The fresh graves looked like puddles.
Before leaving, I stood for a few minutes beside our family plot. Jacob's name had been chiseled onto the marker, right beneath our father's. The blank spot in the stone's bottom-right-hand corner was waiting for me, I knew, and it was a nice feeling to realize that -- unless I were to die within the next few months -- it would never be filled in. I was going to be buried a long way from here, under a different name, and thinking this gave me an instant's rush of happiness. It was the best I'd felt since the shootings, the most confident in our course: for perhaps the first and only time, what we'd gotten seemed worth the price we'd paid. We were escaping our lives. That cube of granite had been my fate, my destination, and I'd broken away from it. In a few months, I'd set out into the world, free from everything that had formerly bound me. I would re-create myself, would chart my own path. I would dictate my destiny.
THURSDAY evening I returned from work and found Sarah in the kitchen, crying.
At first I wasn't sure. All I noticed was a stiffness, a strained formality, as if she were angry with me. She was standing at the sink washing dishes. I came in, still in my suit and tie, and sat down at the table to keep her company. I asked her some questions about her day, and she answered them in monosyllables, short little grunts from deep in her throat. She wasn't looking at me; her head was tucked down against her chest, watching her hands working at the dishes in the soapy water.
'You okay?' I asked finally.
She nodded, not turning around, her shoulders hunched forward, making her back look round. The plates clinked together in the sink.
'Sarah?'
She didn't answer, so I got up and came to the counter. When I touched her on the shoulder, she seemed to freeze, as if in fright.
'What's the matter?' I asked, and then, leaning forward to catch her eye, I saw the tears rolling slowly down her face.
Sarah wasn't a crier; I could count the number of times I'd seen her in tears on the fingers of one hand. They appeared only in the wake of major tragedies, so my first reaction to her weeping was one of panic and fear. I thought immediately of the baby.
'Where's Amanda?' I asked quickly.
She continued to work at the dishes. She turned her face off to the side, made a sniffling sound. 'Upstairs.'
'She's all right?'
Sarah nodded. 'She's sleeping.'
I reached forward and turned off the water. In the absence of its rushing, the kitchen took on a sudden silence, and it seemed to add a peculiar weight to the moment, which frightened me.
'What's going on?' I asked. I slid my arm along her back until I had her in a half embrace. She stood there rigid for a second, her hands draped over the edge of the sink, as if they'd been broken at the wrists, then she let herself fall toward me, let a sob work its way raggedly up through her chest. I hugged her with both arms.
She cried for a while, returning my embrace, her wet hands dripping soapy water down my neck and onto the back of my suit.
'It's all right,' I whispered. 'It's all right.'
When she quieted down, I brought her over to the table.
'I can't work at the library anymore,' she said, sitting down.
'They fired you?' I couldn't imagine how she could possibly be fired from the library.
She shook her head. 'They asked me not to bring Amanda anymore. People were complaining about the noise.' She wiped at her cheek with her hand. 'They said I can come back after she's outgrown her crying.'
I leaned forward and took her by the hand. 'It's not like you really need the job right now.'
'I know. It's just...'
'We've got enough money without it.' I smiled.
'I know,' she said again.
'It doesn't really seem like it's worth crying over.'
'Oh, Hank. I'm not crying over that.'
I looked at her in surprise. 'What're you crying for?'
She wiped at her face again. Then she shut her eyes. 'It's complicated. It's all sorts of things put together.'
'Is it about what we've done?'
My voice must've come out strange -- nervous maybe, or scared -- because she opened her eyes at the sound of it. She looked directly at me, as if she were appraising me. Then she shook her head.
'It's nothing,' she said. 'It's just me being tired.'
THAT weekend a thaw arrived.
Saturday the temperature rose to fifty degrees, and everything, the whole world, began to melt in a sudden dripping, sliding, oozing rush. Large, perfectly white clouds floated across the sky throughout the afternoon, pushed gently northward by the moist touch of a southerly wind. The air smelled deceptively of spring.
Sunday was even warmer; the thermometer eased its way up into the lower sixties, accelerating the melting. By late morning, the ground had begun to reappear in small squares and slashes the size of footprints, dark against the dirty whiteness of the retreating snow, and in the evening, when I went out to untie the dog and put him in the garage, I found him sitting in an inch-deep puddle of mud. The earth was unveiling itself.
I had trouble falling asleep that night. Water dripped loudly from the eaves beyond the window with an incessant ticktock sound. The house creaked and moaned. There was a sense of movement in the air, of things breaking free, coming undone.
I lay in bed and tried to trick my body into fatigue, consciously relaxing muscles, forcing my breathing to slow and deepen, but every time I shut my eyes, a vivid image of the plane floated up before me. It was lying on its belly in the orchard, its wings and fuselage free of snow, its metal skin glinting brightly in the sunshine, like a beacon, attracting the eye. Looking down at it in my head, I could sense it waiting, could feel its impatience. It was yearning to be found.
ON WEDNESDAY of that week, a strange thing happened to me. I was sitting at my desk, working on an account discrepancy, when I heard Jacob's voice out in the lobby.
It wasn't his voice, of course, I knew that, but its tone and pitch were so eerily familiar that I couldn't resist rising from my chair, walking quietly over to my door, opening it, and peeking out.
There was a fat man there, a man I'd never seen before. He wasn't a customer; he'd merely come inside to ask for directions.
He didn't look at all like Jacob. He was old, balding, with a thick, drooping mustache, and as I watched him speak, watched the unfamiliar gestures of his hands, the way his face moved above his mouth, the illusion that he was using Jacob's voice gradually disappeared. It started to sound a little too throaty, a little too rough. It was an old man's voice.
But then I shut my eyes, and it instantly became my brother's once again. I stood there very still, focusing my whole mind on the sound of it, and, listening, I felt an irresistible surge of sadness and loss rise up within myself. It was overwhelming, stronger than anything I'd ever felt before, so powerful that it had an actual physical effect on me, like a wave of nausea. I bent forward slightly at the waist, as if I'd been hit in the stomach.
'Mr. Mitchell?' I heard.
I opened my eyes, straightened my body. Cheryl was standing behind the checkout counter, staring at me with an expression of grave concern. The fat man stood in the center of the lobby, his right hand touching the corner of his mustache.
'Are you all right?' Cheryl asked. She seemed as if she were about to come running toward me.
