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Number of times, since we met, that I’ve laundered my clothing: 93; that I’ve finished a book: 19; that I’ve heard songs on the radio with her name in them: 17 ( good times never felt so good : 9; where did your long hair go? : 2; a song I don’t know whose chorus chants Caroline Caroline Caroline in a voice like the clittering of dice in a cup: 6). Number of foot-long sandwiches I’ve eaten since we met: 12. Number of Lewises it would take to equal in height the number of foot-long sandwiches I’ve eaten since we met: 2.1; number of Carolines: 4.9. Number of times I’ve thought today about the color of my walls: 2; about the shape of my chin: 1; about airplanes: 4; about mirrors: 3; about the inset mirror in one of Caroline’s flap-books: 1; about Caroline and the turn of her lips: 6; about Caroline and macaroni and cheese: 1; about how difficult it can be to separate one thought from another: 1; about Caroline and moths and childhood fears: 4; about my childhood fear of being drawn through the grate of an escalator: 1; about my childhood fear of being slurped down the drain of a bathtub: 2; about eyes: 9; about hands: 6, about hands, mine: 3. Number of lies I’ve told you: 2. Number of lies I’ve told you about my behavior toward Caroline: 0; about fairy tales: 0; about Nabokov: 1. Number of times I’ve dreamt about her: 14; pleasant: 12. Number of times I’ve dreamt about her mother: 3; nightmares: 3. Number of nightmares I recall having had in my life: 17. Number of hours I’ve spent this month: 163; in vain: 163.
    Lewis tidied the house while Caroline napped, gathering her toys from the kitchen and the bathroom, the stairway and the den. He collected them in the fold of his arms and quietly assembled them on her toy shelves. Warm air breathed from the ceiling vents and sunlight ribboned in through the living room windows, striking in its path a thousand little whirling constellations of dust. Lewis pulled a xylophone trolley from under the couch. He stacked rainbow quoits onto a white peg. He carried a pinwheel and a rag doll from the hallway and slipped a set of multiform plastic blocks into the multiform sockets of a block box. He walked from the oven to the coatrack, from the coatrack to the grandfather clock, fossicking about for the last of a set of three tennis balls, and, finding it behind the laundry hamper, he pressed it into its canister. Then he held the canister to his face, breathing in its flat clean scent before he shelved it in the closet of the master bedroom. Lewis often felt, upon entering this room, as if he had discovered a place that was not an aspect of the house that he knew— someplace dark and still and barren: a cavern or a sepulcher, a tremendous empty seashell. The venetian blinds were always sealed, the curtains drawn shut around them, and both were overshadowed by a fat gray oak tree. The ceiling lamp cast a dim orange light, nebular and sparse, over the bed and the dressers and the carpet. Lewis fell back on the bedspread. The cable of an electric blanket bore into his shoulder, and his head lay in a shallow channel in the center of the mattress, formed, he presumed, by the weight of a sleeping body. He yawned, drumming his hand on his chest, and listened to the sigh of a passing car. He gazed into the tiny red eye of a smoke alarm.
    When he left to look in on Caroline, he found her sleeping contentedly, her thumb in her mouth. A stuffed piglet curled from beneath her, its pink snout and the tabs of its ears brushing past her stomach. Her back rose and fell like a parachute tent. He softly shut her door. Returning to the living room, he bent to place a stray red checker in his shirt pocket, then straightened and gave a start: her mother was there, sitting on the sofa and blinking into space. Lisa Mitchell rarely arrived home before the moon was as sharp as a blade in the night sky, never once before evening. Now she sat clutching a small leather purse in her lap, and a