around me. I saw where my lungs would puncture, heard the radio I couldn’t turn off, stared at my foot impaled on the brake. I was aware that the orange reflective triangles would be placed around my car. I didn’t understand at the time that predictions swerve and take on whole other meanings. There was a car, but no accident, no death. Unless you call love an accident. I don’t.
three
The morning Jane left, I crawled into bed with Mike and didn’t wake up until the midmorning express vibrated the French doors of the second-floor deck. Mike was propped up on one elbow, watching me. He looked amused, probably thought Jane and I were having him on. Maybe he was employing that simple carnival trick of his: to guess the weight of a head. Mike had worked on a midway one summer during college, and he had gotten pretty good at sizing up a person by the pound. But he wasn’t reliable then and gave away too many stuffed cats and cloth dolls.
—Holding Jane’s place? he laughed.
I sat up against the bolster, and launched into a nervous rap about the Jaguar. He leaned into me as I talked openly about the canvas top and the broken mechanism. We both liked machinery, how a good piece of equipment works, but I could only distract him so long, and I ran myself out detailing that car. Mike unraveled his pajamas from the covers, slipped into the bottoms, and got out of bed.
—Shout if I get warm.
He looked under the dust ruffle, stepped in and out of the bathroom, checked behind the yellow stuffed chair. When he came back to bed, he took my hand and said:
—I give.
—I tried to stop her.
He looked at my head again. I felt it lift off my neck and go onto the scale.
—She left the girls’ insurance cards. Took two bags. I should have woken you. I haven’t slept for . . . She’s probably in San Luis Obispo by now. Paso Robles. This looks so bad. I couldn’t think.
I watched the gill-like movement of his jaw, the small muscles tensing and relaxing. He balled up his pajama top and threw it across the room, and said:
—Fuck.
Then he laughed to himself.
—It’s okay, Mike said. I lifted the receiver on the old white princess phone sitting on the bedside table, but it slipped from my hand and dropped to the rug.
—I’ll try her cell, I said, unwinding the cord and starting over.
—She won’t answer.
I hung the phone up.
—Did she go north?
—No. I mean, I don’t know.
—Which car?
—The Jaguar.
—Is it too early for a drink?
He knew where Franny had kept her gin and brought it back to bed. I took a sip, watched him, waiting for something other than the weary, almost luminous look he gets after being up all night editing. For years Mike had made documentaries. Exquisite, quirky things. My favorite was the man fixing a VW Bug who talked about his six ex-wives while he gapped the plugs and set the timing, his lone voice working like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. He said:
—You have to feel like you came out here for nothing.
—Don’t worry about me. Maybe the police could . . .
He touched one of my eyebrows, as if it were out of place.
It’s okay? I thought. Sometimes Mike suffered from the same kind of melancholy that overtakes me, so I understood that at least. And I understood his way of protecting me. He lost his sister when he was fifteen. But, it’s okay? The blue bottles on Franny’s dressing table sent out light. The fog had burned off a good deal. It was the first clear sky since our arrival, but that was how June was, unlimited fog with a few breaks. I hoped it would be all right where Jane drove.
—This is what she does. She drives off, he said.
I realized his eyes used to be a true, faded color. Now they looked blue like laundry soap. I looked for contact lenses as he gazed toward the islands, but I didn’t see any. I couldn’t understand the way he’d aged. It wasn’t that his face was waxy or taut, injected or stitched into place; it was unchanged. Changed, unchanged. I played with this like a power surge—lights coming up, blacking out.
—Aren’t you blind without your glasses?
—I can see you better this way, he said.
He moved his thumb over my right palm, not far from the spot where this random line bisects the lifeline and another line, the three lines forming a triangle if I flatten my hand out as a palm reader would. But instead he formed my hand into a small basin, as if he were going to pour something there. Once again he assured me that Jane was fine, that I shouldn’t worry.
—We have to keep it low-key for the girls, he said, but his words and his mouth worked at different speeds now.
—Her disappearance, he said, as if I hadn’t understood.
I probably had that stretched-awkward smile I get. We both took another drink.
—We could say she’s gone to look for architectural salvage, I said.
—We’re knee-deep in architectural salvage.
—But she has her time away, right? Conferences?
I began to feel my own break between phrasing and delivery. As I watched his face, I picked up something of Jane in the ticking of the feather pillows, mixed with her grandmother’s oily scent. I looked at his chest. I felt like the girl in Duras’s The Lover, when she was about to touch the man’s chest for the first time. I offered to stay a couple of extra days, make some headway on Franny’s stuff. Then I caught myself and quickly wound back to the girls.
We agreed that it would be plausible for Jane to go off and work for a while in seclusion. She had a commission designing sets for a version of Peter Pan, in Boston. Mike would hide her drawings.
He picked up the knotted ends of my nightgown ties and rolled them between his fingers, letting them drop against my chest.
—Can you really make any knot? he asked.
—I know knots, I said.
My father had taught me dozens of sailor’s knots.
—And flags, I said. Capitals. By-products. My mother and her fucking workbooks.
—I thought you did scrapbooks.
—Those too.
I rushed to tell him everything I could about the articles I clipped. On a variety of subjects.
—I know. I could tell you where tulips spring up on Dutch maps.
I put my hand on his cheek and he said:
—I’d
