The girl’s voice I recognized said, “May I speak to Stefan, please?”

“No, you may not speak to Stefan. Leave him alone! You said you weren’t going to say anything else. How about you stick to that?”

“I want to. But I can’t. I have to do this.”

I hung up. The phone rang again immediately. I grabbed the receiver like a weapon. But this was a new voice, honeyed, almost musical, a Glinda-voice. “You know, Thea, your son really should die.”

I reached down and unplugged the phone. The bland rabidness of such ordinary folk, people with mortgages and microwaves, who ordered pizza on Friday nights, frightened me even more than the fanatics.

“Never pick the phone up again, Thea,” Jep said then, again in that calm, dangerous tone.

“It’s just such a natural response, like a baby crying...”

“Please don’t pick it up anymore. Let it go to voice mail.”

“Okay, okay,” I said.

I waited for him to say more.

“Jep?” I said then. “Do you still love me?” Jep leaned over and kissed me. We hadn’t even kissed, much less anything else, since Stefan had come home. Just the recognition that I had a physical body and emotions above the level of survival flowed through me, shivering deep in my abdomen. “I know it’s not just him. It’s us, too. But I can’t do all of this at once.”

“You don’t have to do it all at once, Thea. I’m not... You know, whatever doubts we have, we’re the counterweight. Against what anyone else says. We have to be the one thing he can count on. The thing is, how?”

We went our separate ways, me to my upstairs office, Jep to a coffee shop, where he was meeting a running back from Jesus the Only Light of the Universe High School. I thought then about Stefan when he was young and begging us not to send him to this terrific prep school, because he did not want to go through life after Portland saying, “Yes, I played for Jesus the Only Light of the Universe.” Jep got annoyed finally and said, “You’d just use a short form.”

Stefan complained, “What? I play for Jesus?”