Abby shifted her attention to the Muzak. It wasn’t anything classical. It was an instrumental version of an old Billy Joel song.

“What are you guys singing?” Abby asked.

The girls stared up at her, and for a moment they looked as if they were disengaged from the present, as if they were not in a store at all, but rather rapt by another moment. They both shrugged.

“Did you guys hear it on the radio or on your iPods?”

They both shook their heads. A moment later they seemed to snap out of whatever mini-trance they were in.

“Can we get macaroni and cheese?” Charlotte asked, suddenly brightening. She wasn’t talking about the Kraft variety. She was talking about the prepared kind. This store had an amazing prepared food section, and offered a three-cheddar ziti. Lately, it seemed, Abby was taking full advantage of the prepared food counters. She wanted to cook for her family every night – she really did – but it was so much easier to buy it already made.

“Sure,” Abby said. “Em? Mac and cheese okay?”

Emily just shrugged. The girls were so different in many ways. Charlotte was the schemer. Emily floated.

They got their cereal (Captain Crunch for Charlotte, Cheerios for Emily); their peanut butter (smooth and crunchy respectively), their bread (they both agreed on multigrain for some reason; Michael thought it tasted like tree bark).

While they waited in line, Abby cruised the tabloids.

“Can we get Peppermint Patties?” Emily asked.

Abby wanted to say no. But how could she resist all four of the prettiest blue eyes in the world? Sometimes the magic was too strong to resist.

“Okay,” Abby said. “But just one each. And you can’t eat them until after dinner tonight. Okay?”

“Okay,” in tandem. They took off for the candy aisle. A minute later they returned. Emily carried the goods. She put them in the cart. There were three Peppermint Patties.

Again with the three, Abby thought.

“Sweetie, I said one each,” Abby said. She picked up one of the candy bars. “Did you bring this one for me?”

No answer.

“Okay, let’s get one more,” Abby said. “One for Daddy. Then we’ll have enough for all of us.”

It seemed like this was getting to be a standard routine and speech. It wasn’t like the girls were leaving out Michael in the equation. Abby had watched them interact with other kids many times. They were always generous with whatever they had to share. This was an early lesson from both her and Michael.

On the other hand, the girls were only four. She couldn’t expect them to be math wizards yet.

THE EDEN FALLS FREE LIBRARY was a small, ivy-laced brick building near the river, a Mid-Hudson design that also was home to the Crane County Community Theater.

Despite the fact that the girls were getting somewhat proficient at the computer, Abby was scared to death of leaving them alone online. So, at least once a week, time permitting, she took them to an honest-to-God, brick-and-mortar library. She had spent a great deal of time at the Hyde Park Library as a girl, and she would not deny the experience to the girls. There was something about the feel and smell and heft of books that no computer monitor could supply. Neither Charlotte nor Emily ever wanted to go. An hour later, neither wanted to leave.

As the girls settled into the children’s section, Abby heard an EMS siren approaching the library. As a trained RN, it caught her attention. It had always been so. From the time she was a child, she had been expected to go to medical school, to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a surgeon. Dr Charles Reed knew his son Wallace did not have the discipline or temperament for heart surgery, or even the rigors of residency, but felt his only daughter did.

Abby had gotten as far as her freshman year in pre-med at Columbia when, one night, on an icy sidewalk in the East Village, she slipped and broke her wrist. While being treated in the emergency room at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, she watched the ER nurses in action, and knew that this was what she wanted to do, to work the front lines of medical care. Part of her had to admit that she knew it would get under her father’s skin, but when she switched over to the Columbia School of Nursing, she knew she had made the right decision. It took Charles Reed most of the ensuing thirteen or so years to get over it, if he ever did.

As the EMS ambulance passed the library, Abby flashed on the night, five years earlier, when she met Michael.

She had been on for almost twelve hours that day. The ER wasn’t busier than usual – that night there had been only one gunshot victim, along with a handful of domestics, including one that had ended in the husband, a fifty-nine-year old man who apparently had received a Westinghouse steam iron to the side of his head for saying to his wife, as a prelude to sex: “Yo, fatso, get with it.”

At midnight an EMS arrived at the door. As they wheeled in the unconscious patient, the paramedic looked into Abby’s eyes, his post 9/11 thousand-yard stare in place.

“Bomb,” the paramedic said softly.

All kinds of things raced through Abby’s mind. All of it terrifying. Her first thought was that the city had been attacked again, and this was just the first of the victims. She wondered how bad it was going to get. As the other two nurses on duty prepped a room, Abby stepped into the waiting room. She flipped the television channel to CNN. Two guys yelling at each other about the mortgage crisis. No attack.

When she stepped into the triage room, she saw him.

Michael Roman, the man who would become her husband, the love of her life, supine on the gurney, his face powdered with black ash, his eyes closed. She checked his vitals. Steady pulse, strong BP reading. She studied his face, his strong jaw, his fair complexion and sandy hair, now coated with black ash.

Moments later he opened his eyes, and her life changed forever.

In the end he had a slight concussion, a small laceration on the back of his right hand. Days later, when Abby saw the photographs of the car bombing, and what it had done to the nearby building, she, like everyone else, was amazed that he wasn’t killed on the spot.

THE SIREN FADED INTO the distance. Abby glanced at her watch, then over at the children.

The girls were gone.

Abby sprang to her feet. She walked over to the children’s section, looking behind all the low stacks, the festive displays for books on Easter and Passover. She stepped into the ladies restroom. No Charlotte, no Emily. She went down to the lower level, the section that had the DVDs and CDs. Sometimes she and the girls picked out movies here in the Family section. There she found four children, none of them her own. Quickening her pace, she returned to the ground floor, and was just about to speak to one of the library assistants when she looked down one of the long stacks in the adult section and saw them.

Her heart found its way back into her chest. The girls were sitting side by side, at the end of the stack of books. They had a large, coffee-table sized volume across their laps. Abby walked down the aisle.

“Hey, ladies.”

They looked up at her.

“You guys shouldn’t run off like that. Mommy got a little worried.”

“We’re sorry,” Charlotte said.

“What are you reading?” Abby got down on the floor with the girls. She sat between them, took the book from Emily. She glanced at the cover.

Russian Folk Tales and Legends.

“Where did you find this?” Abby asked.

Emily pointed to the bottom shelf of a nearby stack.

Abby returned to the page at which the girls had been looking. On the left was a large color plate, an intricate woodcut of a fairy tale figure, a tall, skeletal man with a pointed chin, rabid eyes, and gnarled fingers. He wore a black velvet robe and tarnished crown. To the right was an index to stories about Koschei the Deathless. Abby skimmed the next few pages, a little unnerved.