But she has no phone, she thinks, floating high above her dream self, cautiously widening the door, the angular glare from the bathroom flaring up the staircase, down the hall, spilling over her bare feet, over her nightgown, the braided cord of the ringing telephone stretching across the hallway and disappearing into the vacuous darkness of her bedroom. She leans over, curling her fingers around the receiver, and as the ringing abruptly quits and she lifts the earpiece toward her body, she notices scuffling, gasps, and sharp skittering taps over the bathroom tiles at the bottom of the stairs. Black feathers, white tipped, a wing extended three, four feet across and flapping aggressively, glimpsed beyond the banister rail. A blunt reptilian claw skids partially into view. Lunging, a wing flaps and contracts. A hiss. Then a spurt of blood, gobbets of veiny red dripping down the tiles, sprayed over the leonine leg and enameled curve of the cast-iron bathtub, all she can see. A nude, wrinkled head, pops up with a liquid smack dripping, incarnadine, glossy with blood, and looks at her with its soulless, 180-degree eye. A garnet eye, a beak hooked like an oyster knife. She turns away, drawing the cold receiver to her ear.

Mrs. Plath? asks the caller.

I’m not Mrs. Plath, she says.

Mrs. Plath, I’m afraid that your husband is … gone.

What do you mean? she asks, terrified, her heart searing, concurrent with awed fascination at the immediate adrenaline pump of her fear.

He’s gone. He’s dead. An embolism. His heart—it burst. A blood clot, a flaw.

A flaw? She can’t believe it. No. It can’t be true.

To his heart. It went straight to his heart. It was too much.

Too much? There’s the sudden sledgehammer of guilt. She would do anything—

Too much.

She’s stunned. She can’t believe it. But what will I tell my children?

You mean the girl, the boy?

Yes. Her body is going liquid, it’s flooding away …

Only tell the girl. It won’t matter to the boy.

This stops her. She’s back, maternally vigilant. What do you mean, because Nick is so young?

Who’s Nick?

The boy. Such a comfort, pragmatism!—the chance to wrap oneself in the cloak of practical circumstance, sure and efficient. She’s always loved this part, the bureaucratic grid. Filling out forms, say: the simple, clear questions; dutifully outlining dates, addresses. The neat unequivocal order of facts.

That’s not his name.

What do you mean? she asks, confused.

The boy—the one you favored over the girl when your husband got sick.

Now she’s really baffled, unless this is all euphemistically reductive. A stereotypic judgment of her skill as a mother? She had a newborn and an active toddler—what more could she have done? She was tired, she was exhausted, and it was always, always cold. Sick? But my husband didn’t get sick.