So Janine confessed. Told Rick about the visions, worse than any nightmare, admitted the sickness of a mind that could picture such awful things. She’d held her breath, expecting Rick to scold her or accuse her of willing evil into their life. Instead he told her, in a sorrowful voice that was much older than his twenty-seven years, “It’s not your mind, it’s the wicked world we live in.” After performing some calculations on the pad of yellow legal paper he kept next to the phone, he allowed Janine to pull Beth out of kindergarten and enroll her in the Christian day school down the street, where Janine and Chrissy could stroller the sidewalked half mile to meet her for lunches Janine made at home. Janine admired the tiny schoolyard’s high wooden security fence, the small size of Beth’s class. Strolling home again, she’d think of Rick, who poured concrete six days a week to make sure his family had everything they needed. He was her rock, she told people, assuaging her fears without writing them off as silly. Though Janine questioned the workings of her own mind—why did the images have to be so disturbing? why couldn’t she imagine something nice?—Rick had never suggested she see a therapist or that in any way she was sick, and for that she was grateful.

They got through soccer camp and swimming lessons, a vacation Bible school instructor who seemed a little too eager to take the children to the church basement arts and crafts room. They endured the transition to a public middle school, with its nighttime dances and questionable curriculum, survived even Janine’s transition to the workplace. They lived through Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, the fashion for bare midriffs and jailbait music videos. They made it through 9/11, the anthrax mail scare, the D.C. snipers, and various child abductions. Because Rick did the instructing, she even got through Beth’s first tentative driving lessons, which Janine thought were given earlier than necessary.