There was Almondine, playing their crib game. Dancing for him, light as a dust mote.

He thought of his father standing in the barn doorway peering skyward as a thunderstorm approached, while his mother shouted, “Gar, get indoors, for God’s sake.” That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn’t matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been playful, she had been playful in the face of that knowledge, as defiant as before the rabid thing. It was not a morbid thought, just the world as it existed. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn’t. Essay might have been taken up in the whirlwind at the lake, but she wasn’t, and there was nothing special in that except her certainty that she had driven the thing away.

In the morning, he planned to walk into the house. He didn’t know what would happen then. Claude had been the one to find his note. He understood that. If his mother had read it, she would have run out shouting his name. But the house was dark and no one had run out.

He rested a hand on Essay’s back and they watched the yard. He felt hollow as a gourd. He knew he wouldn’t sleep anymore that night. The yard light stood high and brilliant on its pole above the orchard, its glow enveloping the house and yard and all beyond that darkness and the sky black above. After a while Claude stepped from the porch and walked along the driveway. A stripe of light appeared beneath the back barn doors. In a few minutes the stripe winked out and Claude crossed back to the house and mounted the porch steps and without pause was swallowed up in the shadows.

Trudy

TRUDY LAY IN BED, HALF SLEEPING, THINKING ABOUT THE DOGS-that peculiar note of agitation she’d heard in their voices when she’d first stepped out of the truck. Not frenzy, exactly, though something akin to it, and enough to make her stop and look around the yard. She’d seen none of the usual causes for alarm-no deer poaching in the garden, no skunk scuttling into the shadows, no raccoon peering red-eyed from an apple tree. In fact, the moment she’d signed quiet the dogs had settled down. She’d decided it was just the lateness of their arrival or the spectacle of a full moon hovering in the treetops. But the edge in their voices nagged at her now. And maybe it nagged at Claude, too; as she was having these thoughts, he sat up and began to dress by the blue moonwash streaming through the window.

“I’m going to check on those pups,” he whispered.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No. Stay and sleep. Back before you know it.”

The spring on the porch door gave an iron yawn and then she was alone. The dogs, she suspected, weren’t the only reason Claude had gotten up. He was, for reasons she didn’t understand, embarrassed about his insomnia, reticent to the point of silence whenever she asked in the mornings how long he’d been awake. The first few times she’d woken to find him missing, she’d stolen out to watch him pace the yard, hands in his pockets, head down, walking until the steady rhythm of step, step, step worked whatever it was out of him. But mostly it was rainy nights that plagued Claude. He’d sit on the porch drawing the tip of his pocketknife across a bar of soap until a facsimile of something or another appeared in his hands and was carved down into something smaller and then something smaller yet until it finally disappeared entirely. The crumbs and curls she found in the trash spoke most eloquently of how long he’d sat in the dark.

Trudy had her own reason for wanting to go outside. It would have been an opportunity, though belated, to stand behind the silo-to make her nightly signal that it was safe for Edgar to come home. But it had been late when they’d parked the truck and carried in the groceries, and full dark. Even so, had she found an inconspicuous reason to go out, she might have tried anyway.

This arrangement between her and Edgar was one fact about that night in the mow she had kept secret from Claude, letting him believe, along with Glen and everyone else, that Edgar had fled, panic-stricken at the sight of Page lying so near where Gar had died. Why she’d withheld this fact from Claude, when she’d told him so much of the rest, she couldn’t have said. Partly because she’d thought it would be such a short-lived deception. The very next night she’d walked into the tall grass and stood facing the sunset, expecting to see Edgar emerge from the woods as Gar had, so long ago, shimmering into place between the aspens. Finally, afraid that Claude would ask what she was doing, she’d walked to the house, ignoring the whisper that said Edgar was there, watching, but choosing not to believe her.

So it had gone the next evening. And all the evenings after.

What had possessed her to tell Edgar to leave? Almost instantly she’d realized it was unnecessary and foolish, but by then he’d disappeared. Standing behind the silo had become her daily penance for that mistake, though one that did nothing to ease her mind. Her only consolation was that the dogs who’d followed Edgar had never turned up, which meant they were still out there. Which meant he was safe. She drew a ragged breath, thinking of it: he was all that remained of her family, and he was somewhere.

But sometimes Trudy couldn’t help imagining that Edgar had returned, just once, on an evening when she’d found no excuse to be outside and he’d lost hope and set off for good. What came into her mind at those times was the image of a black seed, grown now into a vine with stems and leaves of perfect black-an image from those days long ago that followed her last miscarriage.

(The night was hot. Her thoughts had begun to drift on a plane between reverie and sleep; circling, eddying. She gave herself over to them, a lucid passenger in her own mind.)

She and Gar had been so certain everything was okay with the pregnancy. Afterward, there had been in her a void, a raw, sunlight-scraped center-something atrocious that muttered how simple it would be to fall down the stairs. To find a quiet place on the river and walk in. Eating had been like pouring sand into her mouth. Sleep a suffocation. Relief came only when she turned inward and embraced that place. The decision was indulgent and self-pitying, yes, but time passed there in such a soothing contraction. When she opened her eyes, it was morning. Gar was holding a cup of coffee for her. When he walked away she closed her eyes and then it was another morning, and the day had passed.

Each hour spent like that poisoned her, she’d thought, yet the sensation was irresistible, enthralling, equal parts dread and desire. She’d roused herself, finally, out of a perversely selfish concern for Gar, because a retreat to that black center would provide her no peace if he were dragged down too. She’d forced herself out of bed and gone downstairs. Gar had been almost giddy. He’d left her alone on the porch and returned cradling that feral pup, so chilled it barely drew breath, black and gray and brown in his hands, eyes glittering, feet scuffling against his palm. And that was the first thing to move her-the first tangible thing-since the stillbirth. From the moment she touched the nursling she’d known it wouldn’t survive, but just as certainly had known they would have to try.

The crib had been ready for weeks. Live or die, she wanted the pup to decide there. For those preparations to have some purpose. When Almondine woke her in the night, she’d leaned over the wooden rails and carried the pup to the rocking chair and set it in the folds of her robe. She’d rocked and watched the pup. Did it have its own black place? she wondered. It wasn’t injured. Could it simply choose to live? And if it wanted to die, why did it struggle so? She traced the tines of its ribs, the pinfeather fur of its belly. Somehow a bargain was articulated between them; Trudy was unsure how that had happened, only that it was so. Then the pup closed its eyes and gave a last, infinitesimal sigh.