violence, and death with which she herself had grown up.
Fortunately, Toby spared her from the admission that she had no
answer.
'If I was God, I woulda made just one mom and dad and kid of each kind
of thing. You know? Like one mother golden retriever and one father
golden retriever and one puppy.'
He had long wanted a golden retriever, but they'd been delaying because
their five-room house seemed too small for such a large dog.
'Nothing would ever die or grow old,' Toby said, continuing to describe
the world he would have made, 'so the puppy would always be a puppy,
and there could never be more of any one thing to overrun the world,
and then nothing would have to kill anything else.'
That, of course, was the paradise that supposedly once had been.
'I wouldn't make any bees or spiders or cockroaches or snakes,' he
said, wrinkling his face in disgust. 'That never made any sense. God
musta been in a really weird mood that day.'
Heather laughed. She loved this kid to pieces.
'Well, He musta been,' Toby insisted, turning his attention to the
television again.
He looked so like Jack. He had Jack's beautiful gray-blue eyes and
open guileless face. Jack's nose. But he had her blond hair, and he
was slightly small for his age, so it was possible he had inherited
more of his body type from her than from his father. Jack was tall and
solidly built, Heather was five four, slender. Toby was obviously the
son of both, and sometimes, like now, his existence seemed
miraculous.
He was the living symbol of her love for Jack and of Jack's love for
her, and if death was the price to be paid for the miracle of
procreation, then perhaps the bargain made in Eden wasn't as lopsided
as it sometimes seemed.
On TV, Sylvester the cat was trying to kill Tweetie the canary, but
unlike real life, the tiny bird was getting the best of the sputtering
feline.
The telephone rang.
Heather put her book on the arm of the chair, flung the afghan aside,
and got up. Toby had eaten all the sherbet, and she plucked the empty
bowl from his lap on her way to the kitchen.
The phone was on the wall beside the refrigerator. She put the bowl on
the counter and picked up the receiver. 'Hello?'
'Heather?'
'Speaking.'
'It's Lyle Crawford.'
Crawford was the captain of Jack's division, the man to whom he
answered.
Maybe it was the fact that Crawford had never called her before, maybe
it was something in the tone of his voice, or maybe it was just the
instincts of a cop's wife, -but she knew at once that something was
terribly wrong. Her heart began to race, and for a moment she couldn't
breathe. Then suddenly she was breathing shallowly, rapidly, and
