“I left them with Mother because I didn’t know . . . I thought—Oh, Albert, I was frantic, frantic. Don’t you ever do anything like this again, hear me?”

For answer, he pulled her back down to him.

The room went deep then, enclosed, narrowing, a submarine plunging into the depths where only the two of them could go, and Susi, without a word, laid the book aside, pushed herself up from the chair and tiptoed out of the room.

She found her bike propped against the tree where she’d left it. It was chilly out now, but the crickets sang their night song and the frogs, awakened after a long winter’s sleep, joined in. She was out in the country, on her own, and it must have been past ten at night. Her mother would be furious. She swung a leg over the crossbar of her bike, pushed off and began pedaling down the dark driveway to the darker road, and there was no moon in the sky to guide her, only the pale distant luminescence of the stars God had put in the heavens to mark His boundaries.

She was late for work the next morning. Her mother had awakened her at the usual hour but she’d fallen back asleep, never more exhausted in her life. She’d got home very late and her mother had greeted her at the door with a stony face, but she explained herself patiently till gradually her mother seemed to relent and heated a pan of barley soup over the stove for her, all the while complaining You couldn’t have telephoned even? and she reiterating how desperate the situation had been—and she didn’t have to exaggerate, that was for certain. When finally she did get to bed, she couldn’t sleep, her mind replaying the day’s events in a continuous loop, coming around again and again to the way he’d cried out her name—Help me, Susi, help me!—and then the image of him holding fast to his wife, of their lips, their tongues, the way he moved against her and she against him as if there were no constraints, as if she herself wasn’t sitting right there in the corner of the room. And she wasn’t in that room as an interloper either, she was there as a Good Samaritan, a friend, a savior—and what did that get her? A lonely ride home in the dark and not a word of thanks.

The first thing she saw on opening the closet—his jacket, hanging on its hook like the most ordinary thing in the world—flooded her with relief. He was there. He was all right. He hadn’t died in the night or lost his mind or succumbed to delirium. She fought down the flickering memory of his vacant eyes, his reddened face, his mussed hair that stood straight up on his head like the hackles of an animal and the way he’d shouted at her when she asked, in all innocence, if she should call the doctor, then she hung her scarf and jacket on the hook beside his, slipped on her lab coat and stepped into the laboratory.