Before they killed Adam, nothing frightened her; now, if the baby coughed, she called the doctor. If she ran a fever, Rachel wanted to take her to the hospital. She paid the mortgage on the twenty-­fifth and had the van tuned up every three months. She bought five pounds of coffee at a time and ten pounds of sugar because she was afraid of running out. She bought a whole case of toilet paper and in the middle of wrestling it down to the basement, the absurdity of what she was doing hit her and she sat on the basement steps and cried until Leah, in her crib, started crying too. The worst, craziest fear was of the doorbell because when it rang, she thought automatically of the story The Monkey’s Paw and she had a glancing image of opening the door and looking into her husband’s dead face, the eyelids blown away like spider webs and the poor bare eyeballs staring at her, weeping from the light they couldn’t shut out.

She lost weight, got dark rings under her eyes, and decided that what she needed was fresh air. She started driving out to the beaches with Leah. Leah loved it; she screamed when the waves broke, and clutched wildly at the sea gulls that flew over their heads. Rachel looked out over the gray water toward Europe; Finland was there, she thought; Norway, Russia. “Home,” she whispered to Leah. But she knew if she ever found that flat ice plain her grandmother had told her about, it would be covered with factories. Ten thousand factories, all making rubber boots. “Rubber boots,” she told Leah, who waved her hands and cried “ubbah.” Rachel started back to the car, then saw a black man in fishing boots standing in the water almost up to his knees, casting into the waves. He had the same strands of white in his frizzy hair that Roger Hawkins did, and even though she knew it wasn’t Hawkins, something about the figure was reassuring; she crossed the pebbles and stood near him; he didn’t move away.

“Did you get anything?” she asked, wanting to hear his voice.

“Not yet,” he said. He didn’t sound like Hawkins, except for the soft timbre some black men’s voices had.

“What’s running?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Blues maybe.”

He kept his back turned and she left him alone. When she got home, she looked for Hawkins’s name in the address book. It wasn’t there and she called Levy at the shop. He was quiet at first, then he asked, “Why do you want his number?”

“He was Adam’s best friend and we haven’t heard from him for almost a year, Jacob.”