “Really, Mark, that’s not your style, is it? Amy needs to have a lot of attention right after school. It’s the way she is. I wish you wouldn’t stay home from work with nothing to do, Mark. You become quite impossible around the house.” She smiled to show that she was only half-serious and left again to go back to Amy.

  For a moment Mark felt a terrible stab of jealousy that MaryJo was far more sensitive to Amy’s needs than to his.

  But that jealousy passed quickly, like the memory of the pain of MaryJo’s fingers pressing into his back, and with a tremendous feeling of relief Mark didn’t care about anything at all, and he turned around to the coffin, which fascinated him, and he opened the lid again and looked inside. It was as if the poor man had no face at all, Mark-realized. As if death stole faces from people and made them anonymous even to themselves.

  He ran his fingers back and forth across the satin, and it felt cool and inviting. The rest of the room, the rest of the world, faded. Only Mark and the coffin and the corpse remained, and Mark felt very tired and very hot, as if life itself were a terrible friction making heat within him, and he took off his robe and pajamas and awkwardly climbed on a chair and stepped over the edge into the coffin and knelt and then lay down in the coffin. There was no corpse to share the slight space with him, nothing between his body and the cold satin, and as he lay on it, it didn’t get any warmer because at last the friction was slowing, was cooling, and he reached up and pulled down the lid. The world was dark and silent, and there was no odor and no taste and no feel but the cold of the sheets.

  “Why is the lid closed?” asked little Amy, holding her mother’s hand.

  “Because it’s not the body we must remember,” MaryJo said softly, with careful control, “but the way Daddy always was. We must remember him happy and laughing and loving us.”

  Amy looked puzzled. “But I remember he spanked me.”

  MaryJo nodded, smiling, something she had not done recently. “It’s all right to remember that, too,” MaryJo said, and then she took her daughter from the coffin back into the living room, where Amy, not realizing yet the terrible loss she had sustained, laughed and climbed on Grandpa, David, his face serious and tear-stained because he did understand, came and put his hand in his mother’s hand and held tightly to her. “We’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Yes,” MaryJo answered. “I think so.”

  And MaryJo’s mother whispered in her ear, “I don’t know how you can stand it so bravely, my dear.”

  Tears came to MaryJo’s eyes. “I’m not brave at all,” she whispered back. “But the children. They depend on me so much. I can’t let go when they’re leaning on me.”