“She’s heading for one of the neighbors right now to tell them how crazy we are. She’s probably telling them we’re dangerous.” Even as the words leave her mouth, Teresa pictures Mrs. Bennett being zapped off the face of the earth by a laser beam, her empty tennis shoes smoking on the sidewalk. “And what was all that about incineration? You never mentioned anyone being incinerated before.”

“I just threw that in to get rid of her,” Frankie says, removing his own helmet and wadding it up into a ball. “They’re not going to incinerate anyone; they’re just going to … correct things.” He rolls the ball of foil between his palms and then holds it up above his face. “Did you know that Giotto is the only person ever who could draw a perfect circle?”

“No.” She doesn’t care about Giotto. She has no idea who Giotto is. She wants to ask him to put away all of his quirks for five minutes and explain to her what he thinks needs “corrected.”

“Let’s work on your portrait,” he says, getting up from the sofa.

Whether or not she’s done it in a previous life, she decides she doesn’t like modeling. It’s nerve-racking. It involves nothing more than sitting in a chair for an hour at a time, yet it leaves her exhausted, as if she’d spent the hour doing yard work. Even the thought of finishing the portrait makes her feel tired. According to Frankie, they’re in the homestretch, but she feels rattled from Mrs. Bennett’s visit and tells him she needs to take a nap first.

She doesn’t sleep. She lies down across her bed and stares at the ceiling, thinking: What needs to be corrected?

Everything, really. Her nonexistent love life. Her relationship with her other three children. Frankie’s health. His blood work is stable now; during the past ten years, the virus has evolved into something he’s living with rather than dying from. But still she wishes she could have done more for him. She understands why he wants something to drop out of the sky and fix all their problems. Let them start right now and work backward, by all means, until the home she tried to create can be remembered as something other than a smoldering battlefield.

But that’s not what’s going on in his portraits. He’s mutated Karen, sliced up Matt, and melted Joe. He’s drowned Roy right out of his shoes. How clean can Teresa’s own record be, in his eyes?

She remembers Jennifer Woodrow—often, and privately: whenever she drives past the house where the Woodrows used to live, sometimes just out of the blue when she’s gazing at Frankie—and suspects that this one unfortunate episode is more than enough reason to have her “corrected.”