Getting to sleep was the problem. It was quiet and she was used to noise. In Minnesota, other professors had parties, or played Bach, Mozart, Scriabin until late at night. In Brooklyn, trucks ran all night between fisheries on the bays and the bridges. When she was growing up, people walked under her window from Central Park to Columbus, talking, laughing, yelling until late, and buses ran all night. But in Laurel, it was quiet. She tried to imagine that she could hear the surf on the other side of the Island, or the sea birds, but the quiet defeated her imagination and she stayed awake until she heard Levy leave his room, which he did every night, and go into the baby’s room. Then she’d fall asleep. If she didn’t, she would think about Adam, and that was dreadful because she didn’t remember him alive, diminutive, vibrant, and with the brightest eyes she’d ever seen; she remembered him in his coffin. Levy had warned her not to look. Orthodox Jews never looked at their dead, but she had insisted. He had been too sad to argue, and the mortician, after a few hours of preparation, lifted the simple coffin lid and she looked into her dead husband’s face. Pancake makeup covered dry rubbery-­looking gashes from the knives, and the lids covering the protruding eyeballs looked too thin to keep out the light.

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.