He tried to read Boswell, but his thoughts wandered to the wedge in Alma’s bathing suit, to her hand on his arm, to the way she’d pouted at him when he’d said goodbye. He went back into the downstairs lavatory, dropped his trousers, knelt at the toilet bowl, and finished what he’d started last night, before Alma had walked in on him—thinking first of Effie, out of loyalty, and then, giving in, of Alma, Alma pulling him aside somewhere lush and green, peeling her bathing suit off, and the orgasm seized him before he could quite picture her naked to his satisfaction, and a shot of semen struck the back of the bowl—and remained there after he flushed. He was impressed. With a wad of toilet paper he wiped it off, looked for any stray spots on the rim or toilet seat, and flushed again.

Afterward, lounging in the den and eating the last of the strawberries, he felt debauched and wasted. He lay back and tried to nap, but he was wide-awake.

Periodically he went up to the attic room to check on Effie. The room felt close and warm and smelled sweet, so he knelt and opened the windows, and Effie murmured her thanks. He got her to take some aspirin with water. Later, for supper, he warmed up a bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and brought it up to her, along with the last of the bread. He got her to sit up, added a pillow behind her. The wind had calmed; evening was coming on. He’d found a kerosene lamp in a closet downstairs. She took a bite of the bread. She sipped spoonfuls of the broth. She was shivering, her face was mottled and swollen, her eyes were slits, and her voice was high and airy.

“I’ve been having these vivid dreams,” she said. “Everything’s amber. The sky’s this dirty orange color.”

“What are the dreams about?”

“I don’t know. Nothing that makes any sense. There was one where me and Bernice DuPont were walking over this bridge, over this muddy river. And at the end of it these big men—like ten feet tall—were hanging around in rags, basically naked, and they were dirty, kind of copper, and the weird thing, they were missing some of their limbs, and they were looking at us like—I don’t know. Like they wanted to eat us.”

She handed the bowl of soup back to him. She was shivering more violently now—her pajamas were damp—and she lay back down and Henry pulled the covers back up to her chin. “I wonder if I should try to find a doctor,” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s just a fever.”

“It’s a bad fever.”

“It’ll burn itself out.”