Wilson looks at his watch as he turns onto their street; he is early. Ruth and Isabelle won’t have left yet for this art class Ruth has signed them up for, followed by a visit to the popover café. So he will have to watch and wait until he sees them go. Part of him feels as if he should immediately go upstairs and tell them of Maggie’s prognosis instead of sneaking her off to the vet like this, but a larger part clings to the hope that Maggie will be okay. The thought that she might not be would make him feel desperate even if it weren’t for Isabelle; Isabelle’s silence only doubles his desperation, even to the extent that it has crossed his mind, albeit fleetingly, that he could, if need be, replace Maggie with another dog—as if Isabelle wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. He scoffs at himself; their daughter is nothing if not observant. He thinks of the sketchbook Ruth found last night and the images inside, far removed from the rainbows and unicorns of Isabelle’s younger days. He sets his jaw; to think of the sketchbook and where it is now—on the secretary’s desk at the new shrink’s office—fills him with a terrible sense of guilt.

Last night, after he and Isabelle had somberly decorated the tree—neither had even pointed to the ladder’s sticker—he returned to his bedroom not to find Ruth asleep, as he’d expected, or even lying glistening-eyed in the dark, but wide awake and hunched over what proved to be Isabelle’s sketchbook. She said she’d found it in the kitchen. “I want the shrink to see it,” she said. “Can you drop it off on your way to the office?”

“Don’t you think she’s missing it? Shouldn’t you put it back? Or give it to her?”

“Wilson, it’s from April! It’s from exactly when she stopped speaking!”

And although it made him uneasy, he has dropped the thing off, as Ruth asked. He’s not sure about this art business, though. It seems to him that Ruth is putting too much stock in art—this class they’re going off to, the analysis of Isabelle’s sketchbooks. It seems to him a sort of abstract way of dealing with her silence, or of understanding it, when it makes more sense to him to do something about it, or go somewhere. Like Africa. Wilson looks at his watch again. After Maggie’s appointment, he’s got a phone meeting scheduled with the travel agent. An exploratory meeting, he considers it, though if Isabelle is not at school come January, Africa makes perfect sense to him. As Ruth herself has said, they cannot go on this way.