Just After Sunset

He liked to think their train would come before then-that their combined expectation would make it come-but he didn’t really believe it. He even considered the idea that the shock might extinguish them and they’d simply whiff out like candle flames in a strong gust of wind, but he didn’t believe that, either. He could see them too clearly after the bulldozers and dump trucks and back-end loaders were gone, standing by the rusty disused railway tracks in the moonlight while a wind blew down from the foothills, whining around the mesa and beating at the broomgrass. He could see them huddled together under a billion High Country stars, still waiting for their train.

“Are you cold?” Willa asked him.

“No-why?”

“You shivered.”

“Maybe a goose walked over my grave,” he said. He closed his eyes, and they danced together on the empty floor. Sometimes they were in the mirror, and when they slipped from view there was only a country song playing in an empty room lit by a neon mountain range.

The Gingerbread Girl

1. Only fast ru

After the baby died, Emily took up ru

“What does Dr. Steiner say about it?” he asked.

“Dr. Steiner says run your ass off, get those endorphins going.” She hadn’t mentioned the ru

Emily had always been able to bluff Henry. Even after Amy died. We can have another one, she had said, sitting beside him on the bed as he lay there with his ankles crossed and tears streaming down the sides of his face.

It eased him and that was good, but there was never going to be another baby, with the attendant risk of finding said infant gray and still in its crib. Never again the fruitless CPR, or the screaming 911 call with the operator saying Lower your voice, ma’am, I can’t understand you. But Henry didn’t need to know that, and she was willing to comfort him, at least at the start. She believed that comfort, not bread, was the staff of life. Maybe eventually she would be able to find some for herself. In the meantime, she had produced a defective baby. That was the point. She would not risk another.

Then she started getting headaches. Real blinders. So she did go to a doctor, but it was Dr. Mendez, their general practitioner, not Susan Steiner. Mendez gave her a prescription for some stuff called Zomig. She took the bus to the family practice where Mendez hung out, then ran to the drugstore to get the scrip filled. After that she jogged home-it was two miles-and by the time she got there, she had what felt like a steel fork planted high up in her side, between the top of her ribs and her armpit. She didn’t let it concern her. That was pain that would go away. Besides, she was exhausted and felt as if she could sleep for a while.

She did-all afternoon. On the same bed where Amy had been made and Henry had cried. When she woke up, she could see ghostly circles floating in the air, a sure sign that she was getting one of what she liked to call Em’s Famous Headaches. She took one of her new pills, and to her surprise-almost shock-the headache turned tail and slunk away. First to the back of her head, then gone. She thought there ought to be a pill like that for the death of a child.

She thought she needed to explore the limits of her endurance, and she suspected the exploration would be a long one. There was a JuCo with a cinder track not too far from the house. She began to drive over there in the early mornings just after Henry left for work. Henry didn’t understand the ru

She parked at the track and ran until she could run no more, until her sleeveless FSU sweatshirt was dark with sweat down the front and back and she was shambling and sometimes puking with exhaustion.

Henry found out. Someone saw her there, ru

“It’s a hobby,” she said.

“Jodi Anderson said you ran until you fell down. She was afraid you’d had a heart attack. That’s not a hobby, Em. Not even a fetish. It’s an obsession.”

And he looked at her reproachfully. It would be a little while yet before she picked up the book and threw it at him, but that was what really tore it. That reproachful look. She could no longer stand it. Given his rather long face, it was like having a sheep in the house. I married a Dorset gray, she thought, and now it’s just baa-baa-baa, all day long.

But she tried one more time to be reasonable about something she knew in her heart had no reasonable core. There was magical thinking; there was also magical doing. Ru

“Marathoners run until they fall down,” she said.

“Are you pla

“Maybe.” But she looked away. Out the window, at the driveway. The driveway called her. The driveway led to the sidewalk, and the sidewalk led to the world.

“No,” he said. “You’re not going to run in a marathon. You have no plans to run in a marathon.”

It occurred to her-with that sense of brilliant revelation the obvious can bring-that this was the essence of Henry, the fucking apotheosis of Henry. During the six years of their marriage he had always been perfectly aware of what she was thinking, feeling, pla

I comforted you, she thought-not furious yet but begi

“The ru

That’s when she grabbed the object nearest at hand, which happened to be a paperback copy of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. This was a book she had tried and rejected, but Henry had picked it up and was now about three quarters of the way through, judging from the bookmark. He even has the reading tastes of a Dorset gray, she thought, and hucked it at him. It struck him on the shoulder. He stared at her with wide, shocked eyes, then grabbed at her. Probably just to hug her, but who knew? Who really knew anything?

If he had grabbed a moment earlier, he might have caught her by the arm or the wrist or maybe just the back of her T-shirt. But that moment of shock undid him. He missed, and she was ru