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other, both of them insistently alive and, in some magical way, invulnerable.
     Helen had complete, unquestioning faith in their mutual safety. Without quite articulating it to herself, she considered them
     the necessary manifestations of existence itself, and for many years she wasted no anxious thoughts pondering the many dangers
     that threaten children. That her offspring would thrive was too solid a conviction to doubt.
    Yet doubt did come to her. It came from within, remaining latent for months, perhaps for years. She first became vaguely aware
     of it at about the time her beautician took to plucking iron gray hairs from her head. She was thirty-nine years old, blessed
     with such reliable comforts that she considered it disgraceful to fret. She’d always known that a woman’s mind has a way of
     quietly damaging satisfaction, shaking one’s confidence in the situation at hand with phantom catastrophes so that experience
     begins to seem a quagmire of possibilities and change the only certainty. But she continued to believe in her happiness, and
     her anxiety betrayed itself only in trivialities, a chronic twitch in her right eyelid and a tendency to clear her throat
     every few minutes, symptoms that Helen shook off as inevitable, like her gray hair.
    Then one morning following a particularly restless night, she decided to walk her children to school, her excuse to herself
     being that she would benefit from the fresh air. At their age, Jackie and Gimp didn’t need their mother as an escort, but
     neither did they seem to mind. They played tag with friends they met along the way while Helen ambled along behind, and at
     the first sight of the school they raced each other up to the building, finishing their uneventful journey with hoots and
     laughter. After the doors closed behind them they ran to a foyer window to wave good-bye. As Helen raised her arm to wave
     back, she hesitated, struck by an immense and unfamiliar fear. Her children were mere apparitions behind the dusty glass,
     insubstantial, weightless, and as soon as they disappeared, she burst into tears.
    Had she been an experienced worrier, at least she would have understood what she was feeling. But she understood nothing more
     than that she had to reckon with the fear, whatever its source. Reckoning must involve reason. So she reasoned her way home
     and spent the rest of the tearless morning planning the next meeting of Jackie’s Girl Scout troop.
    Through that fall and winter, Helen rarely had cause to remember her bout of worry. Heavy snowfalls gave the children plenty
     to do outside, and holiday fund-raising events kept their mother fairly well occupied. With the approach of spring, however,
     she began to grow restless. She would have taken long afternoon walks, but that wasn’t done by women of her age—not in this
     town, where the only sidewalks connected the stores along Main Street. Instead, she bought herself a new radio and spent the
     empty hours learning the words to such popular songs as “The Dipsy Doodle” and “Harbour Lights.”
    Toward evening one day in May, while the children played outside in the warm, grainy dusk and Helen attended to bills, the
     newscaster pressed in monotone through the previous day’s list of crimes, including one involving a hobo who was doused with
     gasoline and lit on fire while he’d been sleeping on the edge of a playing field in Huntington. The name of the nearby town
     startled Helen, as if she’d suddenly heard her own name on the broadcast. She dropped the letter opener and almost turned
     over her chair when she stood. She hurried outside, where she found her children behind the garden shed pounding nails and
     securing wire mesh to tall wooden stakes. Helen had no idea what they were building and didn’t stop to ask. She just swept
     them into her arms with rough, impossible strength and squeezed them together as though trying to press one into the other,
     to make a single child