I arrived in Arcade and found the Antlers hotel, its glass facade pink against the blue mountains. A million tons of toxic dust had scattered over Manhattan when the Towers fell, and the air of Arcade struck me as sweet and sticky with pine. I wanted to have a shower and I wanted to get laid.

A few guys in fatigues were lounging in the hotel lobby, not Roland. He’d said there was an air force base nearby. One of the men was trying to wrap a present with a copy of the Arcade Ledger, precut Scotch tape stuck to his lip.

When I told the concierge my name, he said he had a message for me and placed a scrap of paper on the counter.

There’s been an accident, I read. I’m at Ascension Hospital. Wait in the room. I’m not sure how long I’ll be. Sorry.

I read the message again and said, “There’s nothing else?”

“I guess not.”

I went up to the room and took a shower, a bit worried about Roland. Wrapped in a white bathrobe, white flakes sweeping the window, I looked over his gaping suitcase. He hadn’t hung anything up or put anything in drawers. Even the collared shirts were still rolled together like towels.

I turned on CNN. The Shoe Bomber was under suicide watch in Massachusetts. Soon enough I started having work anxiety again, a sense of events swirling past, unobserved.

I got dressed and headed for the Jeep.

3.

The American flag didn’t wave outside Ascension Hospital. It was draped on frozen elm branches that had grown too close to the pole, squirrels’ nests balled up in the overgrowth. Ambulances were bouncing into the lot and a line had formed all the way out of the emergency room, the automatic doors hesitantly closing partway and then shuddering open again.

I saw Roland on a concrete bench by the entrance, smoking a cigarette and staring at the curb. It was the first time I’d seen him in a private moment. He looked stunned, overwhelmed. I stood before him and watched those wide eyes narrow as they climbed to my face. I knew I looked good: broad shoulders filling out the jacket, light-brown hair cut sharp below the ears, my high forehead mercifully unblemished. He got up and hugged me, close, cigarette still in his lips.

“Are you okay?” I said. “What’s happened?”

“Oh, yeah. Nothing’s wrong with me. It’s Floella.”

He must’ve seen me flinch, how behind my eyes the story unfolded from the name: another woman, a wife?

“My stepmom,” he added.

Now he flicked the cigarette away.

“I should head back in,” he said. “Why didn’t you wait at the hotel? They have an Olympic swimming pool, like really Olympic, with an Olympic flag and everything.”