"He's doing better all the time," said Step. "And we couldn't very well give him all these tests at home."

"I don't like what they're doing to him here," said DeAnne. "I don't like the way he's drugged all the time."

"I don't like it either," said Step. "But we're not doctors."

"They don't know everything," she said.

"But they know something," said Step. "And sleeping in a hospital bed isn't going to make you or me any wiser about what we ought to do. Please-you've spent too much time here alone."

"I hardly have any time alone," said DeAnne. "I think every sister in the Steuben 1 st Ward has been up here twice."

"At church this morning the bishop asked everybody to fast and pray for Zap next Sunday. The whole ward."

It filled DeAnne with emotion to hear that. They really weren't alone. And maybe with so many people fasting and praying, God would hear.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would be like in the book. Maybe things would always be just a little bit out of control, just out of reach.

Step reached down onto the floor. "You dropped your book," he said.

"I don't want to read it anymore," she said.

"Oh? I thought you liked it. Yesterday you even read me a passage from it."

"She knows too much," said DeAnne. "It hurts too much."

"Fine, I'll put it up on the shelf here-"

"No," she said. "No, give it to me."

"So you are going to read it."

"No," she said. "I'm just going to hold it. Is that all right?"

He looked at her strangely.

"I'm not going crazy, Step. It just ... it's an anchor. It's another woman telling me she knows about things going wrong, and I just need to hold the book, OK? I mean at least it's not a Barbie doll or something."

"Fine," said Step. "I just wondered if this is going to become an icon to you. Like scripture. The fifth standard work?"

"Don't make fun," she said. "This is very hard for me, you know. I've always prided myself on making perfect babies. Now all I've got left that I make perfectly is my pie crusts."

"I wasn't making fun," he said, as he reached down and embraced her awkwardly "And he is a perfect baby DeAnne."

"You can't just deny it and make it go away," said DeAnne.

"He has the perfect body for the life God intends him to live. For the life he intends us to live."

God's plan. Nothing we can do about it. Might as well stop praying or trying or anything.

No, he doesn't really believe that, she realized. Because when we've talked about this sort of thing before, it was me who argued that God must plan all our lives or it wouldn't be fair, and he's the one who said, God doesn't have a plan for our lives, he just put us all into a world where no matter what our life is like, we can still discover how good and strong we are, or how weak we are, or how evil or cowardly. He's saying this about God's plan to make me feel better.

"I keep thinking," she said, "that we shouldn't have made love so soon after I used the spermicide the last time."

He shook his head. "It wasn't all that soon, DeAnne."

"You're supposed to wait longer. A week."

"DeAnne, the doctors don't even know what the problem is, let alone what caused it."

"And Bendectin-all these stories about Bendectin and birth defects--"

"In the National Enquirer, DeAnne, not in Scientific American or the Journal of the AMA."

"Step, I don't want to come home without my baby."

"But you will come home without him, DeAnne, because you know that's what's best for him, and best for you. And you always do what you know is right. That's who you are."

She thought about that for a while. "OK," she said. "Call for the nurse."

Later that afternoon, Step dropped by the pharmacy to pick up DeAnne's pain medication. While he was waiting for the pharma cist, he wandered over to the magazines. A woman was standing there, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that she glanced at him and stepped away. He scanned the covers of the newsmagazines, and then, out of sheer boredom, the professional wrestling fan magazines.

"You just can't give up, can you," said the woman.

Step glanced up, trying to see whom she was talking to. She was looking at him.

Did he even know her? She looked familiar, but he couldn't place her.

"At Kroger's, at the mall, I turn around and there you are. Can't you give me any peace?"

Step was baffled. "Excuse me, but I think you have me confused with somebody else."

"Wasn't giving up my job enough for you? Are you trying to hound me into suicide?" Her voice trembled; she sounded genuinely distraught. Whatever she imagined he was doing seemed real enough to her, though he could not think of why she would have fixated on him.

"Ma'am, nobody wants you to commit suicide."

"Then just stop it," she hissed.

Suddenly he made the connection. She hadn't chosen him out of madness; she really had given up her job because of him.

"Mrs. Jones," he said.

"You're a vile man," she said. "Whatever I did, I don't deserve to have you stalking me."

"I'm not, I swear it. This is the first time I've set eyes on you since--"

"Don't lie to me," she said contemptuously. "You every time. At the mall you laughed out lo ud at me."

"Mrs. Jones, how would I know you'd even be at Macy's? I'm here picking up a prescription for my wife."

"I won't go on with that tape hanging over my I won't. It's worse than blackmail, it's torture."

It sickened him to have her, Stevie's tormentor, complaining about torture. But he didn't want to argue with her. She was a closed chapter. "Listen, Mrs. Jones. I just brought my wife home from the hospital and our newborn baby is still there because nobody knows why he's having seizures but he's in intensive care at a hundred dollars an hour and I don't have insurance and the bank is foreclosing on our house in Indiana and you know something? I don't care about you. I'm not following you. I'm living my own life, and you go live yours and forget about me, because until this moment I had completely forgotten about you and I'd just as soon leave it that way"

He turned to go back to the pharmacist's counter. She snatched at his sleeve. "Give me the tape," she said.

"I don't even remember where it is," Step said. "Look, Mrs. Jones, we both live in the same town. We're bound to end up in the same store or me same fast-food joint or the same movie every now and then, and it doesn't mean anything."

"Is that how you plan to defend yourself when I ask the court for a restraining order?" she said. "That's what my lawyer suggests."

"Right now I think my prescription is ready and my wife needs it. Have your lawyer write me a letter." If there was a lawyer.

He picked up the prescription, had the clerk put it on his account at the store, and left. He was half afraid that Mrs. Jones would follow him out of the store, chase him all the way home, and beat on his door, insisting that he had to stop following her. But when he returned home with the medication, the only people who knocked on the door were more Relief Society sisters, coming by to help encourage DeAnne about Zap. Whatever happens will be part of Heavenly Father's plan, they said. After they left, DeAnne couldn't help but voice her exasperation to Step and Vette. "Of course it'll be part of God's plan, but God hasn't exactly been famous for planning nice things for all of his children."

Even though she was annoyed, Step could see that their visit had been good for her. In familiar surroundings, some parts of her life seemed finally to be under control again. She was back to being Relief Society spiritual living teacher instead of a helpless mother trapped in a hospital surrounded by doctors who didn't know what they were doing with her baby and wouldn't admit it.

On Monday morning, DeAnne arranged for Mary Anne Lowe to come over and tend Robbie and Betsy so that Step could take Stevie to the psychiatrist while Vette took DeAnne to the hospital to nurse Zap.