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into the heel. For an instant she’s tempted to rescue it, but doesn’t.
    She circles the bed and gets in, her skin absorbing the chill of the sheets. She’s too tired to read, and the book seems stupid now, bad luck; she’ll give it back to Eileen. She settles in, then decides it’s too
cold and levers herself out, gropes the three steps to his dresser and hauls on his favorite Bills T-shirt and a pair of wool socks. They don’t help right away; she just has to stay still and let the bed warm, like an engine. All day she’s wanted to crawl under the covers and surrender; now, with the house fallen silent around her, it doesn’t feel like an escape. She rolls over and curls around the body pillow.
    She’s seen the beds they have in jail on TV—steel bunks with thin mattresses and scratchy blankets. She’s afraid he’ll be cold. He needs two pillows; sometimes when he doesn’t sleep right his neck hurts and she has to rub Heet into his muscles.
    She feels herself concentrating, focusing her closed eyes as if she can see his cell. She needs to relax and see nothing, an empty screen. She thinks of Casey, floating warm inside her, his heartbeat slowing, echoing hers. Sometimes at night she feels him flutter or turn, a dolphin swimming, but right now he’s quiet. He’s probably as tired as she is.
    Outside, a car motors by, a jetlike rush of wind, then nothing.
    The bed warms, and she drifts into a pleasant half-sleep, a dream of summer on her grandmother’s farm when she was eleven—the old metal seat of the tractor, the barn that smelled of musty hay and cow dung. She’s happy there, peeking over the rough boards of the stalls. The cows look up at her with milky eyeballs but don’t stop chewing. Their gums are a mix of pink and black like a dog’s.
    When the phone goes off, it’s like a memory, the ring calling her back to the present. Immediately she knows it’s about him, someone from the jail. It’s past midnight, the time reserved for bad news. She slaps at the phone, grips it.
    A man asks if this is Mrs. Dickerson—older, serious, official.
    “Yes,” she says, “this is she.”
    “Mrs. Dickerson,” he says calmly, “do you know how easy it would be to kill you right now?”

A FAIR AND SPEEDY TRIAL
    LOVING YOU
    ISN’T THE RIGHT THING TO DO
    FLEETWOOD MAC

HEART - SHAPED BOX
    SHE CAN’T EVEN CALL HIM. HE CAN CALL HER, BUT ONLY AT PREARRANGED times and only collect. She’s taking unpaid leave, so there’s no paycheck coming in where there used to be two.
    “We better get off,” she says.
    “Yeah,” he says, and then they stay on.
    Their calls are taped, his letters to her opened. She’s not allowed to bring him any food or money or cigarettes, not even a blanket. Sometimes she gets to kiss him hello and goodbye when she visits, sometimes not, depending on the guard, depending on the guard’s mood. Her doctor says the metal detector won’t hurt the baby as long as she doesn’t go through it four or five times a day. Some days she goes through two or three times and then worries.
    The first time she meets their lawyer she wishes she’d tried harder to come up with the money. He’s young and looks nervous in his skinny tie, a college kid dressed for an interview. She’s supposed to call him Andy.
    To start, he says he believes Tommy’s not guilty, then goes on to talk about the problems of the case as if that doesn’t matter. They can place him at the scene, so there’s no way to prove he’s completely innocent. Luckily they don’t have to. The DA has to prove he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, that’s their one advantage. The first thing they have to do is ask for severance, make the DA try the cases separately. If they can do that, he wouldn’t be surprised if
both of them walk on the murder charge, the evidence isn’t there. If not—and the DA’s not going to want to do that, it makes things a lot harder for him—they could be in trouble. Either way they’re