Jake lay beside her, his eyes wide open, staring at the small slivered square of light projected on the ceiling from the glowing window. Then he turned to her, watching her, breathing in her hair that was spread on the pillow. He leaned toward her and put his arms around her, sliding one hand under her neck until he had encircled her with his arms, and rested his lips on her ear.

As for Leora, she felt herself drifting, slowly drifting, as if she were on a boat crossing the distance between two countries, off to sleep, dreaming that she was telling him.

Chapter 7 The Same Long and Dreamless Night, Elsewhere

CHAPTER 7

THE SAME LONG AND DREAMLESS NIGHT, ELSEWHERE

DO YOU remember this, Anna?” Bill Landsmann asked.

But it had been a long time, years, since Anna Landsmann had remembered anything. It had started the year after Naomi died. That was the year Anna—sharp, incisive Anna, organized, meticulous Anna, always prepared with whatever word or act the moment demanded—suddenly forgot how to tell time.

It began slowly. That autumn, on the day everyone was supposed to turn the clocks back an hour, Anna did not turn them back. To be fair, Bill didn’t remember either that day, having just returned from one of his trips and suffering from his own time-zone confusion, but still the fact remained: the clocks were not turned back. It wasn’t until Ben called the house—which was confusing too, in terms of time, now that he had moved to California, what with their always calling Ben too early and his always calling them too late—and mentioned the time that Bill suddenly noticed that they were an hour ahead of where they should have been. When he mentioned it to Anna, she laughed, joking that the two of them were surely ahead of their time and telling him not to bother fixing the clocks himself; she would make the rounds of the house and set them back where they belonged. But the next day he noticed, after seeing another customer’s watch in the supermarket, that the clocks still had not been changed. He reminded her, and she laughed again, telling him again that he didn’t have to bother, that she would fix the clocks as soon as she had a free moment. She never fixed them. A few weeks later, he looked at her watch, which she had placed on her night table before going to sleep, and he noticed that it was broken. When he mentioned it to Anna, she laughed yet again, joking that her watch wasn’t really broken, since it still told the time correctly twice a day. But these jokes were no longer funny, because by then Bill had realized that something was seriously wrong. She had not only forgotten how to read a clock; she also no longer understood what time was for. She had forgotten how to tell time.