She was petrified, he could tell. She made no effort to hide it. To her, any illness whatsoever was an assault on the sanctity of their family unit. The kids’ throw-up bugs were met with the same dark-eyed fear another might reserve for, say, a bad blood test or the appearance of an unexplained lump. This is it. The beginning of the terrible tragedy she was certain would one day befall her.

His tolerance for Ann-Marie’s eccentricities was at low ebb. He was dealing with something serious here, and he needed her help, not her added stress. Now he couldn’t be the strong one. He needed her to take charge.

Even the kids were staying away from him, startled by the not-there look in their father’s eyes, or perhaps—he was vaguely aware of this—the odor of his sickness, which to his nose resembled the smell of congealed cooking grease stored too long in a tin can rusting beneath the sink. He saw them from time to time hiding behind the balusters at the bottom of the staircase, watching him cross the second-floor landing. He wanted to allay their fears, but worried he might lose his temper trying to explain this to them, and in doing so make things worse. The surest way to set their minds at ease was to get better. To outlast this surge of disorientation and pain.

He stopped inside his daughter’s bedroom, found the purple walls too purple, then doubled back into the hallway. He stood very still on the landing—as still as he could—until he could hear it again. That thumping. A beating—quiet and close. Wholly separate from the headache pounding in his skull. Almost…like in small-town movie theaters, where you can hear, during quiet moments in movies, the clicking of the film running through the projector in the back. Which distracts you, and keeps pulling you back to the reality that this is not real, as though you and you alone realize this truth.

He shook his head hard, grimacing from the pain that went with it…trying to use that pain like bleach, to clean his thoughts…but the thumping. The throbbing. It was everywhere, all around him.

The dogs too. Acting strange around him. Pap and Gertie, the big, bumbling Saint Bernards. Growling as they would when some strange animal came into the yard.

Ann-Marie came up later, alone, finding him sitting at the foot of their bed, his head in his hands like a fragile egg. “You should sleep,” she said.

He gripped his hair like the reins of a mad horse and fought down the urge to berate her. Something was wrong in his throat, and whenever he lay down for any length of time, his epiglottis seized up, cutting off his airway, suffocating him until he choked himself back to breathing. He was terrified now of dying in his sleep.