She’s pushing, and she’s getting tired. She’s been violently sick for a whole day now; she doesn’t have much energy in reserve. It’s hard work, pushing and pushing, getting it out. She stops to take a breather, picks up the ringing phone.

Ted? she says, too cautious to hope. But there’s no one on the line. There is only a dial tone suspending itself in the phone’s black ether. And she realizes that the ringing hasn’t stopped—it’s a car horn, not a phone. She sets the receiver on the floor and walks hesitantly toward the windows, stepping past the children, little Nicholas in his crib huddled, rump high, against the refrigerated air, Frieda collapsed in her frilled flannel nightgown as if dropped from a great height, her two Carrara feet exposed, delicate relics at the blanket’s fluted edge. Under the sickly green glow of the streetlight, her mother’s car, the old gray Chevrolet, is all packed up—to drive across America? No, it’s the hoar-frosted Morris, shiny black and brand new, ready for the channel ferry and their trip across France just before they found Court Green. Then she must really be pregnant; she’s always been pregnant on road trips. So it must be Ted down there, behind the wheel, waiting to take her away—the beach at Berck-Plage, the amputees sunning at the veterans’ hospital on the sand, learning to turn the pages of their newspapers with prosthetic hooks. To Spain, to Ireland, somewhere, away from here.

Wait—she calls out the closed window, though he won’t be able to hear her. Her breath blows up and frosts the glass, erasing her reflection, making her impossible to see from inside. The Morris idles at the curb, intentional as a London cab, as a hearse. She turns, running back through the room to the hallway, and snatches up the phone to call for help.

Hullo, this is the international operator, says a dusky female voice with a German accent. You have a call coming through.

In a sudden access of foreboding, she knows it’s not Ted waiting for her outside. Father, I know it’s you, she says into the telephone, afraid. Operator, she says, I won’t accept the call. Hobbled by the inertia of the unconscious, she moves excruciatingly to hang up, frozen like a child in her defiance.

What have you got on under that nightgown? thunders a German baritone. Put on some proper clothing. You can’t go to the door like that, practically naked!

It would kill your father, Aurelia breaks in, to know what you did with all those boys. I know. I dreamt it, and he died. Don’t you remember? I told you while we were lying there one morning, in our twin beds—