“I don’t mind being in that position.”

“I’m saying I mind. I’m not interested in getting any messages.”

“I don’t think this is a bad message she wants to send you.”

“I don’t care what kind of message it is.”

“Well then can I ask you why you don’t just get divorced? If you don’t want to have anything to do with her? Because as long as you’re not divorced, you’re sort of giving her hope.”

A second child’s voice had now joined the first, the two of them together calling Bobbbby! Bobbbbbby! Walter closed the window and said to Jessica, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

“OK, fine, Dad, but could you at least answer my question? Why you don’t get divorced?”

“It’s just not something I want to think about right now.”

“It’s been six years! Isn’t it time to start thinking about it? If only out of simple fairness?”

“If she wants a divorce, she can send me a letter. She can have a lawyer send me a letter.”

“But I’m saying, why don’t you want a divorce?”

“I don’t want to deal with the things it would stir up. I have a right not to do something I don’t want to do.”

“What would it stir up?”

“Pain. I’ve had enough pain. I’m still in pain.”

“I know you are, Dad. But Lalitha’s gone now. She’s been gone for six years.”

Walter shook his head violently, as if he’d had ammonia thrown in his face. “I don’t want to think about it. I just want to go out every morning and see birds who have nothing to do with any of it. Birds who have their own lives, and their own struggles. And to try to do something for them. They’re the only thing that’s still lovely to me. I mean, besides you and Joey. And that’s all I want to say about it, and I want you not to ask me any more.”

“Well, have you thought of seeing a therapist? Like, so you can start moving on with your life? You’re not that old, you know.”

“I don’t want to change,” he said. “I have a bad few minutes every morning, and then I go and tire myself out, and if I stay up late enough I can fall asleep. You only go to a therapist if you want to change something. I wouldn’t have anything to say to a therapist.”

“You used to love Mom, too, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I only remember what happened after she left.”

“Well, she’s fairly lovely herself, actually. She’s fairly different from the way she used to be. She’s become sort of the perfect mom, unbelievable as that may sound.”

“Like I said, I’m happy for you. I’m glad you have her in your life.”

“But you don’t want her in your life.”

“Look, Jessica, I know that’s what you want. I know you want a happy ending. But I can’t change my feelings just because it’s something you want.”

“And your feeling is you hate her.”

“She made her choice. And that’s all I have to say.”

“I’m sorry, Dad, but that is just grotesquely unfair. You were the one who made the choice. She didn’t want to go.”

“I’m sure that’s what she tells you. You see her every week, I’m sure she’s sold you on her version, which I’m sure is very forgiving of herself. But you weren’t living with her for the last five years before she left. It was a nightmare, and I fell in love with someone else. It was never my intention to fall in love with someone else. And I know you’re very unhappy that I did. But the only reason it happened was that your mother was impossible to live with.”

“Well then you should divorce her. Isn’t that the least you owe her after all those years of marriage? If you thought well enough of her to stay with her for all the good years, don’t you at least owe her the respect of honestly divorcing her?”

“They weren’t such good years, Jessica. She was lying to me the whole time-I don’t think I owe her so very much for that. And, like I said, if she wants a divorce, it’s available to her.”

“She doesn’t want a divorce! She wants to get back together with you!”

“I can’t even imagine seeing her for one minute. All I can imagine is unbearable pain at the sight of her.”

“Isn’t it possible, though, Dad, that the reason it would be so painful is that you still love her?”

“We need to talk about something else now, Jessica. If you care about my feelings, you won’t bring it up again. I don’t want to have to be afraid of answering the phone when you call.”

He sat for a long time with his face in his hands, his dinner untouched, while the house very slowly darkened, the earthly springtime world yielding to the more abstract sky world: pink stratospheric wisps, the deep chill of deep space, the first stars. This was the way his life worked now: he drove away Jessica and missed her the second she was gone. He considered returning to Minneapolis in the morning, retrieving the cat, and restoring it to the kids who missed it, but he could no sooner actually do this than he could call Jessica back and apologize to her. What was done was done. What was over was over. In Mingo County, West Virginia, on the ugliest overcast morning of his life, he’d asked Lalitha’s parents if they minded if he went to see their daughter’s body. Her parents were chilly, eccentric people, engineers, with strong accents. The father was dry-eyed but the mother kept erupting, loudly, unprovoked, in a keening foreign wail that was almost like song; it sounded strangely ceremonial and impersonal, like a lament for an idea. Walter went alone to the morgue, without any idea. His love was resting beneath a sheet on a gurney of an awkward height, too high to be knelt by. Her hair was as ever, silky and black and thick, as ever, but there was something wrong with her jaw, some outrageously cruel and unforgivable injury, and her forehead, when he kissed it, was colder than any just universe could have allowed such a young person’s forehead to be. The coldness entered him through his lips and didn’t leave. What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and there was no point in anything. To communicate with his wife, as Jessica was urging, would have meant letting go of his last moments with Lalitha, and he had a right not to do this. He had a right, in such an unjust universe, to be unfair to his wife, and he had a right to let the little Hoffbauers call in vain for their Bobby, because there was no point in anything.

Taking strength from his refusals-enough strength, certainly, to get him out of bed in the morning and propel him through long days in the field and long drives on roads congested by vacationers and exurbanites-he survived another summer, the most solitary of his life so far. He told Joey and Connie, with some truth (but not much), that he was too busy for a visit from them, and he gave up on battling the cats that continued to invade his woods; he couldn’t see putting himself through another drama of the sort he’d had with Bobby. In August, he received a thick envelope from his wife, some sort of manuscript presumably related to the “message” that Jessica had spoken of, and he stowed it, unopened, in the file drawer where he kept his old joint tax returns, his old joint bank-account statements, and his never-altered will. Not three weeks later, he received a padded compact-disc mailer, bearing a return address of katz in Jersey City, and this too he buried, unopened, in the same drawer. In these two mailings, as in the newspaper headlines that he couldn’t avoid reading when he went to buy groceries in Fen City-new crises at home and abroad, new right-wing crazies spewing lies, new ecological disasters unfolding in the global endgame-he could feel the outside world closing in on him, demanding his consideration, but as long as he stayed by himself in the woods he was able to remain true to his refusal. He came from a long line of refusers, he had the constitution for it. There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild-they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scattered in the wind-but this only made him more determined to hold on to what little of her he still had.