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room, where he’d been basically camped out, staring at his computer screen, cutting and cropping digital images. It was a bummer to have him so distracted during their first week in a new home, but Susan understood the reason. GemFlex was a small company, and the only way they’d become a bigger one was by getting a “rep”: a professional middleman who would tout their services to the big jewelry outfits, and handle all the negotiating and billing—all the tedious busywork that had the least relation to what Alex really enjoyed, which was taking pictures. Now there was a rep named Richard Hastiewho’d called them, first thing Monday, with a week’s worth of work for Cartier, shooting three watches for a small print advertisement. And though nothing had been stated explicitly, Alex and his partner felt they were being tried out, with the potential reward of not only steady work from Cartier, but ongoing representation from Hastie.
    “So?” Susan ventured, hours later, when Emma was long asleep. She’d settled on the other end of the sofa, with a glass of wine and the crossword puzzle. “How’s it going?”
    “You know, I don’t know,” Alex answered slowly, looking up from his computer with a tired smile. “All right, I think.”
    “You think you’ll get it?”
    “Well, like I said, I don’t know.” He yawned and turned back to the screen. “I hope.”
    Susan returned to her puzzle, feeling a mild, prickly wash of irritation. Yes, he was busy, but it was unlike Alex not to say something along the lines of, “And how are
you
doing?” Never mind “the house looks great” or “thanks for working so hard to get us set up.”
    His focus on this opportunity actually frightened her a little, made her wonder how important this contract was to their financial health, especially after the considerable expense of the move.
    Susan folded up her crossword and kissed Alex gently on the top of the head on her way upstairs.
    *
    Even after taking half an Ambien, Susan took what felt like an eternity to drift off, and when at last she did, it was into the grips of an awful nightmare. She was walking down Cranberry Street when she jammed her toe on a crack in the sidewalk, just as she had jammed itbetween the two floorboards on the landing. But this time the pain was intensified a hundredfold, out of all proportion to a stubbed toe, sending wave after wave of burning agony up her leg. Susan clutched at herself, howling, and went sprawling onto the sidewalk. Prostrate and writhing, she saw that Andrea Scharfstein was sitting at the top of the stoop, dressed in a wrap of eerily bright vermillion, waving her thin arms wildly, shouting, “Look out! Susan,
look out
!”
    She craned her neck upward just in time to see a gigantic double stroller hurtling out of the sky. She leapt to her feet and stumbled back, and the carriage hit the sidewalk. The stroller exploded and blood burst out of it, as if the thing had been a gigantic sloshing balloon full of blood; erupting in waves of blood, cascades of it, vastly more blood than possibly could have been inside those two poor little girls. Susan was splattered, covered, drenched in blood. She wailed, wiping the blood from her eyes until she could see the small corpses of the girls, their battered pulpy skeletons, strapped into their little seats in the side-by-side double stroller, hands clenched together … she screamed again, woke herself with screaming, woke to find her hands balled into fists and grinding into her eyes.
    Susan took a series of ragged breaths until her hands quit trembling. Then she staggered out of bed and into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror for a long time, wiping intensely at herself with her palms, as if the blood of the dream was still caked on her cheeks and clinging to her hair. At last she tiptoed back into the bedroom and stared at Alex, who slept peacefully, undisturbed. The glowing red lines of the bedside clock told her it was