Rebecca had promised Clara she would be there in the morning, speaking in her calm, steady way, switching into the professional reserves she had begun to acquire that first summer with the Huntington’s study, the reserves she called upon when it was her obligation to tell a patient, or the parents of a child, or a whole assembled family of two or three generations, about the meaning of the hideous scientific data on her desk, printed out on paper stacked neatly in bland file folders, data that proved that the fetus or the patient or the family members before her (who would soon be snatching tissues from the several boxes artfully deployed on various surfaces around her small office, all the while trying to comprehend that their lives had just changed forever) had really terrible luck, the very worst sort of luck, the bad luck when your genetic dice have come up snake eyes.

The worst of all were the pregnant ones. Turner’s, trisomy 18, Klinefelter’s. No, the worst were the babies and small children. Tay-Sachs. Cystic fibrosis. Sickle-cell. Niemann-Pick. But the diseases, like Huntington’s, that revealed themselves in middle age were horrible in their own ways. There had been a Huntington’s case just the day before—a bank vice president in his forties from Guilford, the father of two young children of six and nine. They would have to be tested, when the parents were ready. His wife had cried so hard she had become incoherent, but he had remained dry-eyed while asking methodically for all the statistical data Rebecca could offer concerning their children. There are so many kinds of bad news, and Rebecca’s job was to be the bearer of all of it.

She thanked Clara for calling and for taking such good care of Esther, and as she hung up the phone, a repressed sob caught her by surprise, painful and unexpected, a bubble in her chest. She cried briefly before blowing her nose into one of the ever-handy tissues, and then she had tried to phone George.

Now she was trying him for the last time before leaving a message she really hoped he would listen to, that she was on her way into the city. She would go home, pack a few things, and then go to Union Station for the New York-bound train. The first pure notes of the unfinished I Am Not Taking Your Call Right Now Waltz played, and Rebecca listened all the way through, hearing something she had never heard before, a melancholy undercurrent that surely had been there all along.

Three

George had listened to his messages and was expecting Rebecca when she arrived at his door. He was hovering and impatient by the time he heard her familiar sounds in the hall, and before she could fit her key into the lock, he had the door open. Their hug was almost a collision.

“I had an ear out for your footsteps,” he said into her hair after a moment. “You have very distinctive footsteps. You walk in duple rhythm, you know.” He drummed the rhythm lightly on her shoulder with one hand to demonstrate.