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explore the foolish. Jacob had stopped fighting, and the injections had been replaced with twice-daily pills. Diazepam. The quicker-picker-upper.
    Or the easier-to-forgetter.
    Or the don't-give-a-damner.
    "Jake, we're going to have to talk about it."
    "There's nothing left to talk about."
    "There's plenty."
    "There's nothing. It's all gone."
    "No. There's still us."
    "There's no more 'us.' There's just you and me. Or maybe just you."
    "Don't talk like that. You've always despised failure. That's not the Wells way."
    "I've had a lot of time to think. Hospitals are good for that, maybe even better than prisons." Jacob pulled the straw from his milk carton and poked it into the syrup near the fly. The fly's wings beat frantically.
    "I know this is terrible. But maybe we can get through it together. Start over."
    "The way we did after Christine? You saw how that one turned out."
    Renee finally sat, in the oak and mauve vinyl chair near the window. The sun had grown a shade more yellow outside, rising above the fog that hazed the horizon. In the old world, the happy distant past, Jacob would be at his desk at the M & W office, talking on the phone, cutting deals, lining up subcontractors. Or else out on the job site, looking at blueprints as a bulldozer ripped brown gashes in the mountainside.
    Developing.
    That was an interesting word, with several connotations. Developers made things happen. But development was also the term for a baby's trek through the cycle, from microscopic fertilized egg to alien peanut creature to bawling, squealing reality.
    "Funny, isn't it?" he said. "The kids were born in this hospital."
    "That's not so funny."
    "Think about it. They took their first breaths from this very same air. The same sick air." He waved the hand that held the straw and the fly finally broke free and arced across the room like a crippled bomber returning from a death run.
    The door swung open. A nurse came in, a male with a sour expression and two days of stubble. He stared at Renee as if she were the patient, then wiped his palms against his hospital blues and slipped on rubber gloves. He squeezed ointment from a tube and rubbed it softly into the skin of Jacob's arms.
    "You're looking good, my man," the nurse said. His ID nameplate read "Steve Poccora" and his picture beneath it was clean-shaven and smiling. The smile looked as if it had been computer-generated in a photo manipulation program.
    "The doctor says I'm getting better every minute," Jacob said.
    "Aren't we all?" Poccora said. Then, to Renee, "We'll have him home to you in no time."
    "No hurry," Renee said.
    Poccora started to grin at the joke, sensed the coldness in the room for the first time, then rubbed the ointment faster. Jacob barely felt the contact. The skin had roughened and much of the damaged layer had sloughed off. He was new in a way, pink as a baby, slick as a snake after molting.
    If only he could shed his soul as easily. He'd read that the body completely remade itself every seven years as cells died and were replaced. That meant he'd been a different man when Mattie was born. A better man.
    Less like Joshua.
    "How's the appetite?" the nurse asked.
    "Crazy," Jacob said. "Renee smuggled me in two buckets of the Colonel's finest."
    "That's why you didn't like the cafeteria grub." Steve Poccora moved the rolling table with the food tray to the corner of the room. "You didn't touch it. Figured you'd be used to it by now."
    "
Mez compliments au chef
," Jacob said in mutilated French.
    The nurse took his blood pressure and pulse, wrote numbers on a chart. "Your diastolic's a little high, but nothing to be worried about."
    "Do I look like I'm worried?" Jacob asked.
    "He's not the worrying type," Renee said. "I do that for both of us."
    Poccora looked from one to the other, as if deciding not to be the birdie in their badminton game. "Yell if you need anything."
    "'Scream' is more likely." On the television, the talk show host had a parrot perched on his