62

Michelle took a long, hot shower. She blew her hair dry with more care than usual.

Although she wasn't a slave to fashion, she spent half an hour deciding what to wear for the meeting that she both desired with all her heart and feared. In the end, she knew simple was best. Clothes would have little or nothing to do with the impression she made. She wore sneakers, jeans, and a pullover sweater.

If the years had taken a toll from her heart, they had been kind to her face. She needed only a little makeup, then added more, then took it all off and went minimal again.

Sitting before a vanity mirror, she began to criticize herself aloud for thinking that Jeffy and Amity might be so shallow as to make their decision based even in part on her appearance. She was ready. Physically ready, but not emotionally ready.

She sat on the edge of her bed and took from the nightstand a framed photograph of the husband and daughter who had died under the wheels of an Escalade more than seven years earlier.

Sometimes when Michelle woke from anxiety dreams of loss and hopeless seeking, in the real dark night of the soul, she saw this photo illuminated only by the clock radio. Even in that poor light, their smiling faces had such vitality, such substance, she couldn't accept that they were truly gone. On those occasions, in a half-mad denial of cold reality, she got out of bed and went to the living room, wanting to find Jeffy in an armchair with a book, went to his workshop where radios—some restored, some in need of restoration—were waiting for him. Never having cleaned out Amity's room, she went there, too. She rearranged the dolls and stuffed toys, pulled down the blinds if they were up, so that if any hungry monsters came looking, they couldn't see a helpless sleeping girl. On nights when her misery was especially bad, Michelle would lie on the single bed, atop the spread illustrated with characters from Sesame Street, and turn off the lamp and put her head on the pillow. Sometimes she could sleep better there than alone in her king-size bed.

Now it seemed that her dark-night-of-the-soul denial might have been less a madness than a premonition that an extraordinary grace, a miraculous second chance, would one day be extended to her. Never had her heart been fuller than at this moment, nor could she recall ever having been this nervous. Second chances were rarely followed by thirds, certainly not in circumstances as miraculous as these. She must do her best. She must open herself to this other Jeffy and Amity, open herself entirely and honestly, speak from the heart.

Yet she worried. She knew as well as anyone, better than many, that sometimes you could want a thing too fiercely. The excessive passion of your yearning could blind you to the mistakes you made, so that in the end, you were defeated by the sheer power of your need.

She returned the photograph to the nightstand and went into the living room, where Ed still slept in the armchair, his legs on a footstool. She woke him, and he sat up, yawning.

"You said the best time to do it might be just before dawn, at the start of a new day and all that. You said they make breakfast together before first light."

"I've seen them at it, yes," he confirmed as he got up from the chair.

"I'm ready." She let out her breath with a sort of whistle and inhaled deeply and said, "I think. I hope."