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By Root 1051 0

him, shooing her back, hissing, “Call the police,” for here he saw the books pulled down from the shelves, some scattered and others stacked or lying mysteriously open. In the kitchen, the drawers were pulled out, utensils dumped, cabinets raided, glassware broken. Down the long hallway, the paintings and prints were torn down, their frames shattered; in the bedroom, the books were tumbled as well, the closets rifled, the dresser and bedside tables overturned. Only then did they truly feel the violation, even though nothing appeared to have been taken. Nothing, of course, but their sense of security; nothing, he thought, and Pepin didn’t tell Alice this, until he noticed his computer was on, his password somehow cracked, and the end of his novel had been cut, stolen, the external hard drive as well. And in the bathroom, after he heard Alice moan in disgust, he entered to find the medicine cabinet open, her pill bottles lying in the sink and on the floor, and the rim of the toilet dotted with a viscous substance—as yellow by now as wood glue—and floating in the bowl, drifting into formlessness like cloud writing, where the spunk of the intruder made a ghostly, jagged M. Impossible, Pepin thought.

“What’ve you been doing?” she now asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

She crossed her arms and looked at her feet, then turned suddenly as if she heard something and sighed. “The strangest thing happened to me today,” she said.

The air was so bad between them Pepin couldn’t tell if she even wanted him to ask, so he took a pull at his drink.

“I think,” she said, “that someone tried to kill me.”

It took him a second for it to register.

“What did you say?”

She lowered her voice. “You heard me.”

“I know,” he said, “but what do you mean?”

That sounded like the beginning of a fight. They’d arrived at a state of communication where every last utterance did. You tried to hold on, to last it out, but he felt a seaman’s certainty about this storm.

“You’re going to say I’m imagining it,” she said.

He let the back of his head slump against the couch.

“I was there this morning,” she said.

The narcissism of depression, Pepin thought. He’d have to tease the most basic of basics out of her. “Where?”

“That accident.”

“Which one?”

“The crane.”

He lifted his head. “On Ninety-first?”

“Yes.”

He sat forward.

“On my run this morning,” she said, “I was jogging toward it—I mean the building they were working on—and looked up as I got close. And I swear it was only a second before I got under it that I heard these two pops, like charges going off, and I thought I saw puffs of smoke on the tower itself. And suddenly the crane’s tipping, falling toward me, but I wasn’t sure, like when you look up at a skyscraper and because of the clouds there’s that illusion that the building’s collapsing. It was so slow at first, then people started screaming and I ran down the block as fast as I could. And when it hit, the impact blew me off my feet.” She shivered. “It barely missed me,” she said.

It was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime eyewitness near miss. At work he’d been watching the live feed on his computer all day. Bizarrely, he’d even thought of calling Alice to make sure she was all right. He didn’t, though. That would mean they’d have to talk. “But it doesn’t mean someone tried to kill you,” he said.

“That wasn’t the only thing that happened,” she said glumly.

Then she told him about the train, the subway ride to Grand Central during her commute. Two boys were rough-housing on the edge of the platform, and when the train came barreling into the station there was an accidental push. Alice spun round, doing a crazy backstroke over the void. “I just barely caught my balance,” she said.

“But that doesn’t mean those kids were trying to kill you,” Pepin said, his heart racing. He was terrified, furious. He wanted to laugh and cry.

“It wasn’t the kids. There was … ” She looked down, her hands trembling as she wiped her eyes. “There was this man too. This little man. He pushed them. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to break them up or push them toward me.