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attempts to show they were not listening. Mostly they’d stopped talking, staring into space as if some wind-borne peril had paralyzed them.
    “I think it’s a perfectly successful picnic,” Claire announced. “I’m having a terrific time. I really am.”
    The word
really
showed up now and then in family conversations like these. We all clung to it. A desperate little adjective.
    Claire struggled to trust what she’d said. Perhaps she thought a voice-over would convince our audience. She had the amazing ability to conceal all evidence that she detected our prevailing moods, and if she ignored them maybe those moods would vanish. It is true that Claire’s indifference to our despondency sometimes had a medical effect.
    Esther looked as if she had been studying our discussion for a class. Her face was blank. She’d fended off another friend and perhaps in her world—with its new-generation accounting—this was a point scored, another success.
    Down the ledge an awful blast of laughter rose up from the children, but on our carpet we were quiet.
    Without Esther today we tried not to trouble our few neighbors in the field by staring. No one wants to be seen asleep with a blood-cracked mouth. The ventilator chugged and the wind swept waves of dry warmth at us from the heaters. A hairless couple slept loudly on the carpet nearby, the wife’s face erased beneath a white hospital mask.
    We ate and rested and we talked a little. Claire insisted that she felt fine. I wanted to believe her, but I felt scared deep in my body. This might have meant nothing. I could feel that way at the wrong times, when things were fine, when I slept or even laughed. Surges of fear that I’d learned to ignore. Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them. I wanted to tell Claire I was frightened, but it seemed like one of those remarks that would lead to trouble.
    Claire tucked some cookies in her mouth, moving them around with her tongue as if they had bones.
    I would have liked to believe in her recovery, but the evidence was impossible to ignore. On our carpet Claire looked like one of those terminal patients let out of the hospital for a final field trip to her favorite restaurant, a ball game. A pity outing. She was thin and pale and when she smiled something dark shone from her mouth.
    I would not oppose what Claire claimed about herself or argue her from her position, so I said nothing of the bruising on her hands, the dried blood crisped over one of her ears. Instead I scooted next to her and felt how little she was, how even through her coat I could feel the long cage of my wife’s bones. When I hugged Claire, with sick people strewn in the field, I felt the shallow swell of her breath and she seemed to me like a bellows that I could control, opening and closing her to the air of the world. I thought if I held her I could always be sure she could breathe. I could just squeeze her a little bit, and when I released her the sweet air would rush in to revive her.
    From our portable radio came word that studies had returned, pinpointing children as the culprit. The word
carrier
was used. The word
Jew
was not. The discussion was wrapped in the vocabulary of viral infection. There was no reason for alarm because this crisis appeared to be
genetic in nature
, a problem only for
certain people
, whoever they were.
    It was probably only contagious within a certain circumference.
    Allergy
is such a broad word, claimed one of the experts on the news. Of course, to some degree, we are allergic to everything. But we react at different rates, sometimes so slowly that we never show symptoms.
    I imagined myself tearing up this man’s credentials, burying him in a hole.
    As our tools of detection improve, we see more symptoms
.
    At this point it was not a terrible idea, if you felt you
fit the category
, to bring your child in for testing.
    When they started listing counties, I turned off the