The garage was already chilly with the night air, and I was shivering by the time I got into the shower in the basement bathroom—my son, Jeff’s, bathroom. I cranked the hot-water valve wide open, adding just enough cold to keep from getting scalded, letting the water pour over me, pummel me, and I hoped purify me. I stood beneath the steaming stream until I’d used every drop of hot water in the fifty-gallon tank. I could have used another fifty gallons and still wished for more.
Wrapped in a towel, I made my way quietly up the stairs, pausing in the living room only to switch off the lamp beside the sofa. At the far end of the darkened hall, the bedroom door was a rectangle of deeper darkness. Even before I reached the room, I heard the deep, sighing breaths of Kathleen’s earnest, steady sleep. I stood in the doorway and listened. Behind me, in the living room, I heard the hollow, metronomic heartbeat of the regulator clock on the fireplace mantel. The clock had once kept time in my father’s law office, and it skipped not so much as a single beat when Daddy opened his desk drawer, took out a pistol, raised it to his temple, and squeezed the trigger. The clock required winding every seven days, and I welcomed the ritual. I remembered watching my father wind it, gripping the key between his broad thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger; I remembered the time, not long before his death, when he let me wind it, my three-year-old fingers engulfed by his big, helping hand. The clock was my most tangible link to my dead father, and the weekly ritual of winding it allowed me to touch him, to be touched by him, in a way that nothing else could. The clock began striking midnight. I lingered in the doorway until the last stroke died away, then tiptoed into the bedroom, draped my towel on the bathroom doorknob, and slipped into bed with Kathleen.
Without waking, she rolled toward me, her head instinctively seeking out its accustomed resting place on my chest, her breasts and belly pressed against my side and hip. Her skin felt cool against mine, and she burrowed into the warmth I’d brought with me from the shower. I synchronized my breathing to hers—a trick I’d learned years before, while doing battle with my dissertation—and as her breath and mine became one, I felt my whirling mind and skittish spirit begin to settle. I heard my father’s clock strike twelve fifteen, and twelve thirty, and twelve forty-five, but I did not hear it strike one.
DEEP IN MY SLEEP, I heard a groan and a cry of distress, and although they seemed to come from somewhere far away, I knew they had come from me. I felt myself struggling, too, but my limbs were weak and ineffectual.
“Bill. Bill. Honey, wake up. It’s okay.” Kathleen’s voice reached down and took hold of me in the depths, hauling me to the surface of consciousness. Her hands held my wrists; I didn’t know if she was shaking me or restraining me. Both, perhaps.
I drew a deep, shuddering breath and expelled it, then another. She let go of me and switched on the bedside lamp, then slid herself to a sitting position, leaning against the headboard, laying one hand on my heaving chest, another on my head. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I said automatically, and then, a second later, “no,” and by the time the word was out, I found myself sobbing. “Oh, God,” I gasped. “I had a dream. An awful, awful dream.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said, pulling me to her bosom, stroking my hair. “I’m so sorry. Tell me.”
But I couldn’t tell her; I couldn’t speak at all, not yet. My breath came in ragged, shuddering gasps—as if it were some separate creature, wild and savage and untamed.
“Shh,” she soothed. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” She rocked and swayed, her fingers cradling my head, her breath washing over me, until bit by bit, breath by breath, my chest rose and fell with hers once more and my fear subsided.
“We were in the backyard,” I said finally. “You. Me. Jeff. Jeff wasn’t a teenager—Jeff was a little kid—but the time was now, somehow.”