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of writing time I’d had since Heidi’s birth.
    That morning, just as I’d been packing up my computer, I’d received a call from my mother. Cal wasn’t working at the time. He’d resigned a full-time contract on the promise of another job that, in the end, hadn’t worked out, but we were trying to look on the bright side. He’d been thinking about getting out of teaching anyway. He was thinking about earning a Ph.D. He was supposed to be researching programs, studying for the GRE, but the reality was thathe was stuck, not certain what he wanted to do next. If we could have talked about it—but we couldn’t talk about it. The trick to getting along seemed to be avoiding talk altogether. I worked and wrote and took care of Heidi. He read the news on the Internet, blogged with reenactment friends.
    Of course he took care of Heidi on the days I was at work.
    “You don’t give Cal a chance with that baby,” friends and family members said. “Get out of the house. Get out of his way. Let the two of them get to know each other.”
    I believed them because I wanted to believe them.
    I believed them because I waited all week for that single night, alone at my computer, in room 342 at the Holiday Inn.
    “I don’t want to worry you,” my mother said. “But yesterday, Cal and Heidi came over, and Heidi threw up on her shirt. I offered to wash it, but he said no, he’d take care of it when they got home.”
    “Is she sick?” I said.
    “I think she’s fine,” my mother said. “But this morning, when I stopped by to see if she was feeling better, she was still wearing the same shirt.”
    “Maybe it’s just that he couldn’t get the stain—”
    “She stank to high heaven, Jeanie,” my mother said. “And Calvin looks—well, he hasn’t changed his clothes since yesterday, either. It’s more than a hangover, Jeanie. He’s not in a good state of mind.”
    What I should have said: “I’ll be home on the next train.”

    What I said: “I’ve got to teach in an hour.”
    My mother did not say anything.
    “You can’t just cancel a graduate-level class.”
    My mother said, “You know what you can and cannot do.”
    Now, nursing a Starbucks cappuccino, I was standing at the corner of Ponce and Dixie, preparing to dash across the four-lane highway, as I did every day, to get to campus. Hurricanes had knocked out the pedestrian walk signs, so you had to time the lights, gauge the speed of the on-coming traffic, which tended to accelerate—Miami being Miami—at the sight of a human being actually braving a crosswalk. During the first week of classes, at exactly this spot, a student had been hit by a car and killed. I thought of her today, as I always did, reminding myself to be careful.
    High overhead, a half-dozen vultures circled aimlessly.
    Perhaps Heidi had insisted on that particular shirt and Cal simply hadn’t had the energy to deal with it. Perhaps she was sick, had been sick all night long, and that’s why Cal was in the same clothes: he’d spent a sleepless night caring for her. None of this rang true, but I didn’t want to think about what it meant. By what it meant, I did not mean what it meant for Heidi or, for that matter, Cal. I was thinking about my writing. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about what it would mean to lose those Wednesday nights, and I thought to myself, in exactly these words: “I am a dead woman. I am dead.”
    The light changed. There was a gap in the traffic. I decided to run for the median, wait for a second opportunityto cross the remaining lanes. But as soon as I stepped up onto the narrow concrete strip, I could see exactly what would happen next. Even before I dropped my cappuccino, I knew how it would bounce, still capped, into the oncoming traffic. Even before my left ankle buckled, I knew how my body would feel as it fell, the impact of my hip, vibrations rising through the concrete. The car that would strike me already gaining speed. The steely