John pulled into the driveway at two-thirty, wishing it really were the start of the weekend. It was Friday, yes, but the only reason he was home so early was that he had to be back at work again in a few hours; For Colored Girls was opening that night.The set he’d designed was spare: a dozen flats painted to look like graffitied segments of a brick wall. Behind them, a cyclorama, lit with different colored gels over the course of the play, from rosy-yellow to celestial blue. It had come off without a hitch and he was pleased with it. No finishing touches remained to be added, nor did he anticipate any last-minute repairs, but he always made a point of being on hand for opening night.

Usually on opening night he’d stay through curtain, too, out of respect for the actors, but he thought he might duck out earlier this evening. He had a nagging feeling he’d been neglecting something at home. Their lives this past year had not been very happy, but they had been steady, predictably chugging along. Now he had the sense of changes afoot, changes he did not quite grasp or see. He was aware, mostly, of a sharp longing for family, never mind that they’d all had supper together every night since Jess had arrived. Perhaps the feeling had to do with Jess, the way her presence bespoke his failings. Or served to remind him that all children grow up and leave home. Or served to remind him that not all children grow up, forcing comparison with the baby they’d lost and his dreadful, thin scrap of life. Or maybe the feeling had nothing whatever to do with Jess; maybe it was all to do with Ricky.

For the arrival of Jess had also, coincidentally or not, heralded the renewal after long absence of what John thought of wryly as “marital relations.” Why wryly? Why wasn’t he simply glad? He sat there in the driveway, in the truck, motor off, keys in hand, mulling over these past nights.

It had begun after their talk with Jess, that Friday night—or really, it had been the small hours of Saturday by the time Ricky’s fingers slipped through the unstitched slit of his boxers. In the milkiness of the streetlamp she made patterns on his skin, drew lace on him with her nails, unhurried, agonizingly light, until he could not not say through his teeth, “Harder,” and then she tugged his boxers down. Lowered her face to the damp curling hair between his legs and rubbed her cheek and jaw bones hard against him like a cat. Later, she rose to straddle him, her face luminous and distant as an antique silver-print. She did not smile, not even with her eyes.

Each night since had seen a repetition. A new iteration. Theme and variation. It was not so much a renewal of their marital relations as a reinvention of them. He should have been ecstatic, should have been delirious. Well, he was. Was anyway swept away, overcome by the tidal force of the thing—even now, in the truck, he’d grown aroused inside his jeans.The ferocity of their sex had no history he could think of; the source of its ruthlessness he did not understand. This lovemaking felt punishing, retributive.

Yesterday morning, going to the bathroom, John had discovered a bite-shaped bruise at the top of his thigh. Its provenance took a second to dawn on him, and when it did he became light-headed. He felt awed by the maroon ellipse on his skin, awash in unfamiliar tenderness. Unfamiliar because it was directed toward himself, a feeling for his own vulnerability. It occurred to him, in a bizarre rush of association, that if Ricky were in some fatal accident, injured beyond recognition, the mark on his thigh could be used to identify her, a kind of dental record. That night he showed her what she’d done. He turned on the bedside light, knelt over her, one knee on either side of her waist, and, grasping the back of her head, steered her face to the spot. She made no expression of remorse. She touched the bruise with her thumb. Grazed it with her lips, salved it with her tongue. But within moments she’d abandoned this posture, her fingers digging into him from behind, her teeth pressed to his front. He winced, and, with a speed that surprised him, pressed her back against the pillow, kneed her legs apart.

John did not know what to make of any of it. He was fascinated and repulsed by what had been brought forth in him. For so long Ricky had related to him as obtuse, wanting, incapable of not letting her down. Now suddenly she needed him, demanded him—but that was not the whole of it: it was this specific version of him she demanded. Inarticulate, brutish.

John got out of the car. The day was mild for mid-April—hard to believe that only two weeks ago bits of snow still lingered. Going up the steps to the porch, he bent to retrieve a mug, presumably left by Jess. Hours ago, from the look of it: an inch of cold coffee sloshed in the bottom, and its walls were coated with milk scum. It was the alphabet mug Paul had made in second grade. John dumped the liquid over the railing and held the empty mug by its lopsided handle—he could picture sevenyear-old Paul sculpting it with slack-jawed concentration, the gumdrop-tip of his tongue protruding—as he pushed through the door.

“Hello!” he called. “Hello?”

Paul was due home from school in a matter of minutes; Biscuit not for a half-hour. It was Jess’s response he listened for.The afternoon sun slanted through the diamond-shaped window on the second-floor landing, draping a column of light across the stairs: dust motes and hush. She was out, then. When she got home he’d speak to her. She simply could not stay vaguely on this way, all open-ended, hapless fate, all whichever-way-the-wind-blows and time-will-tell. Last night at supper Ricky had come down on Paul for asking Jess point-blank when she was leaving, but John had thought the question legitimate, if not, perhaps, felicitously phrased. If her parents really had kicked her out, he supposed they would have to make a place for her here, as Ricky kept insisting. One way or the other, he wanted it said, acknowledged.

And why did Ricky keep insisting? He couldn’t work it out. But then, it had been a long time since he’d felt he understood what Ricky desired. Nearly a year had passed since the revelation of her second infidelity, but his memory of that night remained sharp: the way he’d lurched home late, after having slept off most but not all of the tequila on the love seat in his office, and pressed her to divulge the secret she’d been keeping, the secret whose content he had not come close to guessing, but of whose existence he had finally become convinced—or at any rate had become freed, perhaps by drunkenness, to posit. The way she’d proven him right and shocked him at the same time. Really shocked him, with a truth he’d never have imagined.The way he’d finished out that night on the den couch, not sleeping at all but staring into the dark, which had a textured, binding quality, like a cheesecloth in which were caught many wild thoughts like so much flotsam and jetsam: thoughts of her workplace affair before they married, thoughts of her holding on to their short-lived baby in the big pink hospital chair. Thoughts of the crib he’d put together, alone, on a Sunday afternoon, whistling, Allen wrench in hand, screws strewn across the floor.

He no longer remembered how many nights he’d spent on the couch last spring—four? five? a dozen?—or what exactly had precipitated his return to their bed, only that it had been nothing transformative, no sweet, relief-filled instance of reconciliation. A certain atmosphere of normalcy was hard to avoid, frankly, in a family where the kids needed their reading logs signed, the laundry needed folding, the fridge restocking, the plants watering. Daily business, if not a balm, was at least a broth in which they’d been swept up and eddied along. His hurt and anger had gotten pulled into the current, as had Ricky’s, apparently: had become just a regular part of the larger brew.

It was tempting to trust her again. He wanted to give himself over to her reanimation these past few weeks, her general move toward good cheer, her excitement over Jess’s baby, her unexpected fervor in bed. But John could not, quite. Why? He put a hand on the newel post, touched the alphabet mug to his forehead. He thought of the night of the baby’s conception, a night all too easy to pinpoint in the sea of touchless nights stretching in either direction from it. That night, he recalled, had held the brief whiff of renewal. Their hands, their bodies, knew painfully well what to do, as if to mock the small coolness that had come to mark their waking hours.Their hands, their bodies, seemed to belie their daylight moods and gestures, to flout what they’d become, to insist, Here is the root of your marriage, undiminished, unchanged . He had been roused that night by her touch, had woken aflame to his own erection in her hand, and had turned to her, already responsive, before he’d had sufficient time to register surprise. The baby had been conceived in the slippery sweat of nostalgia, and the truth was that John had spent the next several months wishing its existence away. Perhaps it was not Ricky he was now afraid to trust.

He lowered himself heavily onto the stairs. And why had Jess come? Could she be trusted when she said she sought nothing from them? She must want something. Whatever it was, he had little doubt he owed it. He wished she would say what it was, wished he could give it and be done. He pictured her, his eldest child, not well known to him: her eyes, first, behind their glasses: serene, modest, the eyes of a fawn, a novitiate—and then her thickening abdomen. Was she beginning to show? He tried not to notice, tried actively to avoid studying the size and condition of whatever small swell was visible: evidence at once inarguable and unfathomable of a more experienced life.

Another image came to him, one he hadn’t thought of in many, many years: day-old Jess. Still in the hospital, swaddled in a receiving blanket, her face a bit compressed still from the trials of birth. Her eyes had looked to him Inuit, dark and almondshaped; her cheeks had been broad, her chin a little nub, and her hair—he remembered thinking, with a private, triumphant thrill, that she’d got his hair!—had been profuse: black, curly, so silkyfine it looked damp.

A nurse had handed her to him. He had been amazed at how light and yet dense she was, and when, in her sleep, in his arms, she had moved slightly, shifting—with such authority—the unimaginably complex muscular-skeletal system within the tight package of her bindings, he had been overcome by pride and gratitude and fear, because only in that moment did it truly hit him that she was a real person, her own person. He’d been nineteen, and in awe.

Deena hadn’t wanted him to hold the baby at all. Or that is what she’d claimed from where she’d sat propped up in the hospital bed, her long wavy hair gathered back in a giant banana clip, her eyes looking oddly naked without their usual black liner, their fringe of mascara. She’d worn a Hofstra sweatshirt over her johnny, and had tiny red dots under both eyes: burst blood vessels from pushing, she’d informed him, piquishly, when he inquired.

“You look like you’ve been in the ring,” he’d said, hoping for a smile.

She’d stared at him, whether annoyed, confused, or simply exhausted he did not know.

“The boxing ring.” He mimed a one-two.

They’d started dating in college the previous July. Both their discovery of and interest in each other had been abetted, no doubt, by the scanty summertime population in the dorms. Deena, going into her senior year, had stayed on campus because she was a rampant overachiever who’d enrolled in some kind of academic enrichment program virtually every summer since junior high; John, entering his sophomore year, because he was given free on-campus housing with his job working as an admissions rep.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Deena had said doubtfully when John, hovering near the threshold of her hospital room, asked to hold their daughter. “What do you think, Ma?” She’d turned to Mrs. Levin, sitting in the visitor’s chair refolding three infinitesimal outfits she’d just held up to show Deena. On the floor beside her sat an enormous Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag; there was a sight gag, John thought, in the relative proportions: the reverse of the clown car at the circus.

“Of course he should hold his baby,” Mrs. Levin said, shrugging her heavy shoulders and pursing her lips, although not looking at either of them, but only at the impossibly small, pinkand-white terry-cloth sleep suit she dangled by the shoulders. “Why shouldn’t a father hold his own baby?”

And John had felt a shot of hope, not because she’d come to his defense (he felt fairly certain her verdict was unrelated to any warm feelings toward him) but because Mrs. Levin was so palpably annoyed with them both, he felt it might serve as a reminder to Deena that she and he were really allies, at least in this sense. They were not getting married, as the Levins wished them to do (never mind that John wasn’t Jewish, never mind, the Levins said, that they were both still in college, both still kids, both, for that matter, idiots: a baby needed a mother and a father).

The thing is, John would have stepped up. Or caved in. Either way: he would have wed. It was Deena who’d held firm in saying no. Deena, two years older than John, had managed to attend her commencement less than a month earlier, huge under her black gown, squinting migraine-ishly against the slamming metallic sunshine, shifting her weight from foot to foot long after the end of “Pomp and Circumstance,” all through the part of the ceremony when the graduates stood waiting to receive their diplomas, supporting the weight of her bulge with fingers laced tightly together beneath it. It was she who’d put the kibosh on their getting married. She who’d said categorically it would be a mistake. A disaster. The worst thing they could do. So that even as John had felt relieved—even, to be fair, as he’d privately acknowledged she was right—he’d felt snubbed. Diminished.

Deena had been adamant not only about marriage; she’d made it clear he was to have no role whatsoever in the baby’s life. “I’m going to be a single mother,” she’d informed him back in the fall. “You won’t be part of us. I’m going to raise her on my own.”

When he’d protested (though again, he wasn’t sure he quite meant to protest; he hadn’t figured out whether her decision constituted more of a deprivation or a reprieve for him), she’d pointed out, not unkindly, “I could have not even told you I was pregnant. I could have told you it was someone else’s.”

She was pre-law, Deena.Years later, after getting her J.D. and passing the boards and marrying Bernard Safransky, whom she met at Cardozo and who specialized in intellectual property law and who made shitloads of money, it seemed, from the get-go, she would chuck it all for throwing pots. But back then, whether he was sitting at Sbarro’s with her in the student center or standing on the doorsill of her private room at North Shore University Hospital six months later, clutching a bouquet of pink carnations rather too hard, John couldn’t help deferring to the future attorney in her, the litigator against whom it was useless to fight—and it was her, not Mrs. Levin, to whom he appealed for permission to hold the baby, this once.

“Well . . . okay,” Deena said with an eye roll that seemed to imply, devastatingly, that it didn’t even really matter, and she’d rung for the nurse to bring the baby, who was staying in the nursery between feedings so that the new mother could get some rest.

Mrs. Levin, whether in protest or out of consideration, had vacated the visitor’s chair in pursuit of a cup of decaf, so John had a comfortable base from which to support his infant daughter, whom he held reverently for twenty minutes—or five, or forty; he was out of time, lost in time—until Deena had looked up from the pages of the magazine she was flipping through and said, with unexpected gentleness, “You’d better go now, John.”

Obediently he’d risen, then looked around, at a loss for what to do with the baby in his arms. Carry her back to the nursery? Ring for the nurse?

Deena patted the bed. “Bring her here.”

He’d passed his daughter, in a kind of slow motion, into Deena’s arms. Only once his own arms were absent the specific weight of her body did he have the sickening realization that the baby had slept the entire time. He thought of asking permission to wake her, so he might see her eyes open just once. But Deena had already fitted her, neat as a puzzle piece, in the crook of her arm, the little face tucked in against her mother’s breast so that all he could glimpse now was the smoothness of her cheek, the round back of her head.

Then he’d been standing once more on the doorsill, threatening to combust with a grief he hadn’t anticipated, barely able to answer when Deena wished him luck.

The rush of years between that moment’s pain and this blindsided him. No one, not once in all the intervening time, had ever suggested what he’d done was wrong. But that changed nothing. On the stairs, cradling his son’s mug, John bent his head, closed his eyes. The air smelled acrid, as though the memory secreted actual physical properties into the environment.

He wondered if everyone, in the end, found himself in need of redemption.

Jess had not, of course, been his only accidental offspring.The baby they’d lost had been unplanned. He was conceived, plain and simple, out of haste and lassitude—John aware that if he paused to get a condom, Ricky might lose purchase on the moment’s rare passion; Ricky, aware that she played bad cop all too often, wanting the relief of playing good cop this once. And although, some weeks later, when their risk had proven consequential, and they had agreed to make room in their family for the manifestation of that consequence, they had not done so enthusiastically. John had been guilty during the first trimester of contemplating (with, yes, something like hope) the increased risk of miscarriage in women over thirty-five. When he, as if in penance for this unvoiced fantasy, offered the idea that Ricky might like to give up her job and stay home with the children, she had not fallen into his arms in gratitude. She had said, “And live on what? What you make?” They had argued then, wantonly, imprudently, about money and responsibility, about who worked harder and who wanted what, bringing up never-before-aired grievances and naming weaknesses that were close to the core of each other’s character. And later all of this seemed to have set the stage for the baby’s death, as if his swift passing out of their lives came in horrifying deference to their wishes.

If suffering could ever be considered payment for wrongdoing, he did not know. But he knew it had been a mistake not to speak these things earlier, not to insist he and Ricky speak of them together, all their ugly, half-hidden truths. He should have confessed from the start his lack of desire for another baby; his fear that if he told her she would despise him; his fear that she had grown to despise him anyway; his suspicion that her refusal to express anger signified a withdrawal of her love—or worse, cast aspersions on his love, called it into question. And how much did he love her? These days. Did he even know, or was that something else he’d lost sight of, grown insensate to? He remembered then, with a terrible lurch, that he had yet to tell Ricky about Biscuit and the ashes. He felt suddenly afraid, as though through long negligence he’d put his family in a kind of peril.

When the alarm went off, piercing his thoughts, it hit him almost with relief, as though it were something that had been gaining on him for ages, something he’d been staving off but which now at last had arrived. So powerful was this impression that it took him a moment to realize the sound was real, and that what he’d been smelling was smoke.