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By Root 512 0

chest incision would reveal, who was plagued by his daughters’ vulnerability, both to illness and to accidents of all kinds. He was still haunted by an incident in the cafeteria of the Museum of Natural History, when Monika, a year old, had nearly choked on a piece of dried apricot. A woman at a neighboring table who happened to be a nurse had leapt up at the sound of Monika’s coughing and efficiently swept her finger through the girl’s mouth; in spite of two years of medical school, Amit lacked the simple instinct, the confidence, to do such a thing. He had been unable to look at either of his daughters for the rest of the day, to enjoy their time at the museum. He kept picturing the apricot piece lodged in Monika’s windpipe, and how it might have silenced her forever. When he read articles in the newspaper about taxis suddenly swerving onto sidewalks and killing half a dozen pedestrians, it was always himself he pictured, holding Monika and Maya by the hand. Or he imagined a wave at Jones Beach, where he had been taking them once a week during the summer, dragging one of them down, or a pile of sand suffocating them as he was flipping, a few feet away, through a magazine. In each of these scenarios, he saw himself surviving, the girls perishing under his supervision. Megan would blame him, naturally, and then she would divorce him, and all of it, his life with her and the girls, would end. A brief glance in the wrong direction, he knew, could toss his existence over a cliff.

He lay down his razor and turned on the shower to warm up the room. He heard a knock, and then Megan opened the door.

“I can’t go to the wedding,” she said, shaking her head. She said this definitively, the way she told the girls that they weren’t allowed to watch another program on television, or spend another five minutes in the tub.

“What are you talking about?”

“Look,” she said, pointing to the skirt she’d put on. Above it she wore only her bra, flesh-colored and dingy at the straps. The skirt reached her ankles, and it was made of a diaphanous, smoky gray material, layered over a silk panel of a slightly darker shade. She held up a section, and his eyes went immediately to a spot in the fabric. At first he thought it was a stain, but then he realized it was a burn that had created a small empty patch, charred around the edges. Beneath it, the silk lining looked unsightly, like the bright flesh exposed when a scab is forcibly lifted away.

“It looks awful,” she said. “There’s no way to hide it.”

“Did you pack a spare outfit?”

She shook her head, looking at him with annoyance. “Did you?”

Amit wiped his hands on a towel and sat on the lid of the toilet seat. Running his hands between the two layers of fabric, he felt the gauzy material brushing his palm, the silk at the back of his fingers. In medical school he’d considered being a surgeon, learning to piece together the most minuscule tissues of the body. But he’d never made it to any rotations, had only learned from textbooks and labs. As far as he could see there was no hope for repairing the skirt. It was so simple, so sheer, that the missing patch, through which the pad of one of his fingers was now visible, had ruined it.

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice when I was packing,” Megan said. “It must have happened the last time I wore it. Sparks from a cigarette or something.”

He knew it wasn’t her fault, and yet he couldn’t stop himself from blaming her a little, for not paying closer attention. And he couldn’t help but wonder if it was an unconscious move on her part, to avoid Pam’s wedding, to sabotage things. It occurred to him that with the excuse of Megan’s skirt they might blow off the wedding altogether and spend the night in the hotel, watching movies in bed. Their absence would go unnoticed in such a big crowd, their place settings ignored as the waiters circled the tables. Had the Chadwick Inn been nicer he might have been tempted.

“Is there a store nearby?” Megan asked. “Somewhere I could dash out and buy something else while you get ready?”

“There used to be a mall, but it