A police van pushed over the curb and over the grass, engine roaring. Two female officers joined in the rout.

Mitch backed Kaye off the mound, and they came to the bottom, facing uphill to keep an eye on the crowd still massed around the sundial. Two officers pushed out of this assembly with the young man in black. Red dripping slashes marked his neck and hands. A woman officer called for an ambulance on her walkie-talkie. She passed within yards of Mitch and Kaye, face white and lips red with anger.

“Goddamn it!” she shouted at the onlookers. “Why didn’t you try to stop them?”

Neither Kaye nor Mitch had an answer.

The young man in the black robe stumbled and fell between the two officers supporting him. His face, warped by pain and shock, flashed white as the clouds against the hard-packed dirt and yellow grass.

73

Seattle

Mitch drove them south on the freeway to Capitol Hill, then turned off and headed east on Denny. The Buick chugged up the grade.

“I wish we hadn’t seen that,” Kaye said.

Mitch swore under his breath. “I wish we’d never even stopped.”

“Is everybody crazy? It’s just too much,” Kaye said. “I can’t figure out where we stand in all this.”

“We’re going back to the old ways,” Mitch said.

“Like in Georgia.” Kaye pressed a knuckle against her lips and teeth.

“I hate to have women blame men,” Mitch said. “It makes me want to throw up.”

“I don’t blame anybody,” Kaye said. “But you have to admit, it’s a natural reaction.”

Mitch shot her a scowl that bordered on a dirty look, the first such he had ever given her. She sucked in her breath privately, feeling both guilty and sad, and turned to look out her window, peering down the long straight stretch of Broadway: brick buildings, pedestrians, young men wearing green masks, walking with other men, and women walking with women. “Let’s forget about it,” Mitch said. “Let’s get some rest.”

The second-floor apartment, neat and cool and a little dusty from Mitch’s long absence, overlooked Broadway and gave a view of the brick-front post office, a small bookstore, and a Thai restaurant. As Mitch carried the bags through the door, he apologized for clutter that did not exist, as far as Kaye was concerned.

“Bachelor digs,” he said. “I don’t know why I kept up the lease.”

“It’s nice,” Kaye said, running her fingers along the dark wood trim of the windowsill, the white enamel on the wall. The living room had been warmed by the sun and smelled slightly stuffy, not unpleasant, just closed in. With some difficulty, Kaye opened the window. Mitch stood beside her and closed the window slowly. “Gas fumes from the street,” he said. “There’s a window in the bedroom that looks out over the back of the building. Gets a good draft.”

Kaye had thought that seeing Mitch’s apartment would be romantic, pleasant, that she would learn a lot about him, but it was so neat, so sparely furnished, that she felt let down. She examined the books in a ceiling-high case near the kitchen nook: textbooks on anthropology and archaeology, some tattered biology texts, a box full of science magazines and photocopies. No novels.

“The Thai restaurant is good,” Mitch said, putting his arms around her as she stood before the bookcase.

“I’m not hungry. This is where you did your research?”

“Right here. Stroke of lightning. You were inspirational.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Want to just take a nap? There are beers in the refrigerator—”

“Budweiser?”

Mitch grinned.

“I’ll take one,” Kaye said. He let go of her and rummaged in the refrigerator.

“Damn. There must have been an outage. Everything in the freezer melted…” A cool sour smell wafted from the kitchen. “The beer’s still good, though.” He brought her a bottle and deftly unscrewed the cap. She took it and sipped it. Barely any flavor. No relief.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Kaye said. She felt numb, far from anything that mattered. She carried her purse into the bathroom and removed the pregnancy kit. It was sweet and simple: two drops of urine on a test strip, blue if positive, pink if negative. Results in ten minutes.

Suddenly, Kaye was desperate to know.

The bathroom was immaculately clean. “What can I do for him?” she asked herself. “He lives his own life here.” But she put that aside and dropped the lid on the toilet to sit.

In the living room, Mitch turned on the TV Through the old solid-pine door Kaye heard muffled voices, a few stray words.”…also injured in the blast was the secretary—”

“Kaye!” Mitch called.

She covered the strip with a Kleenex and opened the door.

“The president,” Mitch said, his face contorted. He pounded his fists at nothing. “I wish I’d never turned the damned thing on!”

Kaye stood in the living room before the small television, stared at the announcer’s head and shoulders, her moving lips, the run of mascara from one eye. “The count so far is seven dead, including the governors of Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama, the president, a Secret Service agent, and two not yet identified. Among the survivors are the governors of New Mexico and Arizona, director of the Herod’s Taskforce Mark Augustine, and Frank Shawbeck of the National Institutes of Health. The vice president was not in the White House at this time—”

Mitch stood beside her, shoulders slumped.

“Where was Christopher?” Kaye asked in a small voice.

“No explanation has yet been given for how a bomb could have been smuggled into the White House through such intense security. Frank Sesno is outside the White House now.”

Kaye pushed free of Mitch’s arm. “Excuse me,” she said, patting his shoulder nervously. “Bathroom.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She shut the door and locked it, took a deep breath, and lifted away the Kleenex. Ten minutes had passed.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Mitch called outside the door.

Kaye held the strip up to the light, looked at the two test patches. The first test showed blue. The second test showed blue. She read the instructions again, the color comparisons, and leaned an elbow against the door, feeling dizzy.

“It’s done,” she said softly. She straightened and thought, This is a horrible time. Let it wait. Let it wait if you can possibly wait.

“Kaye!” Mitch sounded close to panic. He needed her, needed some reassurance. She leaned on the sink, could barely stay upright, she felt such a mix of horror and relief and awe at what they had done, at what the world was doing.

She opened the door and saw tears in Mitch’s eyes.

“I didn’t even vote for him!” he said, his lips trembling.

Kaye hugged him tightly. That the president was dead was significant, important, it mattered, but she could not feel it yet. Her emotions were elsewhere, with Mitch, with his mother and father, with her own absent mother and father; she felt even a mild concern for herself, but curiously enough, no real connection with the life inside her.

Not yet.

This was not the actual baby.

Not yet.

Don’t love it. Don’t love this one. Love what it does, what it carries.

Quite against her will, as she held Mitch and patted his back, Kaye fainted. Mitch carried her into the bedroom, brought a cold cloth.

She floated for a while in closed darkness, then became aware of a dryness in her mouth. She cleared her throat, opened her eyes.

She looked up at her husband, tried to kiss his hand as it passed the cloth over her cheeks and chin.

“Such a fool,” she said.

“Me?”

“Me. I thought I’d be strong.”

“You are strong,” Mitch said.

“I love you,” she said, and that was all she could manage.

Mitch saw that she was sound asleep and pulled the blanket over her on the bed, turned out the light, and returned to the living room. The apartment seemed so different now. Summer twilight glowed beyond the windows, casting a fairy-tale pallor over the opposite wall. He sat in the worn armchair before the TV, its muted sound still clear in the quiet room.