She crouches down beside him. She rubs her hand over his hair. She scratches Sailor’s chest. “Guys, I think I’m going to take an Ambien and go to sleep. I just can’t think about this anymore tonight.”

Maureen calls. She was at what was supposed to be a victory party, but everyone is just going home now. “Nobody even said good night. They were like miners going into their own private tunnels.”

“Let’s talk in the morning. I know waking up will be slamming into an abutment, but eight hours of whatever’s just happened will have passed.”

One of the happiest moments of Cate’s life was in front of another TV, eight years ago, waiting through another set of returns, when Barack took Ohio, and so the presidency. Now all that is about to be pulled inside out.

Even medicated, she can’t sleep. In the kitchen, Graham is still up.

“How will the world survive this?” he asks. It’s 4:30 a.m. He’s sitting at the island, hunched over, drinking coffee. His ponytail has come undone; his hair hangs Christlike to his shoulders; he’s in his own private Gethsemane. “The people who voted for him. I feel like I should have gone and talked with each of them. Brought charts, scientific articles, photos of melting glaciers, dying polar bears, shown the value of immigrants, how much better it is to consider races and genders equal. I should have told them coal mining isn’t making a comeback.”

“This is very bad, but a lot of it was mechanical malfunction. Too many things are wrong with the machinery. All the gerrymandering. The voter suppression, the low turnout. The obsolescence of the electoral college. Many more people voted for Hillary, but we’re going to have him for president. We need to sit with this for a while,” Cate says. “Then get to work turning it around. Get inside the wheelhouse and start pushing against the heavy wheel.”

“The surveillance is going to get much worse.”

“Let’s take a break. Let’s walk this dog.” Sailor concurs by swiping at the back of her shin. “When things get bad, he always worries it’s about him.”

duck egg

She stands in the ankle-deep water that slides across the sandbar, kicked up into spray by the dogs running its length, then back again. The water is a cold that eventually becomes bearable. The sky holds the vibrant blue of renewal, a postcard of spring. All well and good, except this is the second week of November. (The first week, it was raining, then freezing.) Through the morning, the temperature has drifted up to seventy. Of course this can’t be right, and is surely a harbinger of floods and fires to come, dust storms, mud sliding into living rooms, deadly whirling winds plucking off roofs. Still, it’s impossible, just for today, not to be viscerally thrilled.