“It’s the exact same phrase you used on me, if I recall—about Mexico, the first time? Please, Fitz, please—we can all be together, don’t you see? It’ll be like Mexico all over again.”

“Right,” he said, and his voice had thickened still more, “but without the tacos. Or what, iguanas? But shhhh!”—he lifted a finger to his lips—“don’t tell Corey.”

She dropped her shoes to the floor, smoothed out the stockings and folded them over her forearm. He’d slept with Fanchon in Mexico, she was sure of that, and maybe Susannah too, though it didn’t mean anything, not when you were under the influence, not when you were having a session, because jealousy was ego-dependent, a kind of disease of it, and the whole purpose of the drug was to enable you to let go of the ego and live in the moment. She’d had Ken. And Charlie. And that was nothing. Just brothers and sisters, just . . . tripping.

“I can still get the deposit back,” she said, and her voice was thickening too. “I’ll bet,” she said. “I’ll bet I can.”

Someone flushed the toilet in the room next to theirs. There was the tattoo of pounding feet, the sigh of bedsprings.

“You know what I want to do?” he said.

“What?”

“Sleep on it.”

In the next moment he was gone, his breathing coming slow and easy till it settled into a soft rasp that played counterpoint to their sleeping son’s. She reached up and shut off the lamp behind her and for a long while she sat there in the chair, listening to the motel sink into the deep rhythms of the night. Sixty-four rooms. The Hotel Catalina had less than half that. And Ken said the big house—the Alte Haus, he called it—had a kitchen that in itself was bigger than their last apartment, with a walk-in refrigerator and an eight-burner range. The meals they could have, everybody together, the sessions, the clear skies, a lake for swimming in the summer and skating in the winter! How many fireplaces? How many floors? Sixty-four rooms. It was like a dream opening up to her one panel at a time, muted colors, movement, and then a vision of them all, Ken especially—especially Ken—gathered round a big stone fireplace while a raga played on the stereo and her mind drifted out to play along with it.

Tim was a magician. He was. And if she’d ever doubted him, she’d been wrong, because he’d really pulled one out of his hat this time.

Chapter 4

4.