She was quiet then, studying him, understanding what he was saying. Then she said, “I’m not stupid, Foster. I know plenty about him, those others too.”

“Well I figure you do. Still, you know what they say. About blood.”

She came then to the bed and sat beside him and reached her hands up to his shoulders, just resting her hands there, the droop of her arms between them. He did not move. Her eyes broken shards of winter sky. She said, “It’s all blood, baby.”

The blankets, their skin, the very air of the room a swamp, everything rich, glutinous, gelid and pure as he imagined some ocean, some forgotten lost sea might be. The dogs, both of them now, off on the hearth, watching them, their heads up, their eyes alert, curious and somewhat alarmed.

“I’m not a bad girl. Not really. I just want. I want.”

“I don’t think you’re bad. I think you’re some kind of wonder is what you are.”

“No, no, no. Foster. Anybody, any girl, could do this for you.”

“I’m not talking about this. I don’t know what it is. It’s not what you think it is, what you seem afraid I’ll think it is. I’m just all scrambled up inside is all.”

“You boy. You sweet boy.”

“What is it?” he asked. “What is it you want?”

“Oh Lord,” she said. “Everything.”

Late dunrose dusk, pale light dimmed free of shadow. The blanket off them. Still hot. Still-hot. Something passed, not sleep, not waking but some nether nuzzle between the two of them, drifting up and down.

The door opened. The dogs shot out. Alexander Mebane standing in the door, his cane leaned in like something extended out before him. His head tipped sideways to look at them. Daphne scrabbling the blanket over them, her movements clumsy against Foster as the rough army blanket tented them.

“Children,” Mebane said. And shut the door.

“Oh Jesus wept.” She was up in the half-light, tipped awkward on one foot then the other as she stepped into her underwear. For the brief moment before she pulled the rest of her clothes on as glowing white as a peeled onion. It was the first time he’d seen her this way, naked and struggling with her body, and he sat welled with tenderness, thinking that the very way she lived within space was different from him, that the world someway was not made right for either one of them alone but together they might find balance one against the other. She said, “I’m dead. I am dead. Oh shit I’m shot and skinned and hung out to dry.”

He got up from the bed, languid, pulled only by her urgency. He pulled on his trousers and said, “He didn’t seem that worked up about it.”