They held hands even on the brick sidewalks. They hurried at the start, not because they thought that anyone would be waiting, or worried. They hurried because the early London morning was dank in the shadows and they were chilled. Because when you are seven and eight and you have just been freed from the smoke-laden air of a museum flat where there is no chocolate milk and cold sheets press down on you and even the English muffins are strange, you hurry.

They had burst from their grandmother’s door. The younger sister leapt over the bottommost of the wide marble steps. They grasped hands. Not slowing, though. Their backpacks whumped from side to side as they outraced smoke-stinky drapes and the hallway full of old tapestries, the last of which said don’t look, don’t look, or the huge three-headed griffon ripping the bloody stumpy legs right off the little faun will be ingrained forever in your mind. The elder sister outran the moment in the inky depths of night when she awoke alone, small heart thudding as the massive armoire against the wall failed to make the blackness familiar. But the smoke reek was lodged in their noses. The stench had wormed into the very fibers of a favorite blue cardigan. The braid that the younger sister brought forward, smooth and cool across her cheek, tasted like ashes.

Careening around the corner, though, they found themselves on Kensington Park Road. The street was green, new with dewy glinty trees. Yellow sunlight made the girls slow. One sister tugged the other’s hand and there over the grate, they squatted. Soaky radiance warmed small curved backs. A great clang made the younger look up from the black rushing water under them. But it was nothing. It was someone’s old maid banging the bottom of a copper pot to scare life back into a dead bird. It was Big Ben, or the way that car horns claxoned here in the United Kingdom. It was nothing. Alongside her sister, the younger one peered down through the grate, to see what she might see.

Why was Lily at her door? And who was this other child who might have been Claire, who resembled her late husband? This child was not, in fact, Claire. Each of her three children, finally, had been sent to school. She was free, out from under the grave weight of them. Free to read her books, to imbibe, to eat her soft-boiled egg. Each had finally turned seven and had been sent from Pebble Beach to British Columbia. To The Shaunigan School. But why, then, these children?

With her voice firm and composed, unaffected by the vodka she had consumed that day, she looked down at the elder child. “Lilly?�

“I’m Lauren.�

Ah … yes. Her son’s children.

She had been sitting immobile in the salon with an open book on her lap. Slightly hunched, both feet on the floor, she reached periodically for her drink. Or for the lit Davidoff languishing in the heavy crystal ashtray.
She had always preferred Davidoffs. She appreciated their length, their dark paper, their prohibitive cost and European flavor (though she was American, Lillian Archer had given up on the muddle of the States decades before). Her cigarettes were not available at the chemist’s, but only to those of a certain station. The fact that each was tipped with its own slender holder brought her disproportionate joy.

She had been lost in the open book, lost in a fictive drive across moors with a dashing young detective who had recently become her lover. On the bookcases that surrounded her were the Brontes and Jane Austen, the Georges Sand and Flaubert and Balzac of her youth. But far more gratifying was the question of how her detective might unravel the mystery. Then, in the shadow of a curt sentence atop the next page, it became clear that betrayal was imminent.
The doorbell.

She sat, listening, trying to piece together what the low tolling was supposed to mean. She rose. Placing the book on the table, she glided toward the door.

Presently she looked at her granddaughters, she understood. Betrayal would come with the detective’s lithe partner, the one with the mahogany tresses who had only just joined the force. Unfeeling fingers met the brooch that bore her scrolled maiden’s initials. She watched as the younger child, who stared up with her late husband’s eyes, averted her gaze. The elder one said something and she stepped backward to let them in.

Just after eight the next morning, she was free of them. Only after they had left did she prepare her soft-boiled egg with cracked pepper and a piece of buttered toast. The crumpets had been an odd, last minute purchase for her American grandchildren and now the opened package would sit on the counter and molder. She added her glass to the breakfast things on the black lacquer tray, watching the splash of orange juice cloud the mercurial liquid. Silent, she moved into the sunlit motes of the salon. There on the side table lay the box of Davidoffs that she would finish early in the day, some number of which she would leave burning, forgotten, as she lit the next. She took a long sip of her drink. She did not think of the call she had just placed to her son.

Bobbing knapsacks had hurried down her front steps. Standing in the doorframe, hands clasped tightly, she wondered about the pre-dawn physicist. (Never did she finish a book without another nearby in case of a mawkish ending, in case she had not deciphered the clues, in case of betrayal. Thus she had ended things with the erudite detective early that morning, only to take up with a dashing physicist.) She stood in the doorway wondering why the physicist would have left Berlin on such short notice without even notifying his terminally ill wife. She shut the door behind her son’s children, not seeing them round the corner. Only when they were gone did she wonder: had she said she would arrange a car? Was she to call when they left? She returned to the book on the low table, to her drink and her Davidoffs, to Prague where her physicist awaited.

The phone rang as planned. His wife leaned in, the baby on her hip, to ask, “Can you grab the phone?� and with a shake of her head, “Didn’t you hear it ring?�

From the inky depths of a Time’s editorial concerning the abduction of an Indian diplomat and his only son, he rose up into the chasing and the shriek and the banging of a red hammer on wooden pegs that were, in that moment, his younger children. He finished the sentence even as he folded the newspaper. He crossed the room to the ringing desk phone, not glancing at the clock, though if he had, he wouldn’t have remembered that his mother was to call when the girls left her flat, around eight.

During their stay they had all, together, followed the trajectory from his mother’s to their rented flat at least a half-dozen times. With strollers and hands held and the toddler on his shoulders, they had walked the stretch down Kensington Park Road, around the end of the park and down the other side to enter the still, always unsuspecting air of her flat. It was really only a handful of blocks, which had been his opinion the afternoon before when he and his wife considered the proposition of the spend-over that would do his mother such good.

Now, having said, “Good morning, Mum,� and “How did it go?� he learned that it had gone well. He returned to The Times with neither sadness nor regret nor anger. Estimating maybe five or ten minutes for the girls to make their way home, he sat back, and read.

Something made him start. He looked up at the wall clock with no memory of the lapse, with no idea of what time his mother had called. He looked back to the printed word, her call receding as the newspaper subsumed. He read. He reached an end, folded the paper, brought it close to read the title of an article on the back. He put the paper down, stretched. How long had he been sitting there? He gathered the cup of now tepid tea that he had agreed to instead of his usual coffee with a gamely, “when in Rome!� But the tea had gone forgotten, remembered only now as he gathered cup and saucer, tucked the folded paper under his arm. He went to wait for them, to read in the morning sun on the wide front steps.

His daughters saw him long before he saw them. They spotted him even from the corner. From where, at the end of Kensington Park, they squatted, one looking up at a mysterious clangor that was nothing. They rose. They spied their father a little slumped on the top step, but slumped in a way that made you think he was enjoying the sun and his paper, not that he was old or tired or sad. He sat with his tea and the paper and they made their way more slowly now, knowing that their private sortie— their foray with Max, king of the Wild Things, their Parisian rush with Madeline to the hospital, their flight from creepy old Mr. Henderson who lived next door back at home on Presidio and who had buried his wife—alive!—under his wide front lawn and who had followed them all the way here to London to do something dirty with them—all of this would end once they were back in the midst of the spilling suitcases and baby bottles and the bright or thick books, always books. They took to conspiring for longer moments behind leafy trees and a boxy red phone booth. They were Encyclopedia Brown and Harriet the Spy moving in on a dangerous suspect as he read, oblivious, on the front steps of a let flat in London.

On he read, shaking his head once at further evidence of an insatiable appetite for pandering that seemed discouragingly international. Even in this, the UK’s most reputable daily, likely specious conjecture as to the private lives of officials. Really, did it matter? The book reviews were better, at least subjectivity was acknowledged and facts were accepted as fictitious. He recognized, like old friends, the titles from his own chimerical piles of books. He loved the weighty sentencing of what was fantasy, critics’ esteem giving fiction shape and volume and doubly written validation.

Until he was brought to a halt: “suppuration.� An elusive, unidentifiable, almost physical lack, because he had once known what “suppuration� meant. He could not remember. He would go in search of a dictionary. (Inside the cover of each book Truman Archer read was a list of truly obscure words that he looked up and secured next to their definitions along with an illustrative citation from the text). But there would be no dictionary in the flat. How could they have brought no dictionary along?

Blaring horns drew him from the reviews.

He looked up at nothing more than shiny fenders and matte tires. Why had he come out on the steps in the first place? Suppuration, sublation, ablation. Suppuration, suppurate. Oh, yes. He was waiting for the girls.

He returned to the paper. He was transported, lost in verbiage and font, in his own fanciful image of a parliament full of white-wigged men with great sagging jowls.

They were calling out. Across and slightly down the street, his daughters were waiting for a break in the traffic.

He looked up. They must have been calling to him for some time, their buoyant “Dad! Daddy!� having been carried away by vehicular flow, caught up in the weather report on the back page: overcast building to showers in late afternoon.

They stood waiting for their father’s recognition, amusing each other with how loudly they could yell, “Daddy! Dad!� even “Father!� (which sounded odd, like something from The Secret Garden, which made Lauren and Eliza Archer laugh) and still he did not look up.

His gaze moved upward to the precise point at which they stood. He folded and put aside the paper. He glanced down to words then looked up smiling—distracted—at the girls, who were, for some reason, laughing. He rose. He tilted his face to the sun as, across the street, they waited. He closed his eyes to absorb radiant heat, wondering if there really would be showers in the afternoon. He looked, then, back to them, raising a hand to shade his eyes.
As he watched, he inscribed their bodies with mathematical properties: parallel lines at a 170Ëš angle. And what an odd parity of height despite the year that separated the girls. Parallel, his children peered down the near-empty street.

They grabbed each other’s hand. Ready, set … for the cross.

And he was filled with strange satisfaction at the precision with which language allowed a certain visual imagery that had just occurred to him: “Ephemeral,� he thought. “Diaphanous. Gossamer.� He imagined the faulty connection that had tethered the span of the street floating up and up as he was drawn again to the paper at his feet. His girls had rendered him “Dad!� but as they stood silent and staring purposefully down the street, he took up his tea cup and his paper with a premature assumption that they had already re-entered the fold.

He was thinking he should bring the binoculars to the air show that afternoon. Beginning his turn back toward the flat he thought, where was that article about the air show in the British countryside? when at the end of the long block, there appeared a green truck.

And he considered “lorry.� Why hadn’t “lorry� arrived safely and unchanged across the Atlantic? Why “truck,� and not “lorry�? And what about “boot,� as in, “Bloody hell, I’ve left the umbrella in the boot!� Then, for him, the association—lorry, truck, lorry, boot, trunk—stopped. Because, in what felt to him like a stagnant minute under water but was actually instantaneous, his girls stepped into the path of a green truck. He went to move, but the truck rushed forward and he stood balancing the teacup.

He faced the street, stepped forward. Brakes screeched, horns howled and his wife blurred past him. He set down the cup on the wide banister. She was out in the street and he followed, his children nowhere to be seen.

Even later that day, confusion surrounded which of the two sisters was actually hit by the truck. One had been hit and had bumped into the other, but neither girl knew—even right after—which had been hit. The younger remembered pin-prick stars and vision narrowing, for the first time, toward a loss of consciousness. But then the darkening tunnel widened again to a circle of unfamiliar faces peering down and asking, “Ho, well! Alright, then?�

There had been little pain. Bright red fear, though, coursed through both girls as the green truck loomed, deafened, pulled the entire street toward its yawning steel grille. In the elder, fear bled quickly (the girls unhurt in a heap together on the macadam) into vibrant anger. Fury at herself, at no one and everyone, at God and at her father, who should have come across the street and held their hands and gotten them safely home. But anger was eclipsed by shame. They were gathered up by a pair of ancient ladies with an enormous horse of a dog. As their mother pulled them to her soft chest, the eldest understood that she had let someone down. Her father. Any eight-year-old should have known that one looked right-left-right in London, not left-right-left. No mention of the incident would be made later that evening with Granny at the dim and dirt-smelling Indian restaurant. No one would tell the adored housekeeper back in San Francisco. Not a word, even, to their mother after the goodnight kiss when shame brought new tears and the elder was sure that it was all her fault that they had gotten slammed into by a big green truck.

His wife shepherded the girls into the flat. They were fine. In the small sitting room he looked on—marveling, removed—at this ability of his wife to soothe. How had she gotten out to the street before he had? How had she known? He sat in a ladder-backed chair, the newspaper still under his arm. His wife was down on the soft brown rug with both girls in her lap. She was humming a tune he had never heard before. She smoothed rumpled hair. She pulled a dark plaited head to her chest.

And suddenly, in the raw and livid flesh of his younger daughter’s knee he remembered “suppuration.� It was Faulkner! Someone was always suppurating in Faulkner. Pus, decay, decadence—the man was a genius. He looked up suddenly. The phone was ringing. No one had the number here except his mother. His mother was calling. He would ask his mother to confirm “suppuration.� He would see which Faulkner she had read lately. He rose from his chair. But then stalled. He sat back down. Because no one was calling. The telephone hadn’t rung.