The muscles and joints and pearly taut sinews of Sylvia’s body go slack with immediate relief—it’s nothing, it’s only for Ted—and then something in the caller’s muffled, genderless voice sets off a rush of blood from deep in the cage of her being. It has a Germanic edge.

“Who is calling, please?” she asks, her vocal cords tightening.

There is no answer; just the vibration of air in the line.

“Who is this?” Sylvia asks, her voice suddenly gummy with fear. Ted stops halfway down the stairs, listening, his head bowed like a mourner’s.

The caller hesitates. “I’d like to speak to Ted Hughes,” it asks with sudden, false briskness.

Sylvia grips the phone and holds it tight to her ear. The bones of her hand whiten under the skin. She twists to face Ted, her face an appeal of helpless terror. He does not meet her terrified eyes; he cannot look at her. He listens, his head bowed, his shoulders sagging, as if he holds the ancient weight of the rafters on his back.

“Who—is—this?” Sylvia demands, drawing herself up, her desperation mounting, throwing off panic and dread like sparks.

The caller says nothing.

She knows this voice: It is the voice of her nightmares. Not the voice itself, but the ceaseless void it comes from.

Sylvia’s voice rises up in a wave, crashing into the receiver of the phone, flooding the mouthpiece, the full force of her fear transforming, becoming an unchallengeable furious anguish. She has been betrayed. “I know who this is, Assia,” she says. “I know it’s you.” She jerks the phone away from her face, as if it stung her, and stabs it at arm’s length into the air at Ted. “It’s for you,” she says to him, looking away, her face contorting.

For a second, for hours, no one moves.

Ted descends the remaining stairs slowly, as if walking through a wall of water. He takes the phone.

Sylvia’s mother is trying not to tremble by the front door, hitching herself as close to the parlor furniture as she can, trying to disappear. It doesn’t matter; Sylvia has ceased to notice her. She’s been absorbed, become part of an already operating machinery. Sylvia is pacing away from the phone table, into the kitchen streaked by thick bars of dusty sunlight, her back to the stairs where Ted has carried the phone up the steps to the second-floor landing and is whispering hoarsely and clearing his throat. Sylvia’s bare arms are crossed over her chest; she is gripping her arms with her hands, squeezing with her long, fine fingers.