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women’s voices speaking softly in Span ish, high-pitched giddy laughter, the long indrawn breath of a vacuum cleaner.
    Charlie lowered himself to the floor. He began the push- up routine that he followed every morning. He believed that the human body must be stunned awake, that left to follow physiological desire our muscles curl toward sleep. His arms levered him up and down. It was not without effort. He sweat. He had been doing five hundred pushups each morning for the last thirty years. It calmed his mind. Gave him space to think. To think, on this particular occasion, about his daughter, Char lene. Had his wife spoken to her? Would she want to speak with him? Then Charlie thought of Dominick Clarke Sawyer. About post-traumatic stress disorder. About what a man would do to keep his children at his side.
    “Let’s get out of here, Charlie,” said the second FBI man. “A coffee. A burger. I don’t care.”
    When they left the hotel, the two suited figures drew many eyes. The sallow pinched clerk pointed at them with the busi ness end of his pen. In the hotel windows, curtains shuffled slightly so that dark hollows were exposed, cloth held back by the tips of pale fingers. Stools swiveled in the donut shop across the road and older men with oiled hair shaded their eyes in detached accidental salutes. When the dark SUV drove onto the road, the hotel seemed to open up, to let in light, to take a long shallow breath.
    JUST BEFORE FIRST light, they drove the Ford pickup out of Jon Howland’s old barn. Dark hulking hay bales and bleating sheep, the huge stump of wood past the threshold, the indignant rooster and the old blood and the ax and the smell of slaughtered things. The truck bumped over wheel ruts. King opened the window and leaned her head outward and the wind blew over them, traveling from nowhere to quiet nowhere. Not one of them said a word while the cottage shrank behind them and the road lumped ahead. The slow hills were lined with bud ding vegetation. Out the windows, the children saw only what they were leaving behind. Cow-spotted mountains, and the safe ty of a cabin that their father had built with his hands, and thick deciduous woods they could navigate blind, and the easy way they had often sat together by the honeysuckle beneath the plum tree in the back field, and the cast of the fishing line beside their father on the bank of the river. And the wait, too; they remem bered the wait that had both hurt and saved them, the wait for winter to turn into spring, or for their father to light the wood stove in the morning so that they could stop shivering, or for the last of the snow to melt, or for the tulips to rise like the undead from the earth, or to turn twelve and sixteen years old, or, most pressingly, for their mother to come home.
    Their father told them to shut the window by spiraling his finger. Then his hand took the steering wheel where it fixed and became part of the wheel and the wheel gave itself over to the column, and the column to the steel beneath. He opened his mouth as though he was about to speak. He closed his mouth again. He leaned across King, rifled through the glove compartment, and balanced a pair of dusty wire-rim sunglasses on his nose. He tugged on his bottom lip. Even now he wanted them happy. He smiled awkwardly.
    They rode past dark woods and past a stream that cut through rock. Gray-and-white water gullied around a bolus of melting ice and then spilled downward into the great open mouth of a steel pipe that ran beneath the road and poured, faucetlike and tamed, over a short cliff. They rode past dynamite-blasted red rock that rose steeply to either side and betrayed thousands of years. They rode over hills covered with trees reddening with spring growth. They rode past curtained windows and past a man in a trapper’s hat waving at them with both arms. They rode past a skeletal peach orchard and past topped apple trunks and branches aborted into reachable spheres. They