The Night Listener : A Novel

of our lost domesticity, the dependable homeyness that had come and gone. I felt a clear sense of relief when Anna hit a key and made them disappear.
    “Have you updated the Quicken files?” she asked.
    “No,” I told her. “I don’t know how to get into that thing.” She batted her eyes at me dubiously.
    “I’m an IBM person,” I said. “Jess always handled this.” She began clicking the mouse. “Save all your receipts, then. I’ll take care of the rest.”
    “Great,” I said feebly.
    “Why don’t you go kick back?” she said.
    “You mean get out?”
    “Yeah.”
    The difficult child had been banished to his room.
    So the dog and I went for our walk. The street we took—the one we always take—was dubbed an avenue early in the century, though it barely qualifies. True, it’s paved with red bricks and lined rather grandly with red-leafed plum trees, but it runs for only a block, dead-ending at the edge of Sutro Forest. The houses along the way are old shingled places with copper gutters bleeding green, but their foolproof charm wasn’t working that afternoon.
    I reached the woods well ahead of Hugo. Below me lay a gorge furred with fog, where eucalyptus trees creaked like masts on a galleon. I stared at them for a moment, lost in their operatic gloom, then turned and looked for the dog. He was yards behind, too blind and dotty to get his bearings. When I whistled, his floppy ears rose to half-mast, but he promptly trotted off in the wrong direction. Poor old geezer, I thought. He seemed even more befuddled since Jess had left.
    “Hey, beastlet! Turn your ass around.”
    My voice was sounding disconnected again. I was halfway down the block before I realized why: I had sounded just like Jess. That gruff but folksy tone was precisely the one he had always used with Hugo. And no one else, I can assure you, had ever called the dog “beastlet.” There was nothing mystical about this, just a cheap trick of the mind that reconstructed Jess the only way I could manage.
    How pathetic, I thought. And how like me to play the dummy to my own bad ventriloquism.
    The fog was much thicker as I headed home. Out of habit, I approached the house from the sidewalk across the street, where I could see it in context: three narrow stories notched into the wooded slope. Its new cedar shingles were still too pallid for its dark green trim, but another season or two of rain would turn them into tar-nished silver. I’d been eagerly awaiting that. I’d wanted the place to look ancestral, as if we had lived there forever.
    Upon moving in, three years earlier, we had thrown ourselves into a frenzy of renovation. Fences and decks sprang up overnight, and the garden arrived fully grown, an instant Eden of azaleas and black bamboo and Australian tree ferns the size of beach umbrellas.
    We had already lived for seven years with Jess’s dwindling T cells and had no intention of waiting for nature to catch up with us.
    Jess used to joke about this. Sometimes he called me Mrs. Winches-ter, after the loony old lady on the Peninsula who believed that constant home improvement would keep evil spirits away. And that was pretty close. My frantic agenda for the house had been my only insurance against the inevitable. Jess was bound to get sick, one of these days, but not until those shingles had mellowed and the new fountain was installed and the wisteria had gone ropy above the lych-gate. That was the deal: Jess could leave, but only when the dream was complete, when we were snug in a fortress of our own creation, barricaded against the coming storm.
    It didn’t occur to me there were other ways of leaving.
    But about that package:
    It awaited me upon my return, having risen like a phoenix from the wastebasket to a place of prominence beside the fax machine.
    Anna was gone, bound for another client, but her dry smile still lingered in the room. I sat at the desk and picked up the padded envelope, turning it over slowly in my hands. It had the feel of Christmas somehow, peculiar as that sounds, the brown-paper promise of wonders to come. Anna had been right, I decided; it wouldn’t do to stop being curious. Especially now.
    I pulled the little tab and out fell a set of bound galleys with a light blue cover. The book was called The Blacking Factory . Its author was Peter Lomax, a name I didn’t recognize. According to the cover letter from Ashe Findlay (a stuffy but pleasant New York editor I’d seen several times at book