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weakly, “It's probably nothing but pre- op jitters. I didn't sleep very well last night.”
    Walls smiled reassuringly. “Let's do this as a precaution, Natasha. Let me take this one and you can assist. If that's all right?”
    “Of course. Thank you.” Natasha could have argued the point. She was sure the trembling would pass as it always had. During the lastoperation her hands had been certain. Being replaced was humiliating.
    “Has this happened before?” he asked. “These tremors?”
    “No. Well, not during surgery. And it passed in a few minutes. I would never….” She exhaled loudly. “I should see someone. I'm sure….I've been under a lot of stress lately.”
    “Why don't you schedule something with Walter Edmonds? It never hurts to be certain.”
    Dr. Edmonds was a neurologist.
    A neurologist can diagnose neurological diseases.
    A neurologist can end a career with the truth.
    “I will do that today,” Natasha said weakly.
    “I don't see where it could hurt a thing,” Dr. Walls said, smiling kindly. He turned to the sink and began to wash his hands meticulously.

NINE
    For the past month or so, Ward had been able to remember his dreams only in piecemeal. While he'd been in Vegas he had dreamed, and his dreams had included a recurring nightmare, that he was lying in warm water as thick as motor oil. There was pressure on his chest like someone sitting on top of him. Above him, moving into view like a cloud, was Natasha's face, abnormally white—bleached of its normal color— and there was a bright red line on her neck behind her collarbone. Ward could feel her hands on either side of his face, and he could see that she was crying. And over her shoulder he saw Barney materializing. Barney's face was illuminated a golden hue. And his son reached over his mother's shoulder and Ward reached up and took his hand, and he felt a remarkable lightness, and was floating up, up….
    Ward McCarty awoke slowly to slits of bright sunlight being fractioned across the landscape of the guest bedroom wall like the stripes of a loping zebra. He heard the dull bumping as thehard- cloth vertical blinds swayed against each other, powered by the cold air rushing silently from the register below them. He closed his eyes and knew he hadn't dreamed at all.
    Slowly Ward drew his strength together, sat up, moved his legs so his feet were on the hardwood floor, and yawned. The large red numbers on the alarm clock read 7:32. A white- coated Natasha was by now working her way through the hospital rooms. Or maybe she was already in a suite operating on some parents’ child, those perfect hands moving deliberately to open and remove some part gone bad, to make a repair, to heal, to fix.
    After showering and dressing, on his way out, Ward stopped in the hallway outside the door to Barney's bedroom. He pressed his ear up to the door quietly, as if to not wake his son. For long seconds he stood staring at the pattern of the hardwood.
    After Barney died people had related to Ward differently—his old friends standoffish or guarded in their conversations with him. Friends with their own children had stopped calling after a few weeks, and Ward and Natasha's socializing had slowed to a crawl. They stopped going to the country club, and no longer attended ser vices atthe First Methodist Church in Concord. It wasn't that Ward blamed God for Barney's death; it was just that he and his wife had lost interest in participatory worship, just as they had lost interest in a lot of other things they'd done as a family. Ward hadn't lost his faith, but he didn't believe that God was paying attention, believed that His interference was as random as the flight of a discarded plastic shopping bag on the Interstate.
    Something always drew him to open Barney's door. He always approached the room shrouded in the feeling that he was entering a tomb, and entering was something he did with increasing reluctance. Finally he reached down, pressed the lever, and