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By Root 1052 0

room, the curtains floating as gently as the tentacles of jellyfish. He called her name, but the terror he felt made breathing difficult. He was sure she’d stepped out onto the veranda and jumped, so sure that after getting up he was afraid to lean over the side and look. He could imagine her body down there, white and undiscovered under the moon. It would not, he thought, be such a bad way to die, and considered it for a moment himself. He imagined the fall. He could imagine the peace it might bring; how long would the fall take? He wondered too what it would be like to return home without her, without anything: the plane ride back, the cab to the apartment, opening the door and stepping inside. What would it be like never to hear her voice again? A kind of loneliness, he supposed, from what he was feeling now, the kind that was nearly self-canceling, a loneliness he couldn’t conjure up. In love, you could never remember what it was like to want it. In love, it was impossible to conceive of the other truly being gone. As for the coming of a child, you couldn’t prepare your heart for it. There was nothing to know until it happened. It was all new.

He went downstairs to look for her. The shops were closed, the gates down. In the lobby, a Japanese clerk was doing paperwork at the front desk. She looked at David, smiled too brightly for the hour—past three in the morning—and went back to her job. A Hawaiian man buffed the floors. In the lounge, a clerk was already setting up coffeemakers, restocking condiments, and pushing a cart on which there were newspapers from all over the world. David stepped out onto the large terrace, the one that overlooked the dolphin lagoon, and spotted Alice on the walkway below.

She was leaning against the fence that surrounded the two pools, her chin resting on her crossed arms. He knew she could hear him coming, and when he stood next to her she didn’t speak. It was humid, but cool. Even in the dark, he could see the goose bumps on her arms. He leaned against the fence as well and waited, too afraid to try to hold her. Occasionally the dolphins surfaced, gray figures on black water, making small jet sounds as they exhaled.

“I don’t think I can go back,” she said.

“Back where?”

“Home.”

He wondered for a moment if these animals, so long around people, shared the same curiosity that humans felt about them.

“Would you stay here?” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. But I’m terrified of our apartment. I had a dream about us walking in there, and it woke me up.”

“Why?”

“Because when we left he was inside me.”

They didn’t speak for a minute or two.

“Would you take me with you?” David asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He could feel the dolphins swim by: a pulse of energy that didn’t even disturb the water’s surface, except for a slight wake you noticed only when little waves rose suddenly up the rocks lining the shallows. They never seemed to break the surface, merely spreading it gently, like curtains, over their heads and backs. “What was it like?” he asked.

“What?”

“Being pregnant.”

“What do you mean?”

“The feeling.”

He recalled what Harold had told him about listening. There were, of course, different versions of this—or, rather, all sorts of unheard sounds: a lazing dog exhaling while waiting for you to call it; the silence of a room after a fight; the sound of a stadium where people were leaving before a loss; toys waiting in a playroom for the child; the book on the shelf that’s been whispering to you. He heard Alice relax, as if whatever was roiling within her had stopped churning for a moment.

“It was like you were special,” she said. “I don’t know how else to describe it. But it was like the world was better. You had something inside you that made you more alive.”

If he were struggling to speak with her, she was struggling to look at him.

“I want to go to bed,” she said.

In the morning, they slept late. David ordered coffee and suggested they get something to eat.

“Good,” she said, “I’m starving.”

The front desk called to confirm their