Cover

Dedication

For Luisa, Isabel, and Peter

Epigraph

We should insist while there is still time. We must

eat through the wildness of her sweet body already

in our bed to reach the body within the body.

—Jack Gilbert, “Tear It Down”

December 22: The Cars

Tess and Martin

“You left them alone in the apartment?” Tess says.

“I’m downstairs, Tess. I’m right out front.”

“And they’re upstairs?”

They moved this year to a high-rise farther from the park but with a washer/dryer in the kitchen, a shared roof deck, a gym. Tess hadn’t expected how scared she’d feel, being up so high. She searches from the sidewalk every weekday morning, walking to the subway, for their specific windows, not sure which of the apartments her children are still in.

“They’re not babies,” Martin says. “You’re the one who wanted to leave by noon, then went to work.”

“I still don’t understand why we have to be gone so many days.”

Martin’s quiet. It’s the twenty-second. Tess didn’t want to go until the twenty-fourth.

“Did you pack the sweaters from your mother? All the presents? The kids can’t see the Santa ones. Stell doesn’t like the strawberry toothpaste; I have that little travel thing of Crest.”

“I’ve packed for trips before.”

“Your sister is going to want to take a thousand pictures.”

“I packed for all of that.”

“The pajamas she sent?”

“Yes. You left them folded by the door.”

“Can you come get me?”

“You know I don’t like driving in the city.”

“We said we wanted to get there before dark.”

“That was when you said you weren’t going into work.”

“Don’t you think we need to make sure one of us still has a job?”

“Oh, fuck you, Tess.”

“Can you please come pick me up?”

The street is quiet, wide and empty; so many of the cars already gone for the long holiday. Martin is surrounded by tall and glinting gray and widely windowed buildings, the one they live in indistinguishable from those on either side. He looks up to find their windows but can’t quite.

He thinks briefly he might call his mother. He wouldn’t talk to her about Tess, about their disagreement—they never talked much about Tess—he’d listen as she listed all the food she’d bought in preparation for the children, the meals and parties she was planning, baking slabs of gingerbread so that the kids could make houses, friends of hers who’d stopped by to bring gifts. She’d ask him what he thought about the side dishes, if she needed an extra pie because the kids were getting so big, the coffee Tess liked. She’d remind him to bring bathing suits and something nice for Christmas dinner, ask about the timing of their flight.