him. As the real world came to her, she pulled the robe around to cover herself as she would if he were someone there to wash the windows.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“ Eight- fifteen,” he told her.
“When did you get in?”
“Just now,” he said. “Oh, an hour ago.”
Frowning, she said, “I should go to bed. I have rounds at six A.M. Have you eaten?”
“Not hungry,” he said.
“There's leftover lasagna in the fridge,” she said, sitting up. “I thought you were supposed to be back this morning.”
“My original flight was canceled. I took a later flight,” he told her, his heart sinking. “I left a message on the machine.”
“Did you?” she slurred, exhausted. “I didn't check the machine. Sorry. I had a long day at the hospital. Emergency appendectomy last night and I couldn't sleep. I came in from morning rounds and…”
“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. Ward couldn't mask his disappointment that his calls home had been totally unimportant to the woman he loved more than anybody on earth. He wished he could say that to her, but for some reason the words were stacked away in some mental cubicle he couldn't locate. She had not said “I love you” since Barney's death, and it was possible she no longer did. Perhaps that love was forever gone-a victim of their grief. Perhaps Barney had been such an integral part of their passion for each other that, now that he was gone, there was nothing at all to bind the doctor to the toymaker.
“I put fresh sheets on your bed yesterday,” she told him.
“Thank you,” he said, feeling as though someone had turned a rheostat that had increased the gravity in the room. My bed.
“If it's all right with you, I'm going to order curtains for this room this week.” Natasha stood and looked out the windows into the dark. “I know it's weird, but I feel like I'd like to close them at night.”
“Whatever you want,” Ward said. Although he hated the idea of curtains covering the windows, if she wanted them, what the hell.
She yawned and stretched. “I'll see you in the morning.”
Ward sat back on the couch and watched as Natasha picked up the blister pack containing the sleeping pills and the wine bottle, then bent to retrieve the glass from the floor.
“I'll get that. Leave the bottle, too,” he told her.
“You sure?”
He nodded and watched as his beautiful wife set down the bottle and, moving in a more or less straight line, floated toward the hallway before vanishing into the darkness.
Like a lone egg in a nest, one of Barney's baseballs sat in the ceramic bowl on the coffee table. He picked it up and turned it in his hand, imagining him and Barney playing pitch with it in the backyard on a spring afternoon. He supposed Natasha had been holding it to better remember Barney He put it back and looked down, spotting, between the sofa's cushions, a flash of white. He came up holding an envelope addressed to Natasha at her office. The return address belonged to the head of pediatric surgery at the Seattle children's hospital where she had done her residency. He lifted the flap, took out the letter, and read an offer to join her surgery professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Taylor Patten, who practiced at Seattle Children's Medical Center, wanted her as a partner in his practice. Ward's face grew hot as he sucked in a long breath and contemplated the letter's significance.
Ward had once wondered if the association between his wife and her mentor had been more than the usual student/teacher relationship, because of their familiarity when they were around each other. The idea now revolted and alarmed him. He'd never asked her about their relationship, just as she'd never asked him about his previous girlfriends. What he wondered as he read the letter was whether she had written her mentor first, or if he had sought her out. And his heart pounded because it reinforced his belief that, aside from Natasha's patients, there was nothing of substance holding her in North Carolina. It didn't make him feel any better to discover that the letter was dated two years earlier, because that meant she had kept it. Why had she? She had been born in Seattle, grew up and had friends and family there. She had never mentioned wanting to return, but in keeping the letter she must have been thinking that she might pursue the offer. She must have been thinking of getting out.
Ward folded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and put it back where Natasha had left it.
Crossing to the wet bar, Ward opened the liquor cabinet and selected a bottle of Laphroaig. He poured three inches of the golden liquid into a crystal glass, clouding it with a little water from a plastic bottle, and, picking up the remote, sat down, put his stocking feet on the coffee table, and started surfing TV channels as his mind grew dull from the pleasant effects of the Scotch.
FIVE
After Natasha left the den, she walked down the hallway, the slate cool against the soles of her bare feet. The combination of chilled wine and Ambien was an effective white noise generator. Natasha was confident that she knew enough about her own body and the drugs to ensure that she wasn't in any real danger of overdosing. There was the time, a few weeks earlier, when she had awakened in the tub half filled with cold water, dried vomit in her hair, with no memory of either throwing up or getting into the tub. She mixed the drugs only occasionally, she thought, as she ran her hand along the wall.
She had been lucky so far that her hands hadn't started shaking during surgery. The duration of the tremors so far was short-usually a few seconds-but they seemed to be coming more often. She would have to have tests run to see what was causing this, but there was no explanation for the tremors that was good. If she had a nervous system disorder, like MS, she was screwed-her career would be over. With the diagnosis of any degenerative disease, she would have no choice but to quit performing surgery. She knew she would have to seek a diagnosis soon.
Walking by Barney's bedroom, Natasha reached out to brush the knuckles of her left hand gently across the smooth wooden door. For nine years of nights she rarely walked past this door without pausing to visit with her son or to open the door quietly take a peek in, check on her sleeping child. The room had not changed in a year. Six months earlier, when she had men tioned to Ward that it might be time to begin thinking about boxing up just the clothes in their son's closet and few drawers, he'd started screaming at her like a lunatic. It was as though Ward expected Barney might return as long as his room wasn't altered. As often as not Ward didn't remember discussions they had, to the point that often she wondered why she bothered to talk to him at all.
The one thing she was sure of was that Ward hadn't loved their son any more than she had, and he couldn't possibly miss him any more than she did. If he wanted to think he had a corner on that, fine, but it would never be the truth. If it were possible for her to trade her life to bring Barney back, she'd die in the next second with a smile on her lips. But he couldn't come back, so she was determined to live the rest of her life. If Ward decided to live his, then they could do so together. If not, he'd have to make his own way to its end.
She went into her bedroom, closed the door, dropped her robe on the floor, flopped down across the bed, and stared up at the ceiling.
Natasha picked up a small stuffed bear that she'd had made for her son while he was still inside her womb, and still lying on the bed, pressed his hand. The recorder inside the animal said in her voice, “Little guy, Mama loves you so very much.” Her own voice brought tears to her eyes, and she hugged the bear to her chest.
She reached over to Ward's side of the bed and felt his absence. She put her hand under his pillow and a dreamless sleep overtook her.
SIX
Watcher sat in his hide in the woods, sipping a sports drink to stay hydrated. When he heard the tone, he
