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Laurel’s house, he thought. He lived here, but it was really hers, her creation. It struck him that he’d never fully appreciated how restful it was. When he arrived home each

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night, all wound up, the muscles in his neck aching, just walking in through the door he felt soothed, like crawling into a warm bed.

Laurel. All around him, he was seeing her reflection.

Something tugged at his mind … something he’d forgotten to do. Then he remembered how withdrawn she’d seemed last night-just tired, she’d claimed, but he had sensed she was holding back. Yet he hadn’t pressed her.

Now, he was climbing the stairs, quietly and quickly taking them two at a time. Reaching the second floor, he popped his head through the open door to Adam’s room. In the faint yellow glow of his Donald Duck night-light, Adam lay curled on his side, fast asleep, most of the covers kicked off, his thumb corked securely in his mouth. Joe felt his tension ease a bit. You see? If anything had happened to Laurel, would Adam be here in his pajamas, sleeping so peacefully?

He tiptoed over, and out of long habit, felt the front of Adam’s Spiderman PJ’s. Dry. Thank God for small favors. For a while, a year or so back, it seemed as if Adam was wetting every night. But lately he’d been getting up on his own at night to pee. Laurel, he remembered, had taken the brunt of it-Adam’s misery, all that extra laundry-and almost never a complaint from her.

Joe kissed his son’s damp, toothpaste-smelling cheek, and was gripped by an odd memory. All of a sudden he was back in the ninth grade, Mr. Dunratty’s drama class, acting out a scene from Our Town, which at the time, with his stampeding hormones and his rush to get outside and play ball, hadn’t made much sense to him. But now he knew exactly how the ghost-Emily must have felt as she stood by and watched the precious, precious minutes of her former life tick past, how frustrated and overcome with longing she must have been. He felt that way now, with Adam … just as he often had with Laurel. As if he were somehow hoarding these moments with his son and his wife, storing them up against the day when they’d be gone and he’d be left only with memories.

Which might not be so far off.

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Joe felt the stitch in his gut tighten once more. Jesus, low had it come to this? With Laurel, he tried so damn lard to keep things together. But it was like running in ซand, he always seemed to be going too slowly. Could he

5e trying too hard?

True, he hadn’t been in love with Laurel when he narried her. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, yes,

3ut the deep love he felt for her now, that had needed :ime to grow.

Joe, in his mind, was seeing Laurel, how she’d ooked that day in the hospital, just after Adam was born, #hen he’d asked her to marry him. How she’d seemed to see straight through him with her clear blue eyes when she isked, “Joe, do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” he’d said, fighting to keep from :utting his eyes away from the frightful urgency of her skyblue gaze.

“Not like that,” she told him, almost angrily. “Not like you loved me when I was a kid. I mean now. Apart from Adam … and from”-he watched her throat clench as she swallowed-“from Annie. Do you love me?”

Joe, caught between the truth and a lie that was only half a lie, really, had taken her hand, and told her what she wanted to hear.

“I love you. Apart from Adam. Apart from anyone. And I want to marry you.”

Then he’d had to look away, because if he hadn’t, the heat of the joy pouring out of her would have scorched him. He’d thought: How can I tell her that I love Annie, too … and that if things had been different, it’d be Annie I’d be proposing to?

But deep down, she had to have suspected. Wasn’t that the root of their problem now? Wasn’t that why he couldn’t touch her in bed anymore without feeling guilty somehow? It wasn’t that he didn’t love her or want her … it was that he loved and wanted Annie, too. Worse, Laurel knew it. She knew it, and it was killing her. He couldn’t even talk to her about it, because if he did that, then he’d have to say it out loud, admit that she wasn’t

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just imagining it. And if he did that, wouldn’t he be hurting her even more?

But he didn’t want to lose her. When he looked at her, what he saw was a beautiful, smart, talented woman, a ferociously devoted wife and mother. Maybe she wasn’t as outgoing or as outspoken as Annie, but in her own low-key way, Laurel could be just as strong and determined. Where Annie could be fire and lightning, he thought, Laurel was bedrock.

Another memory came to him, stealing up on him in the close-smelling darkness of his son’s room. That summer he’d been tearing out rotten boards in the porch … and suddenly there were wasps swarming everywhere, stinging him, crawling down the back of his shirt. He must have knocked loose a whole nest of them. In an electric fog of agony, he remembered yelling to Laurel, on her knees in the garden, planting seedling tomatoes. She’d looked up, frozen for a second, then had reached automatically for the garden hose that lay snaked across the dirt beside her. Then he’d felt the cold spray hitting him, and there was Laurel, standing fearlessly in the path of the fleeing wasps, wielding the hose nozzle’s spring-loaded grip as if it were a machine gun. He saw several wasps land on her arms, and another on her neck. She flinched when they stung, but didn’t stop spraying until he’d run far enough to get free of them.

“Run!” he yelled, and then she was dropping the hose and pelting after him, the brim of her floppy straw hat bouncing, her sunburned arms and legs flashing.

“Take off your clothes,” Laurel commanded as she caught up with him near the hedge that marked their property line. Frantically, she began shucking off her shorts and T-shirt.

“Christ, what are you doing?” He stared at her, not understanding, while the stings on his arms and legs began to throb and burn. He felt as if he were on fire.

“Just take them off!”

When they were both stripped down to their underwear, she began scooping up handfuls of mud where it had collected around the marigolds she’d watered earlier. She

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smeared herself, and him, until they both were nearly covered with mud. Joe, as he felt the fieriness begin to ease, suddenly realized how ridiculous they had to look, standing out here in broad daylight in their underwear, covered in mud, in full sight of the neighbors.

He began to laugh, holding his stomach, bowed by hilarity.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded, hands on hips, her hair speckled with mud, and a muddy stripe along one cheek like a muttonchop sideburn.

“I was just wondering what Mr. Hessel next door would say if you walked over right now and asked to borrow his pruning shears.”

Laurel bent down; then Joe felt something wet and sloppy hit his forehead, just above his eyebrow. Mud running down his face, he watched Laurel, giggling, dart for cover behind the chinaberry tree. Scooping up a handful of mud, he slung it, missing her by a hair. She squealed, and waggled her rear end at him, leaving him no choice but to chase her. Catching her easily-she was laughing too hard to run fast-he tackled her.

That was when he’d looked up, and caught sight of their elderly neighbor, Gus Hessel, staring over the fence, his jaw slack with astonishment.

Laurel spotted him, too. Springing to her feet, she had run for the back door, leaving Joe to offer his neighbor a sickly smile before making his own hasty retreat. Inside, they crowded into the shower, holding on to one another and laughing like a pair of lunatics until the muddy water swirling down the drain turned clear.

“How will I ever be able to look Mr. Hessel in the eye after this?” she’d groaned, laughing.

“You won’t have to-he’ll be too busy eyeballing the rest of you.”

She hit him with a wet washcloth, and by the time they got out of the shower, their stings had stopped burning, and they finished in the bedroom what they’d started in the yard.

Now, Joe felt a deep longing for those carefree days. Lately, with all the pressure at the restaurant, and his

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father’s increasing senility, he felt sometimes as if he were looking at Laurel through the wrong end of a telescope, seeing her-even when she was close enough to touchas if from a distance. And then, God, yes, there was Annie …

Walking with her yesterday afternoon, he’d felt like a kid playing hooky, stealing a sweet piece of freedom away from all the pressures. Annie somehow had made him lighten up. Afterwards, he’d felt really terrific … for about an hour.

Joe gently pulled the kicked-off covers over Adam, and slipped out. His and Laurel’s bedroom was next to Adam’s, but when he peeked in, it was dark. At first, he thought it was because she was asleep. But the bed, though its covers were rumpled, was empty.

Slipping back downstairs, he headed for Laurel’s studio, and as he approached he saw the sliver of light under its closed door. She was probably so caught up in her drawing that she’d lost all track of time. That had to be why she’d let the kitchen get so messy, and hadn’t remembered to switch on the porch light. He felt himself relax.

Standing outside her door, he knocked softly. “Laurey?”

No answer.

He eased open the door and saw her perched on the high stool before her drawing table, hunched over its tilted surface, her long hair pooled on either side of her; at her elbow, a jumble of pencils, erasers, chalk stubs, charcoal sticks. In the white cone of light cast by the Tensor lamp clamped to the side of the table, her hand, madly sketching, seemed to glow with a light of its own.

“Laurey?” he called again, stepping inside.

Her head jerked up, her shoulders snapped back. She swivelled to face him, her elbow bumping the lamp’s hood, making the room’s shadows jump. Her face, half cloaked in that jittery darkness, looked oddly disjointed -huge eyes staring out from an array of overlapping angles and planes. She was wearing a loose silk robe, jaybirdblue, the color of her eyes. Its shimmering folds hung on her, and it struck him how thin she’d gotten seemingly

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overnight, her arms sticking out from her sleeves like pale reeds. She looked sick, frighteningly ill.

Joe felt his heart turn over. Jesus, what was going on?

“Hi. Sorry if I scared you,” he said. Keep it cool, he warned himself. She’ll tell you when she’s ready. “Deadline?” He gestured toward the slew of crumpled papers littering the carpet at her feet.

She nodded. “They need it by Monday.” Her voice sounded flat, toneless. “I’m trying something different, pastels and charcoal.” She looked down at her hands, curled limply in her lap, her fingers black with charcoal. “It’s not working, though. It’s the unicorn. He’s not-” She swallowed, her eyes cutting away from him.

Joe stepped closer, peering over her shoulder. The nearly finished drawing of a winged unicorn seemed to leap out at him, all fluid lines and supple movement. Extraordinary. She was so damn talented. The only talent she didn’t seem to have was believing in herself.

“-what I wanted,” she finished.

“What do you mean?”

Laurel shrugged, her hand flying up to her cheek, leaving a trail of black smudge marks.

Joe felt a prick of frustration. Why did he always have to pry things out of her? She was so wonderfully expressive with her artwork, but when it came to conversation, she could be about as open as a brick wall.

“It’s good,” he said softly, his gaze shifting back to the drawing. The unicorn, done in lilac pastel shaded subtly with charcoal, seemed almost three-dimensional, as if it were hovering above the paper. “Really good. Maybe the best you’ve ever done.” He meant it, too.

Laurel frowned, and stared down at the floor. “No,” she said in that awful, flat voice. “He’s just a horse with wings and a horn.”

“Is there a difference?”

She looked up at him, as if surprised that he couldn’t see what to her was so clear. “He has to be … magical. The children who read this story should believe in him.”

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“Laurey,” Joe gently reminded her, “it is just a story.”

Now he could see tears shining in her eyes, hard and bright as chips of ice. “Don’t you see? If you believe, it is real. Like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. When I draw, no matter how fantastic the thing is, I believe in it. That’s what makes it work.”

“And you don’t believe in unicorns? Or is it just this unicorn?” He smiled, hoping intensely to lighten her mood.

She stared at him, an expression of terrible sadness passing over her delicate face. Joe felt suddenly as though he were skidding, skidding all out of control, into the lonely future he’d feared.

“I can’t seem to believe in it either.” A shudder passed through her, and she hugged herself, hooking her bare feet through the rungs of her stool, pressing her knees together tightly. Softly, so softly it could have been the hiss of rain against the window, or leaves scudding along the rain gutters, she said, “Joe, I want us to … to be apart for a while. Please don’t argue. Please. I don’t think I could stand even talking about it right now. It’d be different if I didn’t love you. I’d be stronger, I know. But … God, this is so hard.” She took a deep, gasping breath.

Joe stared at her, not believing what he was hearing, yet at the same time feeling curiously relieved-as if he’d known this was going to happen, and had been waiting for it. “Laurey, what is it? What’s going on?” He took a step toward her, but she held out her hand to stop him.

“Look,” she told him when it seemed as if she’d regained some control, “it wouldn’t do any good to start throwing around accusations. When Annie told me about … about your father, I felt so … so … well, but then I thought it over and I realized it wasn’t anything new … my feeling left out. What’s new is that I … I don’t believe in us anymore. All the things I wanted, hoped for … they just aren’t going to happen, are they? My own believing in them isn’t enough.”