“But I didn’t get to write, did I?” she retorts, feeling the withering sting of tears even as she drives them back, drives her irrefutable point home. “As soon as I was back in my study, you were rolling in the scent of Chanel. Filthy with it,” she continues, her face collapsing beneath the bitter taste of scorn. She is listening to herself, full of self-pity and hypnotic disgust. She cannot stop. “Your face in it. Like a pig. That’s your ‘View of a Pig.’” She hugs Nicholas, who is dull eyed, contracted into himself from the visceral shock of the last three days. “And I with a nursing baby.” Again, the vision of herself abandoned brings the pinch of near tears. “Revision…,” she sneers. “Everything I’ve accomplished, I’ve done despite you.”

“I didn’t plan this, Sylvia,” Ted says, wretched, his fingers knitted into a buttress supporting Frieda’s weight under her blanket, her small pale face turned away, hiding.

“What do you think we are, figments of your imagination?” Sylvia adds. “Something you can excise? You think these children—” She pauses, suddenly cowed by the profundity of her children’s realness, here, hearing everything, doubtless sensing the ineluctable pall of her hopelessness seeping out of her pores. All the weeping and the gnashing of teeth, and the children of the Kingdom cast out into darkness—

They stand together in the loveless parlor, swaying out of sync with the quiescent children, who are young enough yet to retreat from an alarming glut of stimuli back to the cushioning amnion of sleep. The wall heater creaks and ticks. Sylvia’s holly, cut a week before, corrupts in its vase, the berries shriveled and dropping, the scalloped edges of the brittle leaves browned and dangerous, like rusted wire.

“Were you ill, Pooker?” Ted whispers to Frieda with strained concern. “Did you have a bellyache?” Frieda tightens her clasp around his neck. “What about Nicky?” he asks Sylvia.

“They’ve both been vomiting since Friday night,” Sylvia reports with the weary matter-of-factness of the battle worn.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” he offers.

“I’ve gotten nothing done,” Sylvia blurts reproachfully. “No shopping, no work. I’ve run out of everything—nappies, food, towels, clean clothes. Christmas is a week away, and I’ve done nothing for these children. I won’t have your desertion ruin their lives as well as mine—”

“You needn’t do anything,” Ted answers without hesitation. “If you’re sick, I could drive you and the children to my family for Christmas—”

“IF I’m sick!” Sylvia rears.

“If you are still sick. If you like,” he corrects himself.

“Are you mad?” she fumes. “You think I would submit to that humiliation, asking for your family’s charity when they know what you’ve done to me?”

“Sylvia,” Ted interrupts, “my mother—”

“They’re your family now, not mine. They’ve offered me nothing.”