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By Root 1054 0

above his bed, the room so quiet she could hear their balsa forms clacking lightly against one another on the draft. Chip was asleep, on his back, the brace straps fastened across his chin and forehead. He looked exactly like Sam when he was asleep, though the brace held his mouth open slightly, and she unfastened the buckles and removed the apparatus, the belts leaving red imprints on his face that looked like tribal paint. “Chip,” she said, pressing a palm to his arm. “Chip, wake up.” He didn’t react. She poked him twice in the ribs. “Chip! Hello, Chip!” It was like he was dead, and now she had to do what she hated doing: she took him by the shoulders and shook him so hard, almost lifting his little body off the bed, that it was as if she were smashing him against a wall. “Chip, please, wake up!” The boy whined painfully—she thought he might cry—but was awake now. He opened his eyes, saying nothing, his expression sour. “Let’s get you dressed,” she said. She sat him up, pulling him by the arms so his head hung back, balancing him, then turning him around so his feet hung over the side of the bed. He stayed hunched there for a moment, his eyes still closed, his chin pressed to his chest, his palms turned up to the ceiling like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

We’ll just go about our day, Marilyn thought as she dressed him. We have a lot to do, a lot to keep on our mind, and that’s how we’ll proceed. She looked at the clock by his bed. It was almost nine forty and she hadn’t accomplished a thing, and once Chip had eaten breakfast it was half past ten and Sam still hadn’t called. Chances were he was very busy. He’d told her the night before he was booked solid, that he was going to try to squeeze in all his appointments before two, so it was best to leave him alone. She left Chip playing in his room while she straightened up the living room and the kitchen, spot cleaned the guest bathroom, then walked back down to the boathouse to tackle that job but at the sight of it turned around in disgust and thought she’d try the hospital just once more, changing her mind when she picked up the phone. She snuck another cigarette on the patio. By the time she’d packed up Chip into the car to go to the supermarket, it was eleven thirty. Backing out of the driveway, she realized she’d forgotten her list. She went back in the house, found it in the kitchen, looked at the phone, and then dialed it.

“I found him,” Donna said. “I gave him the message.”

“Thank you,” Marilyn said. She’d closed her eyes and was pinching the bridge of her nose. “Is he there now?”

“He stepped out.”

She looked at her watch. “For lunch?”

“He didn’t say.”

They waited, and any relief she felt was immediately obliterated. “Well,” she finally said, “as long as he got the message.”

“I gave it to him in the flesh.”

“Did he say when he’d be back?”

“He just said soon.”

Later, as she and Chip drove into town, Marilyn reflected on how little she really knew about her husband’s schedule—and, in turn, how little he knew about hers. In fact, as long as she had got everything done that he expected, he didn’t give her daily movements a thought. She could go anywhere right now because she was operating under his presumption. She drove down Lake Road, studying the drivers in the oncoming lane. Where were these men and women off to? Did their husbands or wives know? Were they where they were supposed to be or was everyone sneaking around? And what if she did? She had, if anything, greater latitude than Sam, and if she chose to could enjoy even more convenient forms of deception because in the past he’d predicated his deceptions on her absences. When they lived in California and he was in med school, he’d had most of his dalliances during her trips back to Cleveland; once they returned home, he’d done most of his slinking around in the odd hours of emergency calls, at lunch hours, coming back from work. His affairs must have been so rushed, so hurried, because he’d had to fit them in only when he could plausibly claim to have been somewhere else. As for her, she