Danny was thinking about this, missing the children, even Billy Nice and his stupid jokes and har-har-har, when up ahead he saw a boy. It was Timothy. He was waiting with his older sister at the end of their driveway. Danny would have known the boy anywhere, on account of the cowlick-two spikes of hair that stuck up from the back of his head like antennae on a bug. Timothy was one of the youngest kids, second grade or maybe third, and small; sometimes the housekeeper waited with him, a plump brown woman in a smock, but usually it was the boy's older sister, who Danny guessed was in high school. She was a funny girl to look at, not funny ha-ha but funny strange, with hair streaked the color of the Pepto that Momma gave him when his stomach got nervous from eating too fast and heavy black eyeliner that made her look like one of those paintings in a scary movie, the kind with eyes that moved. She had about ten studs in each ear; most days she was wearing a dog collar. A dog collar! Like she was a dog! The odd thing was that Danny thought she was sort of pretty, if not for all the weird stuff. He didn't know any girls her age, or any age, really, and he liked the way she waited with her brother, holding his hand but letting it go as the bus approached so the other kids wouldn't see.

He drew up to the end of the driveway and pulled the lever to open the door. "Hey," he said, because that was all he could think of. "Hey, good morning."

It seemed like their turn to talk, but they didn't say anything. Danny let his eyes quickly graze their faces; their expressions were nothing he could read. None of the trains on Thomas ever looked like these two did. The Thomas trains were happy or sad or cross, but this was something else, like the blank screen on the TV when the cable wasn't working. The girl's eyes were puffy and red, her hair kind of smooshed-looking. Timothy had a runny nose he kept rubbing with the back of his wrist. Their clothing was all wrinkled and stained.

"We heard you honking," the girl said. Her voice was hoarse and shaky, like she hadn't used it in a while. "We were hiding in the cellar. We ran out of food two days ago."

Danny shrugged. "I had Lucky Charms. But just with water. They're no good that way."

"Is there anybody else left?" the girl asked.

"Left where?"

"Left alive."

Danny didn't know how to answer that. The question seemed too big. Maybe there wasn't; he'd seen a lot of bodies. But he didn't want to say so, not with Timothy there.

He glanced at the boy, who so far had said nothing, just kept nervously rubbing his nose with his wrist. "Hey, Timbo. You got allergies? I have those sometimes."

"Our parents are in Telluride," the boy stated. He was looking at his sneakers. "Consuela was with us. But she left."

Danny didn't know who Consuela was. It was hard when people didn't answer your question but instead answered some other question you hadn't even thought of.

"Okay," said Danny.

"She's in the backyard."

"How can she be in the backyard if she left?"

The boy's eyes widened. "Because she's dead."

For a couple of seconds, nobody said anything. Danny wondered why they hadn't gotten on the bus yet, if maybe he'd have to ask them.

"Everybody's supposed to go to Mile High," the girl said. "We heard it on the radio."

"What's at Mile High?"

"The Army. They said it's safe there."

From what Danny had seen, the Army was pretty much dead, too. But Mile High would give them someplace to go. He hadn't really thought of that before. Where was he going?

"I'm April," the girl said.

She looked like an April. It was funny how some names were like that. They just seemed to fit.

"I'm Danny," he said.

"I know," said April. "Just please, Danny? Get us the hell out of here."

Chapter 7

The color wasn't right, Lila decided. No, it wasn't right at all.

The shade was called "buttercream." On the sample from the store it was a soft, faded yellow, like old linen. But now, as Lila stood back to inspect her work, dripping roller in hand-honestly, she was making such a mess; why couldn't David do these things?-it looked more like: well, what? A lemon. An electrified lemon. Maybe in a kitchen it would have been all right, a bright, sunny kitchen with windows looking out to a garden. But not in a nursery. My God, she thought, a color like that, the baby wouldn't sleep a wink.

How depressing. All her hard work wasted. Hauling the ladder up the stairs from the basement, laying the drop cloths, lowering herself onto her hands and knees to tape off the baseboards, only to find she'd have to go back to the store and start over. She'd planned to have the room done by lunch, leaving enough time for the paint to dry before she hung the wallpaper border, a repeating pattern of scenes from Beatrix Potter. David thought the border was silly-"sentimental" was the word he'd used-but Lila didn't care. She'd loved the stories of Peter Rabbit when she was a girl, crawling onto her father's lap or snuggling down in bed to hear, for the hundredth time, the tale of Peter's escape from Mr. McGregor's garden. The yard of their house in Wellesley had been bordered by a hedgerow, and for years-long after she should have stopped believing in such things-she'd patiently searched it for a rabbit in a little blue jacket.

But now Peter Rabbit would have to wait. A wave of exhaustion enfolded her; she needed to get off her feet. The fumes were making her dizzy, too. Something seemed to be wrong with the AC, although with the baby, she always felt a little overheated. She hoped David would get home soon. Things were crazy at the hospital. He'd called her once to let her know he'd be late, but she hadn't heard from him since.

She made her way downstairs to the kitchen. The place was an awful mess. Dishes piled in the sink, counters stained, the floor beneath her bare feet tacky with grime. Lila stopped in the doorway, feeling puzzled. She hadn't realized how badly she'd let things go, and what had happened to Yolanda? How long since she'd been here? Tuesdays and Fridays were the housekeeper's regular days. What was today? To look at this kitchen, thought Lila, you'd think Yolanda hadn't been to the house in weeks. Okay, the woman's English was not the best, and sometimes she did strange things, like confusing the teaspoons with the tablespoons-how David grumbled about that-or depositing the bills, unread, straight into the recycling bin. Annoying things like that. But Yolanda wasn't one to miss even a day of work. One winter morning she'd shown up with a cough so bad that Lila could hear it from upstairs; she'd practically had to pry the mop from the woman's hands, saying, Por favor, Yolanda, let me help you, I'm a doctor. Soy medico. (Of course it was bronchitis; Lila had listened to the woman's chest right there in the kitchen and written the prescription for amoxicillin herself, knowing full well that Yolanda probably didn't even have a doctor, let alone insurance.) So, okay, she sometimes threw the mail away and mixed up the silverware and put the socks in the underwear drawer, but she was a hard worker, tireless really, a cheerful and punctual presence they depended on, what with their crazy schedules. And now not even a call.

Which was another thing. The phone didn't seem to be working, on top of which there was no mail. Or newspaper. But David had told her not to go outside under any circumstances, so Lila hadn't checked. Maybe the newspaper was sitting in the driveway.

She fetched a glass from the cabinet and turned on the faucet. A groan from below, a burp of air, and ... nothing. The water, too! Then she remembered; the water had been out a while. Now she'd have to call a plumber on top of everything else. Or would have, if the phones were working. Wasn't it just like David to be away when everything went to hell in a handbasket. That had been one of Lila's father's favorite expressions, hell in a handbasket. A curious turn of phrase, now that Lila thought about it. What exactly was a handbasket, and how was it different from a regular basket? There were lots of phrases like that, even just simple words that could suddenly look strange, as if you'd never seen them before. Diaper. Misled. Plumber. Married.

Had that really been her idea, to marry David? Because she didn't remember thinking, I will marry David. Which a person should think, probably, before they went ahead and did it. Strange how one minute life was a certain way and then it was another, and you couldn't remember what you'd done to make it all happen. She wouldn't have said that she loved David, exactly. She liked him. She admired him. (And who could fail to admire David Centre? Chief of cardiology at Denver General, founder of the Colorado Institute of Electrophysiology, a man who ran marathons, sat on boards, held season tickets to both the Nuggets and the opera, who daily hauled his patients from the very brink of death?) But did these feelings add up to love? And if not, should you actually marry such a man because you were carrying his child-nothing planned, it had simply happened-and because, in a moment of characteristically David nobility, he had announced that he intended to "do the right thing"? What was the right thing? And why did David sometimes seem not like David but someone resembling David, based on David, a man-sized, David-like object? When Lila had told her father the news of their engagement, she'd seen it in his face: he knew. He was sitting at his desk in his study, surrounded by the books he loved, stroking glue onto the bowsprit of a model ship. In just the tiniest lift of his generous eyebrows, the truth was written. "Well," he said, and cleared his throat, pausing to screw the top onto the little jar of glue. "I can see how, under the circumstances, you might want to. He's a good man. You can do it here if you like."

Which he was, and which they had, flying off to Boston on the front edge of a spring blizzard, everything rushed and jammed into place, just a handful of relatives and friends able to make it at the last second to stand awkwardly in the living room while vows were exchanged (it had taken all of about two minutes) before making their excuses. Even the caterer had left early. It wasn't the fact that Lila was pregnant that made it all so awkward. It was, she knew, that someone was missing.

Someone would always be missing.

But never mind. Never mind David, and their awful wedding (really, it had felt more like a wake), with its piles of leftover salmon and the snow and all the rest. The important thing was the baby, and taking care of herself. The world could go to hell in a handbasket if it wanted to. The baby was what mattered. She would be a girl; Lila had seen her on the ultrasound. A baby girl. Tiny hands and tiny feet and a tiny heart and lungs, floating in the warm broth of her body. The baby liked to hiccup. Hiccup! went the tiny baby. Hiccup! Hiccup! Which was a funny word as well. The baby breathed the amniotic fluid in and out, contracting the diaphragm, causing the epiglottis to close. A synchronous diaphragmatic flutter, or singultus, from the Latin singult, "the act of catching one's breath while sobbing." When Lila had learned this in medical school, she'd thought: Wow. Just, wow. And of course she had immediately started to hiccup herself; half the students had. There was a man in Australia, Lila knew, who had been hiccupping continuously for seventeen years. She'd seen him on Today.

Today. What was today? She had made her way to the front hall, becoming gradually aware, as if her mind were lifting on tiptoes to peer above a ledge, that she had drawn the curtain aside to take a look outside. Nope, no newspaper. No Denver Post or New York Times or that trashy little neighborhood thing that went straight into the bin. Through the glass she could hear the high, tree-borne buzz of summer insects. Usually you'd see a car or two gliding by, the postman whistling his way down the block, a nanny pushing a stroller, but not today. I'll be back when I know more. Stay inside, lock the doors. Don't go out under any circumstances. Lila remembered David saying these things to her; she remembered standing at the window to watch his car, one of those new hydrogen-powered Toyotas, zip silently down the drive. Good God, even his car was virtuous. The pope probably drove one just like it.

But wasn't that a dog? Lila pressed her face closer to the glass. The Johnsons' dog was toddling down the middle of the street. The Johnsons lived two doors away, a pair of empty nesters, the daughter off married somewhere, the son away at college. MIT? Caltech? One of those. Mrs. Johnson ("Call me Sandy!") had been the first neighbor to show up at their door the day they'd moved in, all bundt cake and big hellos, and Lila saw her nearly every evening when she wasn't on call, sometimes in the company of her husband, Geoff, out walking Roscoe, a big grinning golden retriever so submissive he'd hurl himself tummy-up on the pavement when anyone approached. ("Excuse my f**king fairy of a dog," Geoff said.) That was Roscoe out there, but something wasn't right. He didn't look the same. His ribs were sticking out like the keys on a xylophone (Lila was touched, fleetingly, by a memory of playing the glockenspiel in grammar school, and the tinkling melody of "Frere Jacques"), and he was walking in a disconcertingly aimless manner, gripping something in his mouth. Some sort of a ... floppy thing. Did the Johnsons know he'd gotten loose? Should she telephone them? But the phones weren't working, and she'd promised David she'd stay indoors. Surely someone else would notice him and say, Why, that's Roscoe; he must have gotten out.

Goddamn David, she thought. He could be so stuck on himself, so inconsiderate, out doing God knows what when here she was, no water and no phone and no electricity and the color in the nursery all wrong. It wasn't even close! She was only twenty-four weeks along, but she knew how the time raced by. One minute you were months away and the next thing you knew you were hustling out the door in the dead of night with your little suitcase, driving pell-mell to the hospital, and then you were on your back beneath the lights, huffing and puffing, the contractions roaring down upon you, taking you over, and nothing else would happen until you had the baby. And through the fog of pain you would feel a hand in your own and open your eyes to see Brad beside you, wearing a look on his face you had no name for, a beautiful terrified helpless look, and hear his voice saying, Push, Lila, you're almost there, one more push and you'll be done, and so you would: you would reach inside yourself and find the strength to do this one last thing and push the baby out. And in the stillness that came after, as Brad handed you the magical swaddled present of your baby, rivers of happiness running down his cheeks, you would feel the deep and permanent rightness of your life, knowing that you had chosen this man above all others because you were simply meant to, and that your baby, Eva, this warm new creature you had made together, was just that: the two of you, made one.