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  “Your room?” Lynn asked, confused. Her own wine glass was empty.

  “You’re talking about that game we used to play, right? When, like, we were all crammed together in the backseat, stuck in traffic. Tearing into each other.”

  “I don’t remember any game.”

  “‘You get one room to yourself,’ Mom would say. ‘And no one else can ever come inside. What room is it you want?’ She did it to stop us from squabbling. I said conservatory because I liked that room in Clue. Mom said kitchen, of course, and Saul—? Sauly, you weren’t born yet, were you?” Henna looked over at Saul, who was sitting blank-faced on a column of folding chairs he had just stacked. His beard was damp. His long white fingers were splayed out over his knees.

  Lynn shook her head. “That’s not—”

  “I was born,” Saul said.

  Henna was giggling, tipsy. “Lynn always said library, library, library.”

  “I was born!” Saul said, more loudly.

  “It was a game?” It was a dream. Lynn felt uneasy now. And worried that Saul might be crying silently to himself, and irritated with Henna for getting drunk. Why couldn’t they ever pat each other’s hands or tell stupid jokes, offer some measure of consolation? It unsettled her that she couldn’t call up a single image of them all sitting together in the backseat of some car, stuck in traffic. She tried but couldn’t remember her shoulders touching Henna’s and Saul’s, couldn’t remember the drumbeat bass from another car’s radio, couldn’t recall Saul’s sticky little arm elbowing hers, or Henna kicking her legs out across Lynn’s lap. She couldn’t remember it and then, like waking from a dream itself, she did—of course, she did—their mother whipping around from the front seat, her face tired but trying as she suggested her game, and everyone groaning when their father said bed. Shelter, the game was called. Their mother’s game.

  “Saul was born,” Lynn whispered.

  “I was, I was,” he said.

  She lurched across the table to touch his arm as he sobbed.

  He shirked away from her reaching hand. Even so, his bearded child’s face was so hopeful, and so stricken, that it seemed possible to Lynn for a brief instant that no other reality had in fact ever fully existed for any of them, that there had only ever been that old car on the highway with all of them inside, each locked in their chosen rooms, and she wondered in anguish and awe how many times she would forget and have to remember this again.

  LOCK JAW

  My wife has taken to her bed, and though she isn’t there always, she’s there pretty often. Good days, she wears the slippers Jeremy picked out for her at Christmas. When she puts these on, I know how hard she’s trying. They’re pterodactyls. They have four fuzzy wings.

  She says being in bed at five makes her feel rich, and who am I to disagree? It’s true, I’ve made a lot of money in recent years writing about lunatics and apocalypse. I wrote one novel about a man who gets chased by a demon monkey, and it was made into a movie, which was never officially released. But mysteriously—miraculously—I saw a trailer for it once, on TV in the middle of the night. The demon monkey wore a more helpless expression than I’d ever imagined for it, like a calf’s or a child’s.

  “Are you feeling any better?” my wife asks. I’ve just gotten back from getting dinner.

  “A little, yes,” I tell her. I’ve had a cold, and though it’s gone now, I continue to dab my nose and hold one hand to my chest. This makes us both feel better.

  The fried rice stands in a carton-shaped tower on the plate when I hand it to her. She takes it. “Did you go out without a hat? I can’t be your mom, Craig. I can’t.” But she’s already smiling up at me. She’s always had a flexible face, and now more than ever I can see each word move across it in a little wave. Sometimes I think I can see a word before she says it in the squint around her eyes. Like now. Like how she starts to say, No thanks, but stops herself.

  “This looks great.” She separates her wooden chopsticks with a crack, and then uses them to lift puckered peas from the brick of rice one by one. “But Charlotte won’t take a bite if she sees these. Help me out?”

  “That’s not eating,” I warn her.

  “You eat them.” She sticks a pea in my face.

  I open my mouth.

  “The kids’ll get dropped off at six, and—” She hesitates. “The dog got out.” She gives me a look like, I told you this would happen, then turns back to the plate. I can see how reluctant she is to ruin the tower of rice, how she plucks out only the peas on the sides, the most accessible. She spends a long time on a single pea wedged in the brick’s corner.

  “Fuck,” I say, finally.

  She sighs. With her free hand, she adjusts the wig on her head. “I don’t know how it happened, honestly. There was some kind of scuffle at the door when the kids were leaving this morning. You’ll have to go look for her before it gets dark.”

  It’s already dark. I unlock my bike from the back porch railing and step onto the pedals, balancing them against each other for a second—just standing—before leaning on my right foot and bearing down. I squint because it’s snowing. Once, when I was a kid, I fell off my bike and busted up my face so bad I needed stitches from eye to scalp. In the past few months, I always think of that when the wheels first turn, before I really get going. I’d begged to stay home from school, and my dad had said, But that’s how you get ahead! How? By lowering people’s expectations. Now, as I pedal down the street, fast, I see all the neighbors have wandered out to their driveways. They hold their shovels in the air like weapons, like pitchforks. Why do they always want so badly for flurries to turn into drifts? They’re from the city, mostly—ex-lawyers, new hippies—and they keep chickens in their backyards as pets. In the summer they plant the dreariest plants, sweet corn and rutabaga. We don’t live in the country, exactly, but in a kind of woods on the edge of the city’s last suburbs, and as I bike down the street I call for the dog, which reassures everyone. The neighbors get worried when they see a grown man riding around alone on his bike. They probably think I’m a pervert or something, so it’s nice for them that I have a reason to be out like this.

  “Renee!” I shout. But not very hopefully.

  One of the neighbors waves at me as I pass. “Lost dog? Can I help?” he asks, raising his shovel up in a do-goody kind of way.

  “Thanks!” I say, meaning no, but he misunderstands, I suppose, because when I turn the corner, I can hear him behind me taking up my call. Going, “Renee! Renee! Renee!” as if some sweetheart of his has closed her door and won’t come out for him. As if Renee were his one true love.

  A mastiff’s mouth exerts 320 pounds of pressure per square inch. That’s what my brother tells me. My brother has been coming by a lot, lately, with these books in pastel jackets and red candles in glass domes. He’s always been a lonely bastard. Sometimes when I’m locking up my bike in the backyard, I can see him sitting with my wife on our bed, their silhouettes against the bedroom blinds like shadow puppets. It’s all too staged, too obvious to talk about. When I go inside, he’s in socks. He has a book in his lap, he’s reading to her. Somewhere along the line, my wife found God, but not the Catholic one she grew up with.

  My brother reads things like: “It is when we try to make our will conform with God’s that we begin to use it rightly.”

  He reads: “Our whole trouble had been the misuse of willpower. We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of attempting to bring it into agreement with God’s intention for us.”

  My wife looks up whenever I come into the room, but my brother never does. He just keeps on reading to the end of the paragraph, doing each word like it’s a full sentence, blinking his eyes slowly like an owl. My dad used to call him a pussyfooter because he was late for everything and wouldn’t get his fingers dirty. I remember he once let his hamster cage go black with shit before he dumped it out, hamster and all, in the woods. I still felt sorry for him then. I remember rocking our bunk bed like a boat when he wouldn�
�t sleep, pushing the wooden frame away from the wall. There was a ghost ship, I told him. There was a boy without hands. But my father was right. When my brother finishes the paragraph, he closes his book by bringing together his two palms on either side of the cover. He says things like, “We’ll meditate on that.”

  He thinks my wife needs him now. He went to Arizona and found a version of God he thinks is compatible with my wife’s sorrow. He drives my children to choir practice. Buckles them in place, adjusts the rearview mirror.

  Dogs aren’t stupid, my brother tells me, but they judge objects first by their movements, then their brightness, then their shape. He says the order is the opposite for humans, which is what makes dogs so dangerous. And so discerning, I think.

  For instance. Renee always lifts her blue upper lip at the Jehovah’s Witness who comes by with her bucolic pictures of lions licking lambs. Renee knows that lady’s fooling no one, that she’s just looking for occasions to feel superior. Or another example. Once Charlotte’s friend’s mother came in the front door, wiped her feet on the carpet, and said, “I must have stepped in something in the yard.” When her daughter, Charlotte’s friend, asked to spend the night, what that woman said to me was, “Oh, but you don’t have a mat.”

  What she meant was that we didn’t pick up after our dog often enough. That we didn’t grow wholesome rutabaga in our backyard or volunteer for the PTA. She meant, No, you can’t stay here with them.

  Charlotte stared down at the doll in her arms like it had died. She was eight.

  That’s when Renee came in the room, her head lowered. By then she was almost two hundred pounds and had a blunt-wedge face like a piece of armor. Her sound was more purr than growl. “Put your hands behind your back,” I said.

  That woman in her heels went, “Excuse me?”

  I loved watching her go white, and then red, the bits of skin around her hair getting blotchy.

  I said, “Just be careful with your movements. Don’t look the dog in the eye.”

  Then I added, kindly, “But don’t be too anxious either. Anxiety’s just as bad.”

  We all watched as Renee’s black hackles rose and fell again, a bristly wave.

  My wife has been thinking ahead. She says she worries what will happen when our children are old enough to stumble on and read The Trilogy of Leviathan’s Children. She wants me to put the books on high shelves. She wants me to put them behind other books.

  I oblige her for now, feeling with a pang just how easy it is to agree to things when you know they’re temporary.

  It’s true I’ve always told her I was a hack. So it would be hard to explain to my wife that there’s something in those books I’m proud of, in fact, something I’d like the kids to see. When I first started writing, I gave the characters my favorite names, which years later became the names of our children. Jeremiah Peter, for instance, was the protagonist in my second book. And our Charlotte was first Ms. Charlotta Linkley Grey, an Australian obstetrician who finds herself pregnant with one third of a baby—the other two thirds of which (the torso, three limbs) are in distant women’s bodies. These three women live through the apocalypse and have to coordinate the birth with drugs and stitch the parts of the baby together. It’s an elaborate, ghastly surgery. It’s not a metaphor, it’s just the end of the world.

  I’m not really superstitious. I don’t believe in luck or prophecy, so it’s weird to me to see how much of Charlotta Linkley there is in my little girl. Of the three mothers, Charlotta is the only one unwilling to give her child up for science, even when her third of the infant almost dies, even when the head and shoulders separate from the torso while she’s nursing.

  Charlotte is mad about her dollhouse. Every day she empties out all of its furniture, makes a pile on the floor of all the chairs and beds. The rugs like potholders, the pots like thimbles. She tells her little brother, “You may choose one room and four pieces of furniture to survive with.” He’s five. He wants the attic, of course, which is the highest room in the house, but she always chooses the bathroom because it has a water source and only one door to guard.

  “Guard against what?” Jeremy asked her once.

  I could see she thought about not telling him. “People outside,” she said.

  My wife says she’s concerned about Charlotte because, since the incident last fall at Renee’s obedience class, she no longer invites her friends over to play. “She used to be so popular,” my wife complains. “Where are all her friends now?”

  My wife blames me for this. I blame her for blaming me.

  But since she gave notice at work, we’ve both gotten pretty good at choosing words that leave no marks. We interact with utmost politeness, and it has been surprising to me that all this niceness isn’t cold, the way I always assumed nice people to be. It’s delicate, yes, but also tender. We used to have fights so fierce that when my wife uncrossed her arms I saw red marks where her fingers had been. Who would have thought that all we needed all along was a certain mutual commitment to circumspection?

  Now when she worries, I take her thin hand. I try to reassure her.

  “But look at Charlotte,” I told her recently. “She’s still happy, see?” I meant it.

  We stood together in the doorway of the children’s bedroom and watched our daughter wipe down her tiny porcelain tub with a tissue. She was waiting for Jeremy to come back from the real bathroom, rocking back and forth on her knees, petting the hair under her ponytail. For her furniture, she chose a stove, one pot, a mattress, and a cake.

  When he came back, Jeremy took the four dolls. It was a family of bears, all wearing dresses and hats.

  “That’s not furniture!” Charlotte yelled, when she realized what he was doing. But what she was really mad about was that there wasn’t anyone left to survive in her bathroom. She menaced him: “What will they eat? Where will they sleep?”

  Charlotte hates it when people won’t play by the rules, or when they change them in any way. Like when I said I wouldn’t be driving her to choir practice anymore, that Uncle Brady would do it. When Charlotte heard this, she led Renee by one velvet ear into the closet. She wouldn’t come out until I dumped out the dollhouse and chose a room. “I want the solarium,” I said, adding, “and this chair which is also a bed, and this magical pot that is a toilet and fire pit and fishbowl and a pillow all in one.”

  “That’s not fair,” she cried. “You can’t use magic.” But out she came.

  Or like when Charlotte walks the dog, and Jeremy is supposed to go in front and be on the lookout for animals. Other dogs, squirrels, cats, small children. But one night just before the first snowfall, Charlotte came home with blood glittering up and down her arm and a bubble of saliva before every word. “He didn’t do his job,” she sobbed. “He was kicking a rock and didn’t tell me about the raccoon.”

  “Why didn’t you just let go of the leash?” I asked her, pulling strands of hair out of her mouth one by one. She’d been dragged across the parking lot on her stomach. Her chin was bleeding. Her jacket was torn.

  She looked confused. She said she hadn’t thought of that.

  That night I told Jeremy I would read him a book. I watched him pick one out across the room and head for the spot next to me on the couch. Then, eyeing Renee sprawled near my feet, he stopped and changed course. He made a wide circle around the coffee table and approached the couch from behind, throwing himself over the upholstered back. He fell dead-man style onto a cushion. “Umph,” he said.

  I took him in my arms and put my face in his hair. He smelled like a baby, still. Like milk and sleep, like urine.

  “Jeremy,” I whispered in his ear. “Are you afraid of Renee?”

  We watched her lift her heavy head, turn to face us. She pulled herself up on her huge haunches, a pearl of mucus shining in each black eye. Jeremy wouldn’t say a word.

  “Dogs can see if you’re afraid,” I told him. “Act as if you trust her.”

  It was good advice. My son hasn’t yet lea
rned to differentiate his actions from his thoughts, which makes him unpredictable. I can’t tell if this is because he isn’t old enough yet to do this, or if it is a flaw in his personality. Once, when his mother asked him to play Go Fish with her in bed, he refused, saying she looked funny. This made her cry. I had Jeremy apologize to her that night, and he said—with a sincerity that was all the more cruel for its artlessness—“I’m sorry you look funny, Mom.”

  Whenever I get home early from a meeting, I make sure to bring my brother his shoes from the front door. I tiptoe through the house to the back bedroom, dangling his sometimes sodden sneakers on two hooked fingers. It’s humiliating in ways I can’t describe, but I hate seeing him in his socks with my wife, and I want him to leave. Sometimes I stand in the dark hallway before I enter, watching him say “principle of all being” like he’s only just now learned to sound out words, and I think about chucking the shoes and clocking him in the back of the head. I never do this, of course. While my brother leans over to tie his wet laces, my wife tells me to feed him anything he wants—chicken, coffee, noodles. She wants him to be fed; she wants me to be nicer to him.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she whispered to me once, late at night, long after I had thought she’d fallen asleep. “But you know better than to tell that tired adultery story to yourself, even in your head. Don’t even start. Look at me. Look at you. We need him.”

  I tend to give him food in wrappers so he can take it with him. Popsicles, Capri Suns, granola bars. It makes me feel better to watch him struggle with the sticky plastic wrapper on a Fruit Roll-Up. He licks his fingers like a five-year-old, has gummy red slugs between his teeth.

  “Everything okay with you?” he always asks on the way to the door. I swear to God, he squints his eyes. He looks at me like I’m an experiment, like he wants to prod me with a stick or something, even though he’s the one with a scarlet mouth stained by Red Dye No. 2.