“Of course,” he said stupidly, neither asleep or awake. And then shut his eyes against the light as she snapped it on. He saw that she wore slacks and a sweater. “You mean now?”

“Right now.” Her eyes were reddened from crying. He felt a wave of tenderness for her, and pity. At the same time his weariness pushed his head back against the pillow.

“What will they think?” he said. “I don’t believe we should simply disappear in the night.”

“I’ll leave a note. I’ll tell them you were called back by the hospital.”

He closed his eyes.

“If you won’t come with me I’ll go alone.”

“Go write the note. I’ll get dressed.”

They had to feel their way down the broad staircase in the dark. The moon was low now but threw a light through which they made their way to the car easily. The crickets had fallen asleep, or whatever they did when they stopped singing. Behind the pool the poor raccoon still trilled.

“Wait,” she said.

She switched on the headlamps and knelt in their light to select a large rock. When he started to follow her she stopped him. “I want to do it alone.”

He sat on the cadaver-skin leather seat, which was wet with dew, and shivered while she smashed at the lock of the cage, wondering whether he would have mailed the letter informing on her father. In a moment the trilling stopped. He heard her running back toward him and then a bumping noise, and her curse.

When she reached the car she was laughing and sobbing, sucking a skinned palm. “I was afraid it would bite me, and when I ran away I tripped over one of the traps,” she said. “I almost fell into the goddam swimming pool.”

He started to laugh with her; they laughed all the way down the long driveway, past the stone gargoyles and onto the highway. When he stopped laughing he saw that she was crying. He considered taking over the wheel from her so she could cry in safety, and then decided he was so tired it didn’t really matter.

She was a soundless weeper; they were far more devastating to watch, he thought, than the more dramatic kind.

“Listen,” he said finally and with difficulty, his voice thick with fatigue, as if he were high. “You don’t have the corner on horrible parents. With your father it’s sex, with mine it’s the bottle.”

He told her the essential details about Myron Silberstein, matter-of-factly and without emotion, leaving out very little: the story of an itinerant musician from Dorchester who drifted into a job in the pit of the Davis Theater in Pittsburgh and one night met a much younger and inexperienced little Italian girl.

“I’m sure he married her because of me,” he said. “He started drinking before I had any memories of him and he hasn’t stopped yet.”