“Nothing,” she said. “Let’s go,” she said.

THE DRAPES WERE DRAWN and sunlight leached from them along the wall and upward in a bright coronation. Naked under the bedsheet, Grant stared at this. He’d dozed a few minutes and then popped awake with his heart kicking. What bed was this? Whose arm across his stomach?

Now there was a gasp, a spasm, and Angela said, “No,” and he said, “It’s all right,” and touched her shoulder. Long ago, she’d described a dream she’d had longer ago still, in which a voice told her she needed to be with her sister. Which one? she’d asked the voice, which sister? but there was no answer.

“—What?” She lifted her head, her brown eyes.

“You said no.”

She drew the hair from her face, unsticking it from her lips. “I did?”

“Yes.”

She shifted, resettled her head on his chest. She breathed. Somewhere a door slammed and a joyful stampede shuddered the hallway, many small bare feet racing for the pool. The high summer voices.

“It’s going to be weird, isn’t it,” she said. She was looking beyond him to the other bed. The scrambled heap of bedding, the illusory suggestion of a body within it. She spread her hand on his chest.

“What is?”

“You know what.”

Grant regarded the empty bed. “It went fast,” he said.

“That’s what everyone tells you: You won’t believe how fast it goes. In a few years, Seanie too.” She sighed.

She tapped a finger twice on his chest, like a soft knock. She did it again.

“Don’t even think it, Angela.”

“We’re not too old. I’m not.”

“I am,” he said, and she said, “No, it keeps you young.”

In the room next door a woman began a violent hacking. A TV came to life, an anchorman’s voice, some urgent new development in the world.

“They saved some money on these walls,” Grant said.

“Was I loud, earlier?”

“I don’t give a damn.”

He swung out his legs and sat with a scrap of bedsheet over his lap. His right leg took up a restless dandling.

“There’s nothing to do, Grant,” she said to his back. “You are far away in a magical land where nobody works.”

He was silent. Then he said: “What?”

She reached for the water bottle on the nightstand and he handed it to her. “They’ll be back soon, though,” she said. “And we wouldn’t want them to catch us in bed”—handing back the water bottle—“would we.”

He took a drink, his heart skipping. On the nightstand was a book—small, hardbound, tented on its pages. He lifted it, trapping his thumb in the crease, and read the cover.

“Are you reading this?”

“It’s Caitlin’s.”

“Where’d she get it?”

“Someone gave it to her.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s D. H. Lawrence. Did you know that?”

“Yes. So?”

“So I didn’t know she read this kind of stuff.” He opened the book and silently read the lines to the left of his thumb:

When the wind blows her veil

And uncovers her laughter

I cease, I turn pale,

And with a deep shift in his chest he remembered when she was small. Small and warm under his arm, clean girl-smell of her filling his heart as he read, Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece, hi-dee-ho, here I go, lookin’ for my missin’ piece. The total absorption of a child, no matter how many times. Her little hand on his forearm, rising to hang hair behind an ear, to scratch her nose—the abandoned, the bereft place on his arm until the hand returned.

He replaced the book carefully, facedown, on the nightstand.

“What kind of stuff?” Angela said.

“Poetry,” he said.

He turned to look at his wife. “Is something funny about that?”

Angela shrugged. She shook her head. They’d lain in the lamplight and Caitlin had read one of the poems in nearly a whisper, a poem full of kisses and touches. Angela wanted to stroke her hair, crawl into bed with her like a sister. She almost could have. The way it often went with mothers and daughters—the screaming, door-slamming days of adolescence, the terrible old warfare of the home—was not how it had gone with Caitlin. The girl had run her way through all of that. They knew how lucky they were.

“Should we call them?” Angela said.

“In a minute.”

“We’d better call them,” she said.

“I’m going to open up these drapes.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m ready.”

SHE LAY THERE A while longer getting used to the light, watching the shape of him, a naked dark sculpture of himself before the sun and the world. There was something about being in a strange place that made everything, even the most familiar things, strange. At last she went to him and put her arms around his hips and pressed herself to him. To skin that no longer smelled of smoke, or alcohol, but only of him.

“Someone will see,” she said, but there was no one to see them, just the sky and the mountains, heaped and stacked in diminishing brilliances of green. The great distant peaks higher than anything ought to be that still stood on the earth.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it,” she said. “You can imagine how it was, two hundred years ago. No roads, no rest stops. Just this vast, wild . . . unknown. Like another planet. No wonder men wanted it so badly.”

“Men,” he said absently, “not women?” He had her phone in his hand, scrolling through the menu.

“Oh yes, your eighteen hundreds woman couldn’t wait to load her nine kids into a wooden wagon and haul them across the Rocky Mountains.” She released him and gave him a spank on her way to the bathroom. “Press fifteen. Or eighteen,” she said, and he turned and said, “Still doing that?”

“I’ll stop when she’s twenty. That will just make me feel old.”

He hesitated before entering the code, glancing around the floor, Put some goddam shorts on at least before you talk to her, he thought, and an image of his daughter flashed in his mind, pale and long-legged on the black cinder—

that stride of hers, so light, an illusion of weightlessness, of never quite landing, but with something terrible in it too when she came up on a girl from behind—and in the next moment another phone began vibrating on a hard top somewhere and Angela said from the bathroom, “That’s them,” and then hurried into the other room. Grant followed but she’d already picked it up. He stood at the threshold watching. The missing tips of his fingers began to jump with heartbeat.

She was frowning at the number. The phone buzzed again in her grip.

“Angela,” he said.

She raised the phone and said, “Hello?” Staring blankly at him. “Hello? . . .

Yes, this is his phone—who is this, please?”

She lowered the phone slowly, watching it, and Grant could see it happening. Every second of it. The unbelievable, the irreversible moment.

“She hung up,” she said. Looking at him. Her eyes already changed.

He reached toward her. “Let me see the—” But she stepped away, turned from him, and began punching at the keypad. He pursued her in a thick warp of movement. He had won her back, little by little. Like bringing someone back from the dead. Years of truthfulness, years of love, all undone by a simple switch, an unthinking exchange of phones. He could not even see the woman’s face, her body. She seemed a creation they’d pieced together out of nothing, out of old materials, right here in these rooms.

He looked at his wife, standing with her back to him. Somehow they would need to get through this hour, this day, this vacation. The long drive home.

“Angela—”

“Don’t,” she said. “Just—” She was trembling. “Answer it, will you?”

The phone in his hand was ringing. For how long? He read the screen with illogical dread.

“It’s Sean,” he said, and his wife said nothing.

THEY’D LEFT THE ASPENS and stepped into a high, intense sunlight, their shadows thrown back on the blacktop. The morning had burned away. The air was sere and smelled of weeping sap and of the brown, desiccated needles. They’d unfolded the map and tried to get their bearings. In a moment, and for the first time that day, they heard an engine, and then a gaining thumpbeat of music, and above them at the curve there banked into view a truck, or a jeep, or something in between, some mountain breed they didn’t know, and it was coming and Caitlin said, “Get over here,” and Sean crabwalked himself and the bike into the scrub growth and wildflowers while the strange vehicle, all sunlight and bass, veered wide of them. In the window was a face, a man’s jaw, yellow lenses fixing on them for a long moment before the jeep-thing passed on and, reaching the crest of the road, dropped away body and engine and music and all.