“Shit!” Ruth hears him say. He stoops down and lifts something from the floor. “Stepped on a bone,” he says, tossing the rawhide onto the couch beside their bed. Ruth pulls back the covers on his side of the bed, and he gets in.

“I’m glad the slides were okay,” Ruth says.

“Lucky they were. I’m going to get some proper storage lockers for the things down there. You know, plastic trunks or something. The cardboard just isn’t doing it anymore.”

“Well, still. They were good to see.” Good, she thinks, and strange, almost sad, in a way Ruth can’t quite understand. After dinner, Wilson had taken the painting down from the wall behind the couch, and the three of them had sat in the darkness of the family room and watched Africa flick against the wall: empty plains, flat and windswept trees, elephant herds and piles of enormous bone, black-skinned Africans with toothy grins. The images were grainy, some a little water-stained, some cracked with age. “See the lion in that one,” Wilson had said, pointing to one. On the wall, Wilson, his brother, and their father stood in front of a safari jeep. They wore khaki shorts and knee socks, and Wilson’s father wore a wide-brimmed hat. All of them were smiling.

“I don’t see it,” Ruth had said.

“I’ll show you,” Wilson said. He stood in front of the projection on the wall, pointing to a small lion in the corner of the image. Field grass and the headlights of the safari jeep seemed painted on his back. When he turned around, he stepped into the path of his own image. His young face hovered over his old face, his young body over the old. Then he stepped away, like a ghost of himself, leaving that young self grinning and pinned against the wall.

Ruth finds Wilson’s hand with her own beneath the covers and gives it a gentle squeeze.

“I showed it to him,” she says.

“Showed what to who?”

Ruth’s mouth twists in frustration. “The drawing, to the shrink! What did you think I was talking about?”

Wilson shrugs in the darkness, but his heart begins to beat a little faster as he thinks about Isabelle’s drawing, and the way she loved those foreign dolls, and how when they go to Africa she can choose her own—one from Kenya, one from Ethiopia, maybe one from Madagascar. “And?” he says. “Did the guy seem any good? What he say? What did he think about the drawing? Did he think Africa was a good idea?”

“Did he think Africa was a good idea?”

Wilson pauses. “Yes,” he says. “Going to Africa. Getting Isabelle out of here for a while, showing her something she hasn’t seen before.”

“Wilson.” Ruth turns her head to look at her husband. His eyes glint in the dark. He blinks. “I don’t think you’re thinking.”