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couldn’t sleep, couldn’t leave her alone. He went by the house every night, patrolling Marilyn Street, up and back, up and back, until one midnight a neighbor came out with a snow shovel and flagged him down and asked if he was missing something.
    In Sandy’s backyard the one blue street lamp shivered. The Chrysler started away slowly, with reluctance, as if it, too, couldn’t bear to leave her.
    Each time the office phone rang, adrenaline streamed into his blood. “Winkler,” the supervisor said, waving a sheaf of teletype forecasts.“These are atrocious. There are probably fifty typos in today’s series alone.” He looked him up and down. “Are you sick or something?”
    Yes! he wanted to cry. Yes! So sick! He walked to First Federal at lunch but she wasn’t at her station. The teller in the station to the right studied him with her head cocked as if assessing the validity of his concern and finally said Sandy was home with the flu and could she help him instead?
    The banker with the birthmark was on the phone. The gray-haired one was talking with a man and a woman, leaning forward in his chair. “No,” Winkler said. On the way out he scanned the nameplates on the desks but even with his glasses on couldn’t make out a name, a title, any of it.
    She came to the door wearing flannel pajamas printed all over with polar bears on toboggans. Something about her standing in her doorway barefoot started a buzzing all through his chest.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?”
    â€˜They said you were sick.”
    â€œHow did you know where I live?”
    He looked across the street to where the other houses were shuttered against the cold. Heat escaping from the hall blurred the air.
    â€œSandy—”
    â€œYou walked?”
    â€œAre you okay?”
    She stayed in the doorway, squinting out. He realized she was not going to invite him in. “I threw up,” she said. “But I feel fine.”
    â€œYou look pale.”
    â€œYes. Well. So do you. Breathe, David. Take a breath.”
    Her feet were turning white in the cold. He wanted to fall to his knees and take them in his hands. “How is this going to work, Sandy? What are we going to do?”
    â€œI don’t know. What are we supposed to do?”
    â€œWe could go somewhere. Anywhere. We could go to California, like you said. We could go to Mexico. You could become whatever you wanted.”
    Her eyes followed an Oldsmobile as it passed slowly down thestreet, snow squeaking beneath its tires. “Not now, David.” She shook her head. “Not in front of my house.”
    March ended. Community hockey ended. She consented to meet him for coffee. In the cafe her head periodically swiveled on her shoulders, checking back through the window as if she had ducked a pursuer. He brushed snow off her coat: stellar dendrites. Storybook snow.
    â€œYou haven’t been at the bank.”
    She shrugged. A line of meltwater sped down one lens of her glasses. The waitress brought coffee and they sat over the mugs and Sandy didn’t speak.
    He said: “I grew up over there, across the street. From the roof, when it was very clear, you could see half the peaks of the Alaska Range. You could pick out individual glaciers on McKinley. Sometimes I’d go up there just to look at it, all that untouched snow. All that light.”
    She glanced again toward the window and he could not tell if she was listening. It struck him as strange that she could look pretty much how she always looked, her waist could still slip neatly into her jeans, the blood vessels in her cheeks could still dilate and fill with color, yet inside her something they’d made had implanted into the wall of her uterus, maybe the size of a grape by now, or a thumb, dividing its cells like mad, siphoning from her whatever it needed.
    â€œWhat I really love is snow,” he said. “To look at it. I used to go up