“Fornicating,” she said.

“Ah,” he said, slowly sitting up and squinting. He took his cup, smoothed his shirt and hair, and made his way to the door. “It’s been a long time since we did that.”

From her window Marianne watched him walk, in a slow and dignified zigzag, back to his room, and resisted the urge to call him back. She was right to send him home, she told herself. They had a big day ahead, no time for distractions. There would be plenty of time to figure out where they stood after the students left.

Eric fumbled his door open and turned on the lamp next to his bed. Marianne waited for him to pull the curtains closed, but he left them open. She wasn’t sure if the open curtains were a gesture of innocence or a rebuke, but eventually she grew tired of watching and climbed into her own bed, alone.

5

Janine’s mind had always compulsively imagined terrible things happening to whomever she most treasured. It started when she was young and her parents would leave her with a babysitter. Waiting for the sound of tires crunching gravel, the splay of headlights through the curtains, she’d played unending games of Monopoly with her sister while she visualized car crashes, abductions, murder, even though she’d grown up in a town where hardly anything like that ever happened. In fifth grade, her good friend Cindy’s mother had died of a brain aneurysm, and suddenly that was what Janine thought of, when she worried—a narrowing and bursting in each of her parents’ brains, her own self, small and helpless, finding them slumped over in the garden or on the kitchen floor. She never told anyone about this compulsion—truly, it felt like something her brain was doing to her—not even Rick, whom she married just a year out of high school.

It grew worse when she became, at twenty-two, a mother. For the first two years of Beth’s life Janine would not allow anyone to drive her except Rick—not even herself. It got a little better with Chrissy—she was too busy with a three-year-old and an infant to do much imagining—but her anxiety increased when Beth entered kindergarten and she had all day long to think about perverts lurking in the schoolyard, someone posing as an uncle and signing her out of school. Beth was an open, trusting child, and the secretary at the primary school was nearly seventy years old, half-blind, and it wasn’t hard to see how such a thing—a terrible thing—could happen.