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Smart- ass.” She closed her eyes. “I’m too tired anyway.”
    And looking green around the gills again. I mentioned the all- night supermarket we’d spotted nearby. “Want me to pick up some ginger tea?”
    “I think I’m over the ginger tea.”
    “Something else?”
    “Just sleep,” she said, nearly there already. “Are you coming to bed?”
    It should have occurred to me then that Sara had more onher mind than the morning sickness, which ebbed and flowed throughout the day.
    I rarely go to sleep the same day I wake up. She almost never stays up past 10 p.m. I should have recognized that she wouldn’t have asked the question if she hadn’t felt an uncharacteristic need for company. That she was feeling just like me: displaced, out of her element. Probably wondering if she’d made the right decision, accepting the job here. Wondering if we’d made a mistake.
    But I didn’t get it. It was hard to relax with our life in boxes, and my mind had already wandered. I thought I could at least unpack a few books.
    It took me ten minutes to drive to the SaveMore on Belmont, pay for a six- pack of Goose Island, and drive back to the house. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Less than the amount of time it had taken me to hook up the TiVo machine. Barely enough time to feel like I’d been anywhere.
    Here’s the way I remember it:
    I parked in the garage and came in the side door, through the kitchen. I know that I put the beer in the fridge and my car keys on the island counter, because that’s where I found them later, after the police arrived.
    Sara told me later that I’d called her name, but I don’t remember doing that. I don’t remember hearing anything, or seeing anything. I don’t remember what it was that made me stop on my way from the kitchen to the bedroom to pull a golf club from the bag I’d almost left behind in Newton, which I hadn’t otherwise touched in years.
    I remember feeling silly doing it. I remember thinking how bare all the walls looked. Nothing about the house seemed like ours yet. I remember thinking:
I don’t like those curtains.
    Then Sara screamed. Or at least she tried.
    The man pinning her down on the bed had one hand clamped over her mouth. I remember a fat vein in his wrist. Iremember the desperation in my wife’s muzzled voice. The wild fear squirming in her eyes.
    The academic in me would like to report that I recognized an intruder, period. I’d like to say that, in the heat of the moment, his ethnic makeup was not a detail that I noticed.
    But I can’t. I saw what Charlie Bernard later called
the liberal white male’s secret horror:
a rough black hand creasing my wife’s pale skin, a black fist tugging her waistband down. His eyes were bloodshot. His teeth were yellow. I could smell his sweat from the doorway. Or at least I remember it that way.
    Looking back, I can hardly picture myself. It seems incredible to imagine how easily I might have hauled off with the golf club and accidentally hit Sara in the face. Or how easily Sara’s attacker—taller, heavier, far stronger than me—might have taken the stupid club out of my hands and used it against me.
    Which is more or less exactly what he did. Just not before I managed to land the first blow.
    I don’t exactly remember swinging, but I remember the meaty thud of the clubhead landing somewhere between his shoulder blades. My arms went rubbery, weak with fear and adrenaline, delivering little power. Still the guy grunted, arching his back. He stood straight and clawed at his spine, as if I’d planted a knife there.
    Then he turned toward me.
    “Motherfucker,
” he said.
    Before I could steady my balance, he launched himself over the bed, eyes blazing. On collision, my limbs turned to water. My feet tangled.
    We went down together. I landed flat on my back, all his weight on top of me, hot breath in my face.
    My own breath rushed out of my lungs. I felt my head bang the floor, saw a flash of light, and couldn’t see