Slowly, she slid to the floor. Her mouth was wide-open, her lower lip curled in upon itself, tears falling and falling and falling, misery without end.

“I hated you,” she repeated. “Don’t you understand? I can’t do this. I can’t hate you.”

And then the words ceased and there were only sounds without meaning. I heard Sam crying, but I couldn’t go to her. All that I could do was reach out to Rachel, whispering and kissing as I tried to quell the pain, until at last we lay upon the floor together, her fingers on my back and her mouth against my neck as we tried to hold on to all that we were losing by binding ourselves to each other.

We slept together that night. In the morning she packed some things, put the baby in the child seat in Joan’s car, and prepared to leave.

“We’ll talk,” I said, as she stood by the car.

“Yes.”

I kissed her on the mouth. She put her arms around me, and her fingers touched the back of my neck. They lingered there, and then were gone, but the scent of her remained, even after the car had disappeared, even after the rain came, even after sunlight faded and darkness rose and the stars scattered the night sky like sequins fallen from the gown of a woman half-imagined, half-recalled.

And through the emptiness of the house a cold crept, and as I fell into sleep a voice whispered:

I told you she would leave. Only we remain.

A touch like gossamer fell upon my skin, and Rachel’s perfume was lost in the stink of earth and blood.

And in New York, the young prostitute named Ellen woke from her place beside G-Mack and felt a hand upon her mouth. She tried to struggle, until she felt the cool of the gunmetal against her cheek.

“Close your eyes,” said a man’s voice, and she thought that she recognized it from somewhere. “Close your eyes and be still.”

She did as she was told. The hand remained over her mouth, but the gun was moved away from her. Beside her, she heard G-Mack start to wake. The painkillers made him drowsy, but they usually wore off during the night, forcing him to take some more.

“Huh?” said G-Mack.

She heard five words spoken, then there was a sound like a book being dropped upon the floor. The hand was removed from her mouth.

“Keep your eyes closed,” said the voice.

She kept her eyes squeezed shut until she was certain that the man was gone. When she opened them again, there was a hole in G-Mack’s forehead and the pillows were red with his blood.

Without Rachel and Sam around, I fell into a black place. I don’t recall much of the twenty-four hours that followed their departure. I slept, I ate little, and I didn’t answer the phone. I thought about drinking, but I was already so consumed by self-loathing that I was unable to lower myself further. Messages were left, but none that mattered, and after a time I just stopped listening to them. I tried to watch some television, even flicked through the newspaper, but nothing could hold my attention. I pushed thoughts of Alice, of Louis, of Martha far from me. I wanted no part of them.

And as the hours crept slowly by a pain grew inside me, like an ulcer bleeding into my system. I lay fetally upon the couch, my knees drawn into my chest, and spasmed as the hurt ebbed and flowed. I thought that I heard noises from upstairs, the footsteps of a mother and a child, but when I went to look there was nobody there. A towel had fallen from the clothes dryer, the door of which now stood open, and I could not recall if it was I who had left it that way. I thought about calling Rachel every second minute, but I did not lift the phone. I knew that nothing would come of it if I did. What could I say to her? What promises could I make without doubting, even as I spoke the words, that I would be able to keep them?

Again and again, Joan’s words came back to me. I had lost so much once; such a loss would be unendurable a second time. In the new and unwelcome quiet of the house, I felt time slipping once more, so that past and present blurred, the dams that I had tried so hard to erect between what was and what yet might be weakening still further, spilling agonizing memories into my new life, mocking the hope that old ghosts could ever be laid to rest.

It was the silence that brought them, the sense of existences briefly halted. Rachel still had clothes in the closets and cosmetics on her dressing table. Her shampoo hung in the shower stall, and there was a strand of her long red hair lying like a question mark on the floor beneath the sink. I could smell her on the pillow, and the shape of her head was clear on the cushions of the couch by our bedroom window, where she liked to lie and read. I found a white ribbon beneath our bed, and an earring that had slipped behind the radiator. An unwashed coffee cup bore a trace of her lipstick, and there was a candy bar in the refrigerator, half-eaten.

Sam’s little crib still stood in the center of her room, for Joan had retained the one used by her own children, and it was easier to simply retrieve that from her attic rather than disassemble Sam’s own crib and transport it to Vermont. I think, perhaps, that Rachel was also reluctant to remove the crib from our house, knowing the pain it would cause me with its unavoidable implications of permanence. Some of Sam’s toys and clothes lay on the floor by the wall. I picked them up and put the dirty bibs and tops into the laundry basket. I would wash them later. I touched the place where she slept. I caught her baby smell on my fingers. She smelled as Jennifer once did.

And I remembered: all of these things I did before, when blood lay drying in the cracks on the kitchen floor. There was discarded clothing upon a bed, and a doll on a child’s chair. There was a cup on a table, half-filled with coffee, and a glass bearing traces of milk. There were cosmetics and brushes and hair and lipstick and lives ended in the middle of tasks half-done, so that for a moment it seemed as though they must surely return, that they had merely slipped away for a few moments and would come back eventually to finish their nighttime drinks, to place the doll on the shelf where it belonged, to resume their lives and permit me to share that place with them, to love me and to die with me and not leave me alone to mourn for them, until at last I grieved so long and so hard that something returned, phantasms conjured up by my pain, two entities that were almost my wife and child.

Almost.

Now I was in another house, and again there were reminders of lives around me, of tasks left unfinished and words left unsaid, except that these existences were continuing elsewhere. There was no blood on the floor, not yet. There was no finality, here, merely a pause for breath, a reconsideration. They could go on, perhaps not in this place, but somewhere far away, somewhere safe and secure.

Fading light, falling rain, and night descending like soot upon the earth. Voices half-heard, and touches in the darkness. Blood in my nose, and dirt in my hair.

We remain.

Always, we remain.

I awoke to the sound of the telephone. I waited for the machine to pick up the message. A man’s voice spoke, vaguely familiar but nobody I could place. I let the cassette roll on.

Later, after I had showered and dressed, I walked Walter as far as Ferry Beach and let him play in the surf. Outside the Scarborough Fire Department, men were cleaning down the engines with hoses, the winter sunlight occasionally breaking through the clouds and causing the droplets to sparkle like jewels before they disintegrated upon the ground. In the early days of the fire department, steel locomotive wheels were used to summon the volunteers, and there was still one outside Engine 3’s station over at Pleasant Hill. Then, in the late 1940s, Elizabeth Libby and her daughter, Shirley, took over the emergency dispatch service, operating out of the store on Black Point Road, where they lived and worked. They would activate their Gamewell alarm system when a call came in, which in turn set off air horns at the station houses. The two women were on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and in their first eleven years in charge of the service they went away together only twice.