“The Gap Year” by Lori Ostlund

It was late—well after midnight, Beth supposed—and she was trying to sleep but Matthew was in the kitchen folding origami, the steady whisper of the paper giving itself over to form all she could think about as she lay there in the middle of the night in their empty house—in the middle of their half-over and suddenly empty lives. It was how Beth thought of their lives now, now that Darrin was gone and she could no longer say whether half-over was such a bad thing. When Darrin was young, Matthew had stayed up late making origami also, flitting from shape to shape, a turtle followed by a crocodile, a cat, a fish. These he hid inside their son’s favorite cereal and in the meat drawer of the refrigerator because Darrin had a fondness for cold cuts, both parents giddy with joy at watching their son discover a swan snuggled with an elephant, there atop his bologna.

Matthew did not mix animals, not anymore, for the whole point was to give himself, his hands, over to repetition. These creatures were not made in anticipation of a son’s delight; they had no purpose, no future either. For even as Matthew created them, his hands were already anticipating their destruction, finishing the final fold, then delivering them onto the pile that would become their funeral pyre. This was their morning routine now (and hadn’t Beth always liked routine?): Matthew sweeping the pile into a paper bag, taking the bag to the back patio, lighting it. He left the sliding door open, and the smell of burning paper wafted in, becoming their new morning smell, the smell—like coffee or bacon—that told Beth to wake up and face the day.

---

They met at a gay bar on the west side of Albuquerque, both of them straight, and later Beth wondered whether Matthew came up to her that night simply because, in a gay bar, straight people could pick each other out the way that gay people were said to be able to find one another in every other crowd. In fact, she had never asked him why he approached her that night, perhaps because she never quite got over needing to believe that he saw her there with her friends—the Sapphists, he later called them—and thought, Now that looks like an interesting person.

She was wearing glasses with owlish frames that did not flatter her face, for that was her goal back then—to be seen as the sort of woman who conspired against her own beauty. Matthew approached her as she stood at the bar trying to get the bartender’s attention. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you near or far?”

He’d meant her eyesight, but she just stared at him, wondering about his scar, a simple white line that emerged from his left eyebrow and continued upward.

“To what? From what?” she said at last, and he pointed at her glasses and said, “Your vision, four-eyes,” in a teasing, playground voice. “Are you near- or farsighted? I’m twenty-twenty, but that too can be a burden.” He sighed, as though struck by the ways that his

life had been made more difficult by perfect vision. She was just starting graduate school in linguistics, and she thought about how the Japanese and Chinese looked at a character and arrived at the same meaning yet articulated it with completely dif­ferent sounds. She recognized all of the sounds this man was making yet had no idea what he was trying to tell her.

“May I buy you a drink?” he asked, and he ordered her some sweet, green concoction involving Midori and pineapple juice. “It’s awful, isn’t it?” he said gleefully after she’d taken a sip. She nodded because it was. “But very tropical, don’t you think?” She nodded again. “When I graduate next year I plan to travel to lots of tropical places, so I’m getting myself in the mood.” He paused. “Maybe we’ll go together,” he said. The pause was what kept her from walking away right then, what assured her that he was not just some smooth talker who went around making preposterous suggestions to straight women in gay bars.

They stood in a corner away from the dance floor and talked. They were the same age, twenty-three, though she was starting a doctoral program while he was still struggling to finish his undergraduate degree in English, struggling because he was tired of having his reading dictated to him by a syllabus.

“I’m tone-deaf,” he announced then, as though listing reasons that she should consider getting to know him. “And I was portly as a child.”

She asked about his scar. He reached up and stroked it with his finger, and she noticed his hands. She had not known that one could find hands attractive. “It’s a rather boring tale,” he said, though over time she would learn that this was how he prefaced all of his favorite stories about himself. He went on to describe a pair of glasses that he had invented as a child—two plastic magnifying lenses held together with pipe cleaners and tape—which he’d worn while riding his bicycle one afternoon: down a hill and straight into a tree. But right up until the crash, it was a glorious feeling, everything rushing toward him, so close he should be able to touch it, though he knew better. He understood how magnifying glasses worked.

“Then how did you hit the tree?” she asked.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose that even our intellect fails us sometimes.”

Around midnight, Lance, Matthew’s best friend, approached them, dripping sweat from the dance floor. “This is Lance,” Matthew said. “He’s a rice queen.”

“What’s a rice queen?” she asked.

“It means he likes Asian guys,” Matthew said. “It’s a bit of a problem here in New Mexico.”

He and Lance laughed, the two of them collapsing with their arms around each other. Beth did not believe love happened in a flash, love at first sight and all that. Rather, she imagined it working something like a frequent-buyer card, ten punches and you were in love, and as she watched the two of them cackling like a pair of spinster sisters, she looked at Matthew and thought, This is the first punch.

---

Matthew grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. When he mentioned this to strangers, they assumed that his father had worked for the national labs, but his father had been a mailman. “Really?” these strangers always said, as though they could not imagine anything as unlikely as scientists receiving mail. Once, halfway through a shift, his father stopped at the post office to drop off several bags of mail and found the entire place shut down, men in white hazmat uniforms combing through the sorting area. “They told him to take the rest of the day off—no explanation—and I told him he should not go back to work until there was an explanation. I was twelve at the time, and he chuckled and said that the mail needs to be delivered, that when I was older I would understand about such things.”

Matthew told Beth this story to sum up the sort of man his father was. It was early in their relationship, and she noted how he sounded—at once proud and exasperated—which told her something about the sort of man Matthew was. In the picture he showed her, his parents looked more like grandparents; it was his high school graduation and they stood flanking him, looking pleased but slightly baffled by the occasion. His mother was sixty-two in the photo, his father sixty-eight. They had come to parenthood late.

A few weeks into his first semester of college, his parents’ neighbor phoned to tell him that his parents had driven the wrong way down the exit ramp of the interstate and into oncoming traffic. They were both dead. His father took that ramp every day for thirty-six years, so the mistake made no sense, but the doctor said—dismissively, Matthew felt—that these things happened when one got old. People became disoriented. Perhaps his father had had a stroke.

Matthew dropped out of college for the semester and took a job counting inventory. This was how he met Lance. They both lived in downtown Albuquerque and began driving to work together in the wee hours, which was when inventory was generally counted. Early on, they were sent to Victoria’s Secret, where the two of them counted every bit of lingerie in the store. Afterward they went to Milton’s diner for breakfast, and Lance looked down at his breakfast burrito and said that he was tired and bored after a night of counting women’s underwear. This was his way of revealing that he was gay. They each ordered a second burrito, and Matthew told Lance about his parents. It had been two months since the accident, but Lance was the first person to whom he had spoken of it. Lance had saved him during that first year after his parents died, Matthew told Beth. They were like brothers.

---

Matthew had learned to fold origami in preparation for their first trip abroad, their first trip together. Traveling would involve lots of waiting, he said, and it was always good to have some trick up your sleeve. He packed stacks of folding paper, from which he produced an endless menagerie, each cat and rooster snatched up by one of the children who pressed in shyly against them to watch him fold.

Once, on a bus in Guatemala, when he was out of paper, he took a dollar bill from his wallet and transformed it into a fish while the little girl across the aisle looked on. He pretended not to notice her interest, but when he was finished he swam the fish across the aisle and dropped it into her hands. Above them on the roof rode two boys no older than twelve, makeshift soldiers with rifles taller than they were. Beth had watched them climb on. They were all she could think about. She was twenty-four, not yet a mother, so she imagined only fleetingly the sorrow that the boys’ mothers must feel at seeing their sons already schooled in death. Mainly she considered them from her own perspective, the fear that she felt in this foreign land, knowing that right above her were two guns, their triggers guarded by fingers not yet skilled at shaving. As she watched Matthew fold, she wondered whether he did so to distract himself from the boys and their guns or whether he was like the girl, focused solely on the beauty of the fish taking shape before them.

---

It was a Saturday afternoon, Darrin’s junior year, and they were pestering him about taking the SAT. Finally he came out with it. “I want to travel,” he said. “I want to do a gap year.” He showed them the website for the program he had in mind: a ten-month trip around the world, working in the rain forest in one country, teaching English in another, while they stayed behind, paying a hefty sum for him to do so, to fly around the world dabbling in local economies. There would be adults, three teachers who would lead seminars, arrange details, and make themselves available by email to anxious parents.

Beth had never even heard of a gap year, but she didn’t like the sound of it, the way that it made Darrin’s future seem removed from them, made Darrin seem that way also. “I just need a year away from school, a year that doesn’t matter so much,” he said, and they kept quiet. But later, as she and Matthew lay in bed together, she said, “‘A year that doesn’t matter.’ How is that even possible?” Matthew laughed gently because he understood that she was afraid.

---

They—not Lance—were the ones who ended up in Asia, the last leg of a one-year trip through a host of hot countries. Matthew had graduated, finally, but Beth quit her program halfway through. Actually, she took a year off, but when she got out in the world and saw what was there, she could not go back. She had grown up in a small town in Wisconsin, and she understood only then that she had been about to exchange one small town for another: academia.

They had been together a year when they started their trip, but their relationship had never really entered the public realm, the realm of parties and shared errand-running, so Beth did not truly know who Matthew was out in the world. She learned on that trip that he talked to everyone. Using Thai or Spanish gleaned from guidebooks and taxi drivers, he conversed tirelessly about the weather and food, about where they were going and where they were from and whether they had children. Beth considered these questions either tedious or nobody’s business, often both, but Matthew did not see it that way. He was happy to tell people how much he loved rice, to say, over and over, that they were from New Mexico—“New Mexico. It’s in the United States.”—to explain that they had no children, yet. Matthew was at ease, in his body and in the world. Beth was not, but on the trip she learned to mime and gesture and even laugh at herself a bit.

One afternoon in Belize, four elderly Garifuna women lounging on a porch called to them as they passed in the street. Three of the women were large, but the fourth was as thin as a broom, and she sat slightly apart from the others, as though her thinness were something that they did not want to catch. The women were eating homemade fruit Popsicles, and Matthew immediately began flirting with the women, asking which of them might share. He pounded his chest to show he meant business, and the women laughed and told Beth that she had a handsome devil on her hands, waggling their fingers at her in warning.

“You two better come in and eat something,” said one of the fat women, and the four rose like a chorus about to sing.

It was the laugh of a man who was in love with her, who saw in her stiffness and reticence something exotic.

The women gave them rice and the leg of a stringy hen, with watermelon Popsicles for dessert. Later, they asked Beth and Matthew how young people danced these days up in their country, and Matthew pulled Beth up to demonstrate. The women clapped and sang, creating a rhythm that Beth willed her body to follow, and for a moment it seemed to, but the rhythm changed suddenly and her body went in the wrong direction. One of the women leaned forward and slapped Beth’s buttocks hard, while the others roared with laughter and shook their hands in front of their faces as though they had chili in their eyes. Matthew laughed also, a laugh that said, Buck up, four-eyes. This is life. Isn’t it great? It was the laugh of a man who was in love with her, who saw in her stiffness and reticence something exotic.

---

Mornings had always been their time as a couple, both before Darrin came along and after, for even as a baby, he had no interest in mornings. Sometimes she and Matthew leg wrestled—she got to use both legs—or Matthew brought her coffee in bed and the two of them sat propped against the pillows, talking quietly, wanting this time together, alone. What they had wanted, that is, was not to wake their son, and she wondered now how they could have ever done such a thing, plotted to have even one precious second less with him. But they had. They had reclined together in this same bed, giggling and covering each other’s mouths, saying, “Shhh, you’ll wake him.”

Other days Matthew woke up feeling loud. “I feel loud today,” he would say, loudly of course, and he would stand on the bed and sing one of the Bible camp songs from her childhood—“Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, lived in Judah a long time ago. They had funny names, and they lived far away”—songs that she had taught him in the early days of their relationship when she was first learning to let go and be silly around another human being. Or he would lie on his back with his arms and legs straight up in the air like a dead cockroach and belt out old Carpenters tunes. “I’m on the top of the world,” he sang as though he really meant it, for that was the thing about Matthew: he was never sheepish about acknowledging his happiness, did not believe that happiness should be discussed only in terms that were ironic or self-deprecating. Eventually Darrin would come running in, begging to be flown around atop Matthew’s extended legs while Beth watched and laughed and tried hard not to picture their son slipping from her husband’s feet, tumbling through the air, his head crashing into a bedpost.

Now, she and Matthew got out of bed each morning, still exhausted, and said standard morning things like “How’d you sleep?” They rose and dressed and went into the dining room, where the night’s origami awaited them, sometimes a hundred cranes or giraffes, piled up on the table: a heap of wings, a heap of necks.

---

The first month, Darrin emailed them almost daily, sending pictures of all the things he knew would interest them: his sleeping quarters and meals, his work and the other students, the

people and buildings that made up his days. He ended his messages with easy declarations of his love for them because that was the way the world was set up now—easy access to communication, easy declarations of love—and Beth was grateful for both. He rarely wrote more than a few sentences, but she could hear his voice in these quick updates filled with enthusiastic adjectives, for he was like Matthew in this way also, never embarrassed by his ease with superlatives, by the way that he declared her spaghetti “the absolute best” and her “the most wonderful mother in the world” for making it.

It was during the second stop on the itinerary—collecting plants in Belize for medical research—that the girl began appearing in his photos. She was plump with wildly curly hair and a careful smile. Because it was his way, Matthew emailed Darrin, asking about her, and Darrin wrote back days later, saying only that her name was Peru.

“Peru? Were her parents hippies?” Matthew wrote, and Darrin replied, again after what seemed a deliberate delay, “Missionaries.”

This, his one-word response without explication, troubled them. Was she religious, they wondered, and if she was, what did that mean for their son? Would he return speaking a language that they did not understand, his conversation laced with earnest euphemisms like “witness” and “abundance”? After years of worrying—with Beth imagining all the ways that they could lose him and Matthew steadfastly refusing to imagine any—was this what it came down to, that their son could simply grow up to be a man they did not recognize?

“Well, please be sure to have safe sex,” Matthew wrote next.

“No need to worry” came back their son’s reply, an ambiguous response that they also discussed far into the night: Did it mean that he was not having sex, or that he was but the sex was safe? Or was it simply his way of telling them to stop worrying, of declaring his adulthood?

---

On the plane from Thailand, they each made a list: on the left, cities that seemed appealing, and on the right, cities that did not. They were heading home, but they had not yet determined where home would be. Somewhere over what Beth thought was the Sea of Japan, they decided on Minneapolis. Beth worried that they were making the choice based on the overwhelming memory of heat, a year’s worth, but Matthew said so what if they were. Weren’t most choices made as reactions to something else? They were in love, but traveling had taught them that they were also well matched: they knew how the other responded to crisis and boredom; they could live together in a very small space yet not grow distant. The trip had left them broke but had also taught them that they did not need much, and so they rented a tiny apartment in Saint Paul, which was cheaper than Minneapolis.

They were in a new city, both of them working at their first real jobs, Matthew as a high school English teacher and Beth as a newspaper caption writer. It was a job that she both liked and did well, for she had the ability to look at a photograph, feel at once the narrative sweep of it, and sum it up in a few precise words. Each night, they lay in bed talking, just as they had through ten-hour bus rides and bouts of stomach ailments. Matthew dissected his day, celebrating his students’ successes one minute and bemoaning their lack of curiosity the next. Mainly Beth listened, preferring to talk about her day when it had gone well, keeping the small frustrations, which were a part of any job, a part of life, to herself. She distrusted how emotions sounded when put into words, the way that words could reduce the experience to something unrecognizable. It was like reading descriptions of wine, she decided, for when she uncorked the bottle and took a sip, she never thought, Ah, yes, quite right, nutty and corpulent and jammy.

---

Matthew wanted to meet her family now that they were only three hours away. Beth felt that relationships worked best when families were not involved. Early on, she had told him the story of her father and his brother, wanting Matthew to know that she trusted him, but the story had left him keen to meet her father. He was like many fathers, she said by way of blunting his interest, quiet and largely absent. He worked as an accountant in an office containing a desk and a coffeepot, and what she remembered most from her rare visits to him there were the stacks of cashew canisters along one wall—empties on the left and full on the right, like debit and credit columns—and the way that her father bent over his ledgers, nibbling one nut at a time, brushing salt from the page before turning it.

Each evening he came home at six and the family sat down to dinner, a silent affair because their father wanted them to focus on chewing and swallowing and, especially, on not choking, goals from which talking and frivolity would surely distract. Then he returned to his office, where he stayed until midnight, balancing the books of farmers and beauticians and storekeepers, all of whom trusted her father to keep them safe from financial ruin.

One night when Beth had just turned seventeen, after she had done something stupid and teenager-like—taken the family car out on a muddy road and gotten stuck so that she missed her curfew by four whole hours—her mother came into her room, where Beth was sulking over her father’s overreaction, which involved a six-month grounding. Her mother sat on the edge of the bed and took one of Beth’s feet in her hands, holding it awkwardly because they were not a demonstrative family.

“Well,” said her mother, “it’s time you learned about Thomas.”

Thomas was her father’s younger brother. Until that night, Beth had not even known that her father had a brother. “When your father was a boy, just eight years old,” her mother began, “he and Thomas were sent out in the front yard to play one Sunday afternoon. Thomas was four, so it was your father’s job to keep him occupied for an hour or two while your grandparents read. At first they made a pile of leaves, planning to jump in it, but it was a windy day and the leaves kept blowing away, so they decided to play hide-and-seek.”

Her mother had paused here, but then went on to describe how, as her father crouched behind a shrub while Thomas turned in slow circles in the yard, a brown car pulled up to the curb and a man got out. “He looked kind,” Beth’s father later told the police, words that had brought his mother to her knees on their kitchen floor.

The man stood for a moment on the sidewalk on the other side of the low fence that enclosed their yard, Beth’s hidden father watching. It was this image—the triangulated gaze—that haunted Beth: her father looking at the man, who was looking at Thomas; Thomas, who was looking for her father.

“Say,” the man called to Thomas. “Are you the little boy who lives here, the one who likes marshmallows so much?” The man extended his arm and opened his fist: a marshmallow rested in his palm like a tiny pillow.

Thomas turned and stared at the man, then made another halfturn, surveying the yard, torn between hide-and-seek and marshmallows. “Yes,” he said to the man, and the man opened the front gate, walked in, and picked him up. Beth’s father stood up from behind the shrub; the man stared at him for a moment, the way a magician might stare at a rabbit that he had not meant to conjure. Thomas’s pant leg was hiked up to his knee, his calf plump and white, the man’s hand wrapped around it like that of a butcher assessing a particularly meaty shank. The man smiled as he took his hand briefly from Thomas’s calf to wave goodbye to Beth’s father.

In the events that followed—going into the house to alert his parents, describing the man for the police—Beth’s father quickly understood that everyone considered him old enough to have been suspicious of the man, so it was not until years later that he told Beth’s mother, confessing this for the very first time, that he had stepped forward not to stop the man from taking his brother but to say, “I like marshmallows, too.”

In her bedroom that night, Beth had promised her mother that she would never tell anyone about Thomas, especially not her siblings, and she never had, until Matthew. When Matthew finally did meet her parents, he was disappointed to find her father just as she had described, a man whose conversation and demeanor did not reflect a childhood of unspoken guilt. Instead, her father engaged Matthew in “men’s talk,” offering detailed explanations of the way that gadgets worked, which was precisely the sort of thing that Matthew hated.

“Say, I bet you haven’t seen one of these,” her father said, showing him the front door lock that he had installed when Beth was young. The lock resembled a rotary telephone, on which she and her siblings had dialed their way into the house. Their friends had all coveted the lock, but Beth and her siblings regarded it as a reproach, proof that their father did not trust them with keys. Their mother had claimed that he installed it because he could not bear the thought of them locked out, waiting in the yard, and only later did Beth understand that her mother was right.

Each time she dialed the lock with her brother and sister standing impatiently behind her, she wanted to tell them about Thomas, but she never did, and she wondered now whether this—maintaining a secret of such magnitude—was what had made her distant from her siblings. Lately, she found herself wanting to call them and confess, but she sensed in this impulse something selfish: she would be offering her father’s secret in order to obtain an audience for her own sorrow. In truth, she had no idea what she wanted from anyone now, except to be left alone.

---

When they had been in Saint Paul a year, Beth learned that she was pregnant, and they began hurtling down the slippery slope of adulthood. The wedding happened quickly, during their lunch breaks, but it took them months to find the right house. They toured a Victorian owned by an elderly couple, the Enquists, who had lived in it for forty-two years but were moving to North Platte, Nebraska, to be near their son, who owned a bar there. The Enquists wrinkled their noses as they spoke, as though something smelled bad—owning a bar, North Platte, being near their son. It was probably everything—the combined facts of leaving their home—but Beth and Matthew did not want to think about the old couple’s unhappiness because their own happiness demanded it. They knew that this was the house for them.

That night they were both too excited to sleep, so they lay curled up in bed together, attempting to inventory the house from memory, its closets and windows and electrical outlets. Finally Beth dozed off, awakening with a start when Matthew jumped up and down on the bed beside her, waving a piece of paper—an offer letter filled with embarrassingly intimate expressions of their love for the house and their desire to make love in the house. He had used words such as “enamored” and “smitten,” had described the appliances as “sexy,” the molding as “bewitching.” In closing, he had written, “We beseech you to accept our offer.”

She remembered even now—especially now—how she had

stared at Matthew, who looked strange in the predawn light, unfamiliar, how she had thought, not entirely at ease with the fact, This man is my husband.

Though she wanted to say, “These are old people. This is Minnesota. Don’t you want the house?” she said simply, “It’s a lovely letter, Matthew.” He smiled and bounced onto his knees on the bed. “I’ll take care of it,” she said, implying that she would deliver the letter, but at work that morning, in between captions, she rewrote it, stripping it down to the basics of money and time frames and expectations.

The baby that she was carrying inside of her, a boy whom they were planning to name Malcolm, never saw the inside of this house that they purchased for him, never hung his clothes in the closets that they had lain in bed tallying up, never got scolded for forgetting to do so. When Beth was six months pregnant, she stepped on a patch of ice on the sidewalk outside their new house and went down hard, trying to break her fall with her right arm. She was in the emergency room having her arm set when the bleeding began.

A year went by, a year during which they did not talk about children or pregnancies or the treachery of ice, but the following winter they broached the topic of having a child, another child, their conversations tentative, circling the subject, until one night Matthew took her hand and said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking that we should adopt. It’s selfish to think we need to re-create ourselves.” Beth felt the same way, but there was a part of her—a small part, but a part—that believed what Matthew was really saying was that he did not trust her to deliver a child safely into the world.

About Darrin’s origins they knew very little, except that he was Canadian. They went up to Winnipeg on a Tuesday, signed all sorts of forms, and drove home with him that evening, in the course of one day crossing borders and becoming parents. It was winter again, and Beth drove while Matthew sat in the back with Darrin, singing to him and reporting everything, every clenched hand and grimace, every aspect of their son’s face, so that by the time they got back to Saint Paul, they both knew him as intimately as if his features were their own.

---

She left her job because she wanted to have those first years with him, wanted to watch him sleep and to feed him sweet potatoes and pears that she chose from the bins at the produce stand and pureed in the blender, combing through the pap with a fork to find the chunks that he could choke on. She had imagined that she would go back to work when he was two, three at the latest, but by then she had come to realize what a minefield the world was—cords dangling tantalizingly within reach, furniture corners like Sirens wooing the most tender parts of him as he ran drunkenly through the house—and she couldn’t leave.

Sometimes, when fear overwhelmed her, she tried to pull back, to take a mental snapshot of the scene unfolding in front of her and produce a pithy line of text for it, and sometimes this even worked and she could see the events for what they were: small, happy moments. Boy, six, learns to ride bicycle without gouging out eye. Birthday boy blows out candles without igniting hair. Tuba player, fourteen, marches in parade without collapsing under the weight of instrument. She understood that an uneventful day was, in fact, the sum of the many moments that could have veered toward tragedy—but did not.

She understood that an uneventful day was, in fact, the sum of the many moments that could have veered toward tragedy—but did not.

Before she pricked potatoes for the oven, she sent Darrin off to his room. She didn’t want him getting ideas about forks. And if he was allowed to watch, she made a point of screaming “Ow!” each time she sank the fork into a potato. “He’s going to think you’re torturing it,” Matthew said as he stood in the kitchen one evening, drinking wine and observing this ritual. “Is that what you want?”

“It’s better than him stabbing himself with a fork,” she said, as though they had been presented with these two options for their son—sadism or masochism—and made to choose.

Their son spent hours stacking dominoes into neat piles, piles that he toppled explosively but with a giggle, enjoying the fickle sense of power that this stirred in him. Beth liked the dominoes also, not just their ability to enthrall her son but the sound that they made in doing so, the steady clicking like the beating of his heart. On the evening of his third birthday, as she closed the oven door on yet another set of wounded potatoes, she became aware of the house’s stillness and walked fast—running would only frighten him—down the hallway to Darrin’s room, where she found his dominoes stacked in orderly towers, but no Darrin. Him she found on the bathroom counter, kneeling in front of the open medicine cabinet, an empty bottle of shoe polish in his hands, the white polish that she had used to keep his baby shoes in order.

“Milk,” he said, smiling at her sweetly, white parentheses framing his mouth.

In the emergency room, after he had been made to vomit and the doctor assured them that he was fine, Darrin giggled while Matthew rubbed his belly like a magic lamp. Beth could not laugh, not even when Matthew said, “Look, Darrin. Mommy’s still wearing her apron.” Instead, she drew her coat around her tightly as though it had been pointed out that she was naked.

“Don’t you ever get worried?” she asked Matthew later, when the three of them were back home and she and Matthew were in bed, lying on the mattress that remembered the shapes of their bodies so perfectly that she thought maybe she had been silly to be that frightened.

“That’s your job,” he said, moving against her in the dark.

But later, after they had made love and fallen asleep, Matthew awakened her to say, “We guard him in our dif­ferent ways, you know. You keep him safe by visualizing every bad thing that could happen to him, as though—I don’t know—you think that you can control it somehow, contain it to your mind. But I can’t bear that, can’t bear living with those images, so my job is to pretend that the thought of them never even enters my mind.”

He began to sob, and she held him, thinking about the tenderness with which he had rubbed their son’s belly. “I know,” she said, for she did know. She understood that fear, like love, took many forms, that it did not have to manifest itself in just one way to be real, and Matthew lay beside her sobbing as though he were confessing an infidelity and not that he, too, loved their son so much that he could hardly bear it.

---

His emails became less frequent, less effusive, and they did not know whether this was because his girlfriend now commanded his attention or because he did not trust them to understand the details of his new life. In fact, they would never know. One morning when he had been gone six months, as they were drinking coffee and Matthew was singing in his loud, off-key voice, the phone rang.

“This is Peru,” whispered the voice on the other end.

“Peru?” said Beth.

“I’m one of your son’s teachers. On the trip?”

“His teacher?” Beth said. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh my God,” said the woman, for Beth thought of her that way now—as a woman. “I can’t do this.” She began to sob.

“Hello?” said Beth, but the sobbing grew distant.

“What is it?” Matthew asked, standing up from the table and coming over to her. Beth shook her head.

A man came on the line then, another teacher, who identified himself as Rob. This man Rob explained to her that their son was dead, electrocuted in the swimming pool of their hotel in Chiang Mai just a few hours earlier. “The students were finished giving English lessons for the day, and Darrin and a few of the other guys were in the pool having a beer.” He paused. “An electrical box fell into the water.”

Rob waited for her to speak. She wanted to ask, “Why were eighteen-year-olds drinking beer?” and, “Why was there an electrical box above the pool?” and, most of all, “Why was my son sleeping with one of his teachers?” But in the end she said only, “And the other boys?”

“They’re okay. Darrin was closest to the box,” said this stranger, Rob. “Listen, if it’s any comfort, the doctor said that he died instantly.”

It was not a comfort. How could there be comfort in the word “instantly,” in any word that meant her son had lived even one second less on this earth?

Matthew took the telephone then. She was vaguely aware of him discussing details, two men taking care of business, but then he said, “No, I’m coming for him,” and everything about Matthew—his voice, his body, his heart—seemed to break into pieces right in front of her.

He told her that he could go to Thailand alone, but she would not hear of it: they had picked up their son together at the beginning of his life, and she would not consider doing any less at the end. She explained this as she wiped off the counters and washed out their coffee mugs, but when she turned, looking for the dish towel, she saw that Matthew was sitting at the table wearing it over his head like a small tent into which he had disappeared to be alone with his grief.

---

They did not tell anyone that they were going, except for the cat sitter, to whom they said only that there was an emergency in Thailand. Beth knew that she should call her parents, but she remembered the way that the conversation about Thomas had ended all those years ago. “Did they ever find him?” Beth had asked, meaning did they find a body, for she understood that nobody had ever seen Thomas alive again. “No,” her mother had said. “And let me tell you, for a parent, not knowing has got to be the worst thing.” Beth knew now that her mother had been wrong, that there was something far worse than not knowing—and that was knowing that her son lay, unequivocally dead, in a hospital somewhere in Thailand.

Later, after they had booked a flight, they went into the bedroom and began to pack, their suitcases lying open at the foot of the bed like two giant clams. They had not spoken of their individual conversations with Rob, had not compared notes in order to create a complete account of their son’s death. They had not talked of anything but the logistics of getting to Thailand, of getting their son home.

“Why was he drinking?” she asked Matthew, hurling the question at his back as he filled his own suitcase, and then, “I want this woman arrested. I want her to pay.”

Beth lay down on the bed, placing her feet inside her own halfpacked suitcase, and began to cry.

Matthew sat beside her, holding his hand to her cheek. “We need to take comfort in knowing that his last days, his last minutes even, were happy ones,” he said.

He sounded like a minister or a therapist, someone schooled in the art of discussing other people’s pain, and she wanted to tell him so, wanted to say, “You see?” for she had been right all these years and now he was proving it, proving how inadequate words were.

---

The final punch in Beth’s falling-in-love card had come in Thailand, at the end of their hot-countries tour. They flew from Jakarta to Malaysia, spending an afternoon in Kuala Lumpur before getting on the night train. In Thailand they bought tickets for a ferry that would shuttle them out to an island whose name Beth could no longer recall; the ticket sellers had considered demand but not supply in offering the tickets, and when the ferry began to load, it was clear that there were not enough seats.

“Next ferry tomorrow,” called out one of the young ferry workers, blocking the gangplank, but he gestured at the flat, empty roof of the boat to indicate that it was an option.

“Let’s do it,” Matthew said. Already, disappointed travelers had begun to jump from the dock down onto the ferry’s roof.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “Have you not heard of something called ‘weight capacity’?”

Matthew bent as though to kiss her but instead bit her nose, hard.

“Ow!” she cried out, and he laughed and tossed their backpacks onto the roof of the ferry, leaping down after them and turning to offer his hand. Nearly since they met, Matthew had been declaring his love, to which she always replied, “Good Lord,” or “Heavens,” intentionally prim responses that made both of them laugh and bought her time, but when she jumped down beside him that day, they both knew that she was nearly there.

The last punch happened two days later on a snorkeling trip with thirteen other tourists. She remembered the other passengers well: a young British woman who vomited uncontrollably and several French boys who laughed at her until Matthew explained to them that they were not helping matters, sounding so reasonable that the boys stopped immediately. There were Germans and a family from Brazil, about whom she had wondered why they would come this far to be in another hot, wet place. Three Thai boys ran the boat, one driving and the other two tending to the passengers’ needs, bringing the vomiting woman a pail, picking the Brazilian children up and pretending they were going to toss them overboard. They said nothing to Beth, though they made small talk with Matthew, asking whether he liked to fish and how much his watch had cost. The driver multitasked as he drove, eating and turning to joke with the other two, even pulling his T-shirt off over his head—all without slowing down. He struck her as the sort of young man who would only become more reckless when presented with fear, particularly a woman’s, so she said nothing, her face set to suggest calm, though Matthew, who knew better, rested his hand on her knee.

It took them nearly two hours to reach the cove. They were supposed to spend the day there, but around one, the young Thai men began to round everyone up, pointing at the ocean, which had become a roiling gray, and at the dark clouds suspended over it. They departed hastily, a forgotten snorkeling mask bobbing near the shore behind them.

That morning, everyone had conversed happily in English, but the storm made them nationalistic, each group reverting to its own language. The waves grew higher, the passengers quieter, and when they hit a particularly big wave, everyone flew up in the air and came down hard, landing atop one another and making a collective “umph” of surprise and fear. The two Thai stewards pointed into the distance, where an object bobbed on the waves, and as they got nearer Beth could see that it was a boat filled with the same configuration of young Thai men and tourists, except this boat was not moving forward, bucking the waves; it rose and fell listlessly while the people on board screamed and waved their arms.

On Beth’s boat the two stewards huddled around the driver, who had been so cocky speeding across the water that morning but now looked tired and very young. They were arguing, she knew, and the driver finally wrenched the wheel, turning their boat toward the stranded one.

“We can’t take everyone,” called out one of the Germans, a woman who had refused to stop smoking even as her lit cigarettes pocked the arms and legs of those around her each time the boat hit a wave, “or we will all die.” She said it in English, the w’s becoming dramatic v’s, and then she took a long drag on her cigarette and glared.

At first, nobody spoke, and then Matthew said, “Look, there’s room.” He wiggled closer to Beth, and the others followed his example. The driver maneuvered their boat parallel to the stranded one, and a steward from that boat, a young man—they were all so young!—with an owl tattoo on his left bicep, instructed the men to link hands across the water.

“Why don’t we tie the boats?” asked one of the French boys, and the steward explained that they needed to break free quickly when a big wave came or the two boats might be slammed together and destroyed.

Only then did the passengers on the stranded boat seem to realize what was expected of them: that they were to perch on the edge of their boat as it lurched beneath them and then leap across the gap to safety. A few cried, but one by one they jumped, collapsing into the arms of those on the other side. Every few minutes, someone called out “Wait!” or “Quickly!” and the men dropped hands and let the boats surge apart.

On the deck of the other boat sat a woman flanked by two young children, a baby in her lap. She was dressed as though for a job interview, and atop her bosom a large cross bounced. She screamed at her husband in what sounded like Swedish, and though Beth did not know Swedish, she knew what the woman was saying. When the husband grew tired of pleading with her, he picked up the oldest child and carried him over to the side, where he stood for a moment, lips moving, before leaning out over the churning water with his son and letting him go into the hands of the French boys on the other side.

He did the same with the second child, but when he reached for the baby, the mother would not let go. “No, we will die here together,” she screamed, in English this time because she wished to include everyone in her terror. After her husband had pried the baby loose, she sat with her head in her hands, refusing to look as her husband leaned out for the third time, offering the baby, their baby, into the outstretched arms of the French boys. As he let go, a giant wave flung the boats apart, the clasped hands slipping from one another like sand.

Later, the father, sobbing, would say that he had heard King Solomon whispering in his ear, “Let go of your son.” As he told this story, the baby rested in his arms, mother and siblings on either side, a family reunited. Beth sat beside Matthew, who looked sheepish yet pleased by the rounds of applause in his honor, for in that half second after the baby had been released, Matthew’s hand shot into the gap and caught him by his chubby leg. Even as the boat bucked mightily, he held on, held on as though nothing but life were possible.

---

Lying in their bed listening to Matthew fold origami night after night, Beth does not cry. Crying happens during the day, when every sight and sound reminds her of Darrin: the hole in the wall from an arrow that he had not meant to release; the creak of the refrigerator door; the tubes of toothpaste in a brand that only Darrin liked, sitting in a drawer unused, useless. Today, she goes into his room and vacuums for the first time since he left a year and a half ago. When she is finished, she panics and rips the vacuum bag open on the hallway floor outside his room, sifts through the compressed pile of dirt and dust, looking for something—a hair, a thread from a favorite shirt, a sliver of dead skin, a fingernail chewed off and spit onto the carpet, the lint from between his toes. Some piece of him.

She falls asleep there on the floor, curled up around the vacuum bag as though it were Gertrude, their cat. When she awakens she does not open her eyes right away, but she knows time has passed, can tell that the sun has shifted and is about to disappear. She knows also that someone is sitting beside her. Matthew. She can feel the weight of his hand on her calf. They have not touched like this since before the phone call from Thailand, touched in a way that is not about passion—though there has been none of that either—or practicality, passing the salt and emptying the dishwasher, but that is simply about the intimacy of every day. Then, as though Matthew senses that she is awake, his hand is gone.

“You think I drove him away,” she says softly. “That I worried too much.” Her eyes are still closed. She hears him breathing and finally the slight intake that means he is about to answer.

“No,” he says. He sounds tired, all those nights of sitting up, folding origami. “I don’t think that.” He pauses, sighs. “The truth is that I don’t think at all. I teach, and I grade papers, and I smile at the other teachers to let them know that it’s okay when I catch them laughing. I stop and put gas in the car on the way home from school every Friday.”

In her pocket are the pieces of Darrin that she picked out of the vacuum cleaner bag—a curly black hair that could only be his and some dried mud he’d dragged in from an all-night graduation party. She knows that if she opens her eyes, she will see Matthew rubbing his scar, as he does when he is thinking, the scar that she had asked him about all those years ago in the gay bar the night they met, when he told her about the bliss of riding his bicycle down the road wearing magnifying-glass spectacles, the world so close, so deceptive. “Have you spoken to Lance?” she asks, because she cannot think of that night without Lance.

“I talked to him last week,” he says. She thinks about the last year, how she knows nothing of what her husband’s days have entailed—lunches eaten, books read, people talked to.

“How is he?”

“Lance is Lance,” he says. “He’s still in Albuquerque, still waiting for the perfect Asian man to come along, still counting inventory, if you can believe it. He sends his love.”

She never understood Lance—with his degree in political science—counting cans at Albertsons. She recalls all the times that she and Matthew, smug in their own lives, offered commentary on Lance’s, saying things like “How’s he going to meet someone when he spends his life aspiring to nothing more than counting inventory?”

“Poor Lance,” she says, and she means it, but then it occurs to her that she no longer has the right to feel sorry for Lance, Lance who wants more than anything to meet someone, to settle down and just be together.

“He’s pretty amazing, though,” Matthew says. “He can walk into a 7-Eleven, look around, and predict within two hundred dollars how much merchandise they have on hand.”

“I guess that’s why he stays,” Beth says.

“What do you mean?” Matthew says.

“To have that kind of certainty,” she says. Her eyes are still closed.

“Or that kind of fear,” Matthew adds and then falls silent.

The day of the funeral, Matthew’s hands rested atop their son’s coffin, side by side, as though the coffin were a piano that he would soon begin to play. His hands were what had first attracted her all those years ago, the unchewed nails and the veins rising up across the backs. They had seemed at once sexy and capable. She remembers how they came from nowhere that day at sea, grabbing the baby from the gap, and how she had mistaken this as a sign of how their lives would always be.

She begins to sob, quietly at first, but then more loudly, and she waits for Matthew to say something, to try for the right words. “He was the absolute best,” she says finally. “The A1 most amazing son in the world.”

Matthew laughs, and the sound startles her here in their silent house. She feels his hand on her ankle, tentative but holding on. She does not know whether it is pulling her down or up toward the surface, but she opens her eyes and does not move away.