He says he’s worried about her. He’s told the doctor, the midwife, probably the neighbors about her breakdown. Worried about her—my god, what a laugh. They nod at her, stiff masks of skepticism on their faces no matter what comes out of her mouth. She says, the window broken by the wind, a loose limb; she says, the fever didn’t break for three days. She stands in the produce market with her baskets, harrowed, listening; she says, I hear gunshots. She thinks, he told me he was going hunting, but he never came back. And they nod, scanning her face, the butcher, the grocer, the postman: disbelieving everything.

There he is, big and black, packing the car with his life—his moldy books, a knapsack that reeks of fish. And she sits inside, packed too: hate up to here. Just waiting for him to go. Then she’ll be off to the coast of Cornwall, with the kids and the kittens and the sleeping pills, off to visit some people who’ll have her—zen orphan depressives ensconced in a faux-charming guest cottage, an invitation complete with cute décor and milk allergies and neurotic gossip. All fake. And moon jellyfish by the thousands washed up on the touristy shore; they’d rather kill themselves than be stuck in Cornwall either. Dreadful, but she’s got nowhere else to go, and she’s got to have somewhere to go. She’s got nothing; at least it’s something. She’ll go. She’ll spread on the sand with the suicidal jellies in their peek-a-boo nighties, see-through ovaries displayed like sliced pimentos, raw and overexposed as she is—melting crystal blebs in which if she hurries she might see her way to a future.

Ted’s strapped his suitcases to the roof rack. Both doors of the Morris stand akimbo, the backseat flat for his fishing poles. Hugging his Yorkshire Voodoo by the gate, he leans into the trunk. The corduroy nap has worn thin at the elbows of his shabby jacket. His bony wrists, his elbows, his back, that seam across his shoulders that’s pulling, behind the panes of the car’s rear window—a rift she can see, even from this irreconcilable distance.