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happening?” Diane asked.
    “I’d like to help you to address that if I can. So let’s get together and talk,” said Walter. “I hear what you’re saying—it’s urgent for you, and I want you to know that I’m available with regard to it—in fact, I’m at your disposal.”
    “Oh, Walter,” said Diane. “What will happen to me?”
    That evening, he picked her up at the house in Laurelhurst where Diane was now installed as au pair. It was a night in mid-August when fall was discernible as a faint, crisp chill just after sundown. Diane was out front, arms crossed impatiently, wearing dungarees and a man’s white dress shirt with its sleeves rolled. She didn’t look well groomed. She hadn’t primped to see him. She looked like she’d come from the kitchen sink, and probably had. She got in quickly and said, “Go,” as if the Lincoln was an escape car, then watched the side mirror as Walter sped off. They left Laurelhurst behind. Walter chauffeured her along residential streets, going nowhere and—between long silences—speaking to the matter at hand. “I’m sure,” he said, “that I could arrange for an abortion. If you want to consider that, I would love to discuss it with you. And the first thing you should know is that I would take care of everything, and pay for everything, and go with you, and take you home afterward. I’d be there with you throughout the whole business. You don’t have to worry about that.”
    Diane rode with her head against the window. She looked—how did she look? Like he’d been stupid about rubbers? Like he was a total idiot? Like he disgusted her? It was impossible to know what Diane was thinking—he’d felt this way about her from the moment they’d met—because she was fifteen and foreign. “That all sounds great,” she said, “but I could never, ever do it. I’m not going to have an abortion.”
    “I don’t know,” Walter replied quickly. “We shouldn’t take options off the table.”
    Their silences grew longer as they rode past evening lawn sprinklers, dog walkers, and a few kids on bikes, asking, in different ways, again and again, “Now what?” Finally, though, Walter got Diane to agree to a plan—a far-from-foolproof plan, unwieldy and laborious, but the best he could come up with under the circumstances—which they put into motion in the middle of November, when Diane told her au-pair family that she was going home to England. A week before Christmas, her host mother and father dropped her at Sea-Tac Airport. She lugged her suitcases into the terminal, rode down the escalator to the baggage-claim level, then went back outside to meet Walter, who was waiting in his car. Yes, he felt oppressed by Diane’s pregnancy, and fearful of how things might turn out, but he also felt steeled and ready at this point. He’d told Lydia—who was back to normal, well organized, and on the ball—that he was “going to Houston for a conference.” She’d answered, good-naturedly, “That’s what they all say,” and he’d chuckled as if to acknowledge the truth of this. Then, feeling tender, and despising himself, he’d hugged her and insisted that he didn’t want to go to Houston, which, if you construed it the right way, was a fact.
    Now he and his knocked-up fifteen-year-old former au pair drove eighty miles north to Anacortes. Walter brooded at the ferry slip where they were going to embark for San Juan Island while Diane slumped, gray-faced, against the window. In a battering sea wind they drove onto the boat and ended up between a trailered backhoe and a wrecking van. Diane wanted to stay in the Lincoln, as opposed to sitting in the warm cabin up top, so Walter put a blanket over her legs and, self-consciously solicitous, another around her shoulders. The ferry churned into disagreeable seas, which became forbidding in Rosario Pass, eliciting, in Walter, fear of a roll. He said, “I’m sorry the crossing’s so rough,” and Diane answered,