With everything transferred into our car, and the keys left in the ignition of the Prius, Gary leans in through the driver’s door and puts the Volvo into neutral, runs to the back of the wagon and pushes it down the road past Sari’s house. Once we’re in the clear, Gary gets behind the wheel and shifts the car into drive. At the end of Sari’s road, he guns it toward the highway. I enter our destination—Home—into his phone, then put it on the holder on the dashboard. In seconds it lights up with our mapped route. We’ll get back just after midnight.

* * *

In the dark silence between us I remember another similarly dramatic night-escape—years ago, before Teddy was born, when we visited a college friend of mine in Maine. Clara had invited me countless times to see the beach house that had been in her family for generations, and one summer weekend a year after I’d met Gary, I finally agree. I print out her directions and pack up the car. I promise him that it will be fun.

Gary only reluctantly agrees to go—he prefers the impersonal feel of hotels to the awkward closeness of staying with friends—travel in general and being in situations he can’t control, like being someone’s houseguest, makes him extremely anxious—but as we get off the highway north of Portland and follow the coastal roads into town and toward a huge shingled house on a craggy hill, he suddenly perks up.

“See?” I say. “And you didn’t want to go.”

But then we pull into the driveway and arrive at the back of the house, which is a dump. Gary parks on a burned mound of dry grass next to two dead station wagons and several feral cats. The cats glare at us, and then Gary glares at me. “We’re not staying. You know I can’t handle this kind of thing. The unknown, the unclean, the unsafe.”

Clara, plain and preppy in flat sandals and a faded Lilly Pulitzer–style skort, comes running out to greet us before we can plot the details of an escape. She takes us through the back of the house—from the kitchen that hasn’t been touched since the avocado-green-and-brown-appliance-seventies, to a grand foyer where flies enter in through a sagging screen door, to an upstairs guest room. Inside the bedroom with sea foam–green walls, Gary’s eyes fixate on the bed itself: a mattress on the floor, a short stack of stained pancake-thin pillows waiting for pillowcases; the buzzing of bees and more flies outside in the dead summer heat.

Clara adjusts the window fan leaning up against a broken screen like a scrappy nurse improving the angle of a bed or a splinted limb. “If you just angle it like this,” she says, almost pushing it out the window, “you can get a nice cross breeze. And it keeps the mosquitoes from coming in. Who needs air-conditioning?”

“Not me!” Gary says theatrically, hitting his head on the swaying chain hanging from a bare lightbulb on the ceiling. He grits his teeth then digs his nails deep into the soft flesh of my palm. “We’re leaving,” he mouths.