Sylvia stands on a chair outside the guest room. She holds her fine sable brush; she paints a glossy red heart on the threshold. Downstairs, the nail-studded door opens in the back hall. She listens, her heart ticking like a bomb. Has it come? Is it over? Soft voices foam into the house: it’s only Ted, Frieda, Nick. The heavy oak door groans on its hinges and clicks into the lock. Her fat, black anxiety rolls back, for a moment, like a stone. She paints a leaf, flowers, steps down off the chair and checks her work. It looks just perfect; it looks just as it should.

*   *   *

“I can hardly bear to watch.” Aurelia Plath is hamster flat against the warm red vinyl seat of her daughter’s car, clutching her pocketbook in her lap. With her other hand she grips the door handle, darting a worried glance in Sylvia’s direction.

“Mother, please stop it,” Sylvia says tensely, her neck craned over the seat as she drifts the car slowly backward. “I’ve done this for years; I know what I’m doing.”

Sylvia’s easing the clutch and reversing out of their parking spot on Cathedral Close, the lane that runs alongside Exeter’s thirteenth-century cathedral. The opposing traffic approaches around the curve that rounds the cathedral green, the cars hidden until the last moment by the jaywalking crowds of sweaty summer tourists and by flickering patches of leaf shadow thrown from the mature hawthorns and plane trees shielding the cathedral from the street.

“You’re right, it’s my fault,” Aurelia apologizes. “It’s just so hard to get used to English driving on the wrong side.”

“It’s only wrong to you,” Sylvia mumbles under her breath. “Could you please roll your window down? It’s stifling in here.” She pulls into the street and steers herself into the steady wave of traffic. Aurelia cranks down the window glass but pretends not to have noticed her daughter’s rudeness. She gazes out the window, concentrating on the neglible view through the full trees.

Sylvia drives the short arc of Cathedral Close, past the lathe-and-plaster facade of Mol’s Coffee House and the Georgian Royal Clarence Hotel. She pulls to the stop sign at the High Street intersection and prepares to turn left, her signaling arm out the window, into what would be oncoming traffic anywhere but England. The insistent blinker clicks like a surfacing memory.