Yes. A city of secrets. Suburban crimes are hushed into backyard whispers and reported earnestly on the evening news where the newscasters stand on street corners for live broadcasts. Afterward the viewers go to bed and listen to the house groan under the pressure of winter. Their own thoughts move from what is happening outside their houses and take the carpeted tread of the stairs and pass the almost-closed doors to the children’s rooms. The family was spared this time and the moans of the children crying out in their sleep surely aren’t so serious as to make mother or father rise to crack the door and check, just to be sure, to crack the door and see if the children are okay. The parents, surrounded by the groans of the house and the moans of the children, let themselves wonder instead about the house. They fret about the pipes being strangled by tree roots and worry themselves about the wooden soffits that should be torn out in early spring and replaced with aluminum so the yellow jackets and paper wasps won’t breed in the arms of the house, to descend and light on the lilac, stinging the children into screams and raised flesh soothed only by careful parental shushing and dabs of baking soda. Surely the parents can fix that, can do that, because the nighttime moans of their children tell them nothing. The sweaty toss of sleeping children sometimes grows so loud that it shakes the parents from their beds. They tiptoe into the sanctuary of the children’s rooms to sit lightly on the edge of the bed and speak at the coiled child and say it’s all right, it’s nothing, nothing really, just a bad dream. The parents wonder if this is a lie, although they aren’t speaking to the children but to themselves. It is better to control the bees and spiders, the carpenter ants eating away at the floor joists, because as parents they can fight those, can see the battle being fought.