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enters through the back door and puts the provisions in the kitchen. Stacking the canned food on the cupboard shelves, she reasons that there is no need for her to worry; the old Crofut house will seem exactly as it has been for the past ten years: vacant, neglected, aching with ghosts. Still, she can’t help worrying that someone will find out.
     
     
    The stairs to the second floor wait like the long zipper down a woman’s back, a fancy woman like from the old movies, the way they always turn and wait: Would you get this for me, darling? Feeling drained now, impossibly weary, she climbs the stairs, half-expecting her mother to emerge from the lush pink folds of her past. On the landing she stands for a moment, hearing the windows rattle in the wind. The empty rooms wait blatantly, drenched in the red light of the setting sun. Her childhood room beckons her. Something stirs in her heart, and she lies down on the bed and weeps, she weeps and howls in the silent house, and she does not know if she will ever stop.
     

 
    5
     
     
    OUT IN THE COURTYARD the hours fade away, and Annie begins to feel cold. People come and go, smoking in small groups. The nurses. The orderlies. “Come on, Annie, I’m taking you home.” She turns toward the voice of Hannah Bingham, one of the labor nurses Michael worked with; his favorite. Hannah stands there like an angel in her pink scrubs, with the murmuring sun at her back. “It’s getting cold out here, isn’t it?”
     
     
    Annie stands up and lets Hannah put her arm around her. Together, they enter the bright corridor, the large lobby with its maroon chairs. The detective nods at her, a notebook in his hands. “I’ll be in touch,” he says, and she nods back. She doesn’t know how she feels about the detective, and she doesn’t want to think about it right now. Hannah leads her to the elevator and they ride up to the doctors’ parking garage. With her long silver hair and a crystal hanging around her neck, Hannah reminds Annie of a wizard and she is glad for her help now. The fourth floor of the parking garage is empty, quiet. Annie steels herself past Michael’s old space, searching the concrete for some scrap of evidence, but the floor looks swept clean.
     
     
    “Come.” Hannah puts her hands on Annie’s shoulders and guides her to the car. “We need to get you home now. Your kids are waiting for you.”
     
     
    The mention of her kids makes her heart prickle. She doesn’t know what she will say to them. They are home with Christina, her loyal babysitter, a student at the college. They will all be wondering where she is by now, waiting for an explanation. She will tell them the truth, she decides, because at this point that is all she has. They get into Hannah’s silver Pontiac, two baby shoes hanging from the mirror, a plastic Virgin Mary wobbling up on the dash. Annie stares at it, feeling contemptuous. There is no God, she thinks. Not for her. Not now.
     
     
    “My kids put that there,” Hannah says. “They think she keeps me safe.”
     
     
    “Maybe she does.”
     
     
    “It makes them feel better, that’s all. Just knowing she’s with me.”
     
     
    Annie nods, thinking about Rosie and Henry, what she will be able to offer them to ease their pain. Even she can’t soften this for them. She does not mind having the long drive to think, to gather more strength to face them. She is grateful that Hannah Bingham is taking her home, out to the country to their beautiful house. Only it’s no longer beautiful, she thinks. Without Michael nothing is beautiful.
     
     
    Hannah pulls out of the parking garage and winds down through short, one-way streets toward the interstate. “What did the detective say?” Hannah asks her. “What do they think?”
     
     
    “Suicide,” Annie blurts. “A morphine overdose.”
     
     
    Hannah scoffs. “Michael? Morphine?”
     
     
    “It happens, they said. Sometimes. It happens to doctors.”
     
     
    “It may