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Dulcie is afraid of freeways. She doesn’t like not being able to get off whenever she wants, and sometimes I catch her holding her breath between exits, as if she’s driving past a graveyard. So, even though the party we went to last week was miles from our apartment in Silver Lake, we drove home on the surface streets.

I was drunk, and Dulcie was driving my car. She’d taken one look at me as we left the party, then dug her fingers into my pants pocket and pulled out my keys. I liked the feel of her hand rubbing against me through my jeans; she hadn’t been touching me much lately.

I cranked open the window to clear my head as we drove through Santa Monica. Nice houses. Pretty flowers. Volvos. Dulcie and I always say we’d never want to live out here in suburbia, but the truth is, we can’t afford to, not on our salaries. Dulcie’s a second-grade teacher in Glendale, and I’m a repairman for the telephone company.

When we reached Hollywood, things got livelier. There were skinny guitar punks patrolling the clubs on the strip with their pudgy girlfriends in midriff tops and thigh-high black skirts. A lot of big hair, big breasts, boredom. Farther east, there were boys strutting the boulevard, waiting to slip into someone’s silver Mercedes and make a buck. One leaned against a tire hydrant and picked at his sallow face, looking cold in a muscle T-shirt.

We hit a red light at Vermont, right next to the hospital where Dulcie lost the baby, a year ago. She’d started cramping badly one night. She was only six months pregnant. I called the emergency room, and the attendant said to come right over. By the time we got there, the doctors couldn’t pick up a heartbeat. They gave Dulcie drugs to induce labor and the baby was born. He was blue. He was no bigger than a football.

Dulcie looked up at the hospital and then back at the road. She’s a small girl and she sank behind the wheel, getting even smaller. I didn’t say anything. The light turned green. She drove across Vermont and I nodded off.

I woke up when a car plowed into us from behind. My body flew towards the windshield, then ricocheted back against my seat. Dulcie gripped the wheel, staring straight ahead out the windshield.

“Something happened,” she said.

“Yeah,” I heard myself answer, although my voice sounded hollow. “We had an accident.”

We got out to check the damage and met at the back of the car. “It’s nothing,” Dulcie said, as we studied the medium-sized dent on the fender. It was nothing to us, anyway; the car was too old and beat-up for us to feel protective of it.

Behind me, I heard the door of a van slide open. I hadn’t thought about the people who’d hit us, hadn’t even noticed if they bothered to stop. I started to wave them off. They didn’t need to get out, apologize, dig around for the insurance information they probably didn’t have. But when I turned around, there were four or five men in front of me. They were standing very close. They were young. I was beginning to think that Dulcie and I should just get back into our car and drive away, when the van’s engine cut out and a tall guy wearing a hooded sweatshirt called back towards it. “Yo, Darren! Turn it on, you motherfucker!”

His cursing seemed to make his friends nervous. Two of them looked at their feet. One hopped up and down like a fighter getting ready for a bout. Someone was saying “Shit, shit, shit” over and over again. Then I heard “Do it, do it!” and a short, wide kid with a shaved head and glow-in-the-dark stripes on his sneakers pulled out a gun and pointed it at my face. It didn’t look like the guns in movies. Dulcie screamed.

“Don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot us!” Her voice was so high it sounded painful, as if it were scraping her throat.

“Your keys!” the tall one shouted. “Give us your motherfucking keys!”

Dulcie threw the keys on the ground at their feet. “Please! I don’t have any money!”

“I’ll get it,” I heard myself say, as if I were picking up the tab at a bar. I was calm. I felt like I was underwater. Everything seemed slow and all I could hear was my own breathing. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. I took out the bills and handed them over. The tall guy grabbed the money and ran back to the van, which made me feel better until I noticed that the kid with the shaved head was still pointing the gun at me.

That’s when I got scared. As though someone had thrown a switch, all the sound returned, loud and close. I heard the cars roaring past on Sunset. I heard Dulcie screaming “No! No! No!” I heard an argument erupt between two of the guys. “Get in their car! Get in their fucking car or I’ll do you too!” I grabbed Dulcie’s hand, and I pulled her around the front of our car, crouching low. I could feel the heat of the engine under the hood. The van revved up. I stood, bringing Dulcie up with me, and there, on the driver’s side, no more than three feet away, was the kid with the shaved head. He had the gun in one hand and Dulcie’s keys in the other. I could see sweat glistening over the pimples on his face.

“Hey!” he said, looking confused. “What the fuck?”

Then it was as if I skipped a few minutes of my life, because the next thing I knew, Dulcie and I were racing down a side street toward the porch lights of some bungalows. We didn’t look back to see if we were being followed. Sometimes Dulcie held my hand, sometimes we were separated by the row of parked cars. We had no idea where we were going.

After the police and their questions, and their heartfelt assurance that there was nothing at all they could do for us, we took a cab back to our apartment in Silver Lake. Dulcie was worried because the crack heads—that’s what the police called them—had our keys, and our address was on the car registration. But the police had told us that the carjackers wouldn’t come after us—that kind of thing almost never happened.

Still, Dulcie couldn’t sleep, so we sat up all night while she went over what had happened. She’d seen the van on the street earlier, but hadn’t it been in front of us, not behind? Why had they chosen our car, our sorry, broken-down mutt of a car? How close had we come to being shot?

“We saw them,” she said. “We know what they look like.”

“They weren’t killers. They were thieves. There’s a difference, I guess,” I said.

“No,” she said, twisting her straight brown hair around her finger so tightly the tip turned white. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Dulcie needs things to be exact. You have to explain yourself clearly when you’re around her, so she’s probably a good teacher. For a minute I wondered whether she wished we had been shot, just for the sake of logic.

She’d done this after losing the baby, too, going over and over what she might have done to kill it. Had she exercised too much? Not enough? Had she eaten something bad? She wanted an answer, and she needed to blame someone; if that person turned out to be her, that would still be better than having no one to blame at all. A few days after the delivery, a hospital social worker called to check on her. She reassured Dulcie that what had happened hadn’t been her fault. It was a fluke thing, the woman said. She used the word flukish.

“I should have noticed them tailing me,” Dulcie said now. “How could I not notice a car that close?”

“Don’t do that,” I told her. “Don’t think about what could have happened.”

“I have to think about it,” she said. “How can you not think about it? We were this close,” she said, holding her fingers out like a gun and aiming at my chest.

*  *  *  *  *

I drove Dulcie’s car to work the next day. When I got home that night, Dulcie had moved our mattress from our bed into the living room, where it lay in the middle of the floor, the sheets spilling over onto the carpet. She’d taken a personal day to recover from the holdup. Her eyes were red, and she looked as though she’d been crying all afternoon.

“It’s the rat,” she said. “He’s back.”

A month earlier, a rat had burrowed and nested in the wall behind our bed. Every night, it scratched a weird, personal jazz into our ears. We told the landlord and he said he would get on it right away, which meant: You’ll be living with that rat forever, and if you don’t like it there’re ten other people in line for your apartment. I checked around the house to make sure the rat couldn’t find a way inside. I patched up a hole underneath the sink with plywood and barricaded the space between the dishwasher and the wall with old towels. After Dulcie was sure that there would be no midnight visitor eating our bananas, she was okay with the rat. We even named him—Mingus.

She wasn’t okay with it anymore.

“He’s getting louder. Closer. Like he’s going to get in this time,” she said.

“He can’t get in. There’s no way.”

“Well, I can’t sleep in that room.”

“It’s a small apartment, Dulcie.” The living room was smaller than the bedroom, and the mattress nearly filled it.

“I can’t do it, Charles. I can’t.”

“All right. We can sleep anywhere you want,” I said.

“I want to sleep in the living room. And I want you to change the message on the answering machine,” she said. “It has my voice on it. It should have a man’s voice.”

“You’re worried about the rat hearing your voice on the machine?”

“Don’t make fun of me, okay? Those guys know where we live.”

Later that night, I discovered that she wanted to sleep with all the lights on.

“I want people to know we’re home,” she said. “People don’t break in if they think you’re there.”

We were lying on the floor on our mattress. She felt tiny, so delicate that I would crush her if I squeezed too hard or rolled the wrong way.

“You don’t mind, do you?” she said. “About the light. Is it too bright?”

She’d let me throw one of my shirts, an orange one, over the fixture hanging from the ceiling. It gave the room a muffled, glowy feel.

“No,” I said. I kissed her forehead. She didn’t turn to me. Since the baby, we’ve had a hard time getting together.

Dulcie sat up again. “Maybe it’s a bad idea,” she said. “Maybe a thief will see the light on at four A.M. and think that we’re actually out of town. I mean, who leaves their light on all night when they’re home?”

“No one.”

“You know,” she said, “I saw in a catalogue once that you could buy an inflatable man to put in a chair by your window. Or in your car. You could put him in the passenger seat if you were driving alone.”

She looked at me, but I didn’t know what to say. To me, driving with a plastic blow-up doll in the seat next to you seemed very peculiar.

“Lie down,” I said, stroking her back beneath her T-shirt. Her skin was smooth and warm.

She lay down next to me. I turned over on my stomach and laid my hand across her chest. I liked the feel of the small rises of her breasts, the give of them.

Dulcie’s milk had come in two days after the delivery. The doctor had warned her that this would happen and had prescribed Valium in advance. I came home from work and found Dulcie, stoned, staring at her engorged breasts in the bathroom mirror. I’d never seen anything like it. Her breasts were like boulders, and her veins spread out across them like waterways on a map. Dulcie squeezed one nipple, and a little pearl of yellowish milk appeared. She tasted it.

“It’s sweet,” she said. “What a waste.”

For the next two days, she lay on the couch holding packs of frozen vegetables against each breast. Sometimes we laughed about it, and she posed for a few sexpot pictures, with the packs of peas pressed against her chest like pasties. Other times, she just stared at the living room wall, adjusting a pack when it slipped. I asked her if her breasts hurt, and she said yes, but not in the way you’d think.

I slid my hand off Dulcie’s chest, turned back over, and stared at the T-shirt on the light fixture.

“Did you know,” she said, “that when you’re at a red light the person next to you probably has a gun in his glove compartment?”

“Defensive driving,” I said, trying for a joke.

“Statistically speaking, it’s true. Until yesterday, I never thought about how many people have guns,” Dulcie said. “Guns in their cars, guns in their pocketbooks when they’re going to the market, guns . . .”

A fly was caught between the light and my T-shirt. I could see its shadow darting frantically back and forth until, suddenly, it was gone.

*  *  *  *  *

The next evening as I was driving home from work, someone threw an egg at my car. I thought it was another holdup. I sucked in so much air that I started to choke and almost lost control. Two kids then ran by my window. One was wearing a Dracula mask and a cape. The other one had on a rubber monster head and green tights. I’d forgotten it was Halloween.

Dulcie takes holidays pretty seriously, and when I got home I expected to see a cardboard skeleton on the door, and maybe a carved pumpkin or two. Usually she greets the trick-or-treaters wearing a tall black witch hat that she keeps stashed in a closet the rest of the year. When she opens the door, she makes this funny cackling laugh, which is kind of embarrassing but also sweet. She’s so waifish, there’s not much about her that could scare anybody. But when I got home and climbed the outside stairs to our second-floor apartment, there was nothing on our door and the apartment was dark.

“What are you doing with all the lights off?” I asked when I got inside. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her hands folded in front of her as if she were praying.

“Shut the door,” she said. “A whole pack of them just came. They must have rung the bell five times.”

“They want their candy.”

“We don’t have any.”

“Really? You didn’t buy any?”

“Charles, we don’t know who any of these people are,” she said slowly, as if I were six years old. “I’m not going to open my door to perfect strangers.”

“They’re kids.”

“What about the ones who come really late?” she asked. “All those teenagers. They’re looking for trouble.”

I sat down and reached across the table for her hands. “It’s Halloween, Dulce. It’s just kids having fun.”

“Plenty of people aren’t home on Halloween. This is just going to be one of those places where nobody’s home.”

The doorbell rang.

“Dulcie—”

“Sh-h-h!” She hissed at me like a cat.

“This is ridiculous.” I got up.

“Please, Charles!”

The bell rang again. I grabbed a box of cookies from the shelf and went to the door. A little kid was walking away, but he turned back when he heard the door open. He was six, eight years old. An old man I recognized from the neighborhood, maybe his grandfather, stood a few steps behind him.

The boy wore a cowboy outfit—a fringed orange vest over a T-shirt with a picture of Darth Vader on it, jeans mashed down into plastic cowboy boots, and a holster sliding down over his narrow hips. He took a gun out of the holster and waved it around in the air.

“Bang,” he said, without enthusiasm.

“You got me,” I answered, putting my hands to my chest and pretending to die.

“It’s a fake gun,” the boy said. “No real bullets.”

“You mean I’m not dead?” I tried to sound amazed, and I got a smile out of the kid.

The grandfather said something impatiently in another language, Russian or maybe Armenian.

“Trick or treat,” the boy said quietly. He held out a plastic grocery sack with his free hand.

I looked into the bag. There were only a few pieces of candy inside. Suddenly the whole thing made me sad. I offered my box of mint cookies.

The boy looked back at his grandfather, who shook his head. “I’m only allowed to have it if it’s wrapped,” the boy said to me.

I felt like a criminal. “We didn’t have a chance to get to the store,” I said, as the boy holstered his gun and moved off with his grandfather.

When I went back inside, Dulcie was standing in the middle of the dark living room, staring at me. Three months after the baby died, I came home from work and found her standing in that same place. Her belly underneath her T-shirt was huge, much bigger than when she’d actually been pregnant. For one crazy second, I thought that the whole thing had been a mistake, and that she was still pregnant. I felt a kind of relief I had never felt before. Then she lifted her shirt and took out a watermelon from underneath it.

A group of kids yelled “Trick or treat!” below us. They giggled. Someone said “Boo!” then there was a chorus of dutiful thank-you’s. I heard small feet pound up the rickety wooden stairway to the second-floor apartments. I walked over to Dulcie and put my arms around her.

“We can’t live like this,” I said.

“I can,” she said.

*  *  *  *  *

Dulcie went back to work three days after the carjacking. I dropped her off at school in my car, and she arranged for one of her teacher friends to give her a lift home. I took it as a good sign, her returning to work. She complains about the public school system, all the idiotic bureaucracy she has to deal with, but she loves the kids. She’s always coming home with stories about cute things they did, or about how quickly they picked up something she didn’t think they’d understand the first time. She was named Teacher of the Year last spring, and a couple of parents got together and gave her this little gold necklace. Her school’s in a rough part of Glendale. The necklace was a big deal.

She was home when I got off work, sitting on the couch. She waved a piece of pink paper in the air.

“What’s that?” I said.

“We’re not allowed to touch the children anymore,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

She told me that a parent had accused a teacher of touching his daughter in the wrong way. Social Services came in, the works. When they finally got around to questioning the girl, she told them the teacher had just patted her on the back because she answered a question right.

“Now the district’s in a panic—they don’t want a lawsuit every time some kid exaggerates. So, no touching the students.”

“That’s nuts,” I said. “Those kids need to be hugged every once in a while. They probably don’t get enough affection at home.”

“That’s a racist generalization, Charles,” she said. “Most of the parents try hard. They love their kids just as much as you and I would.”

Neither of us said anything. Dulcie hadn’t brought up the idea of our having kids since we’d lost the baby. She had just stepped on a grenade, and I was waiting through those awful seconds before it explodes.

“This is a fucked-up town,” she said finally.

I wasn’t sure what had made her say this. The school thing? The carjacking?

“Maybe if we turn on the TV we’ll catch a freeway chase,” I said. .

“Or a riot.”

“Or a celebrity bio.”

She started laughing. “That’s the real tragedy,” she said. “The celebrity bio.”

We laughed some more. When we stopped, neither of us knew what to say.

“I’m not racist,” I said at last.

“I know. I didn’t mean that.”

“I may be prejudiced against celebrities, though.”

She squeezed out a smile. It was worth the stupid joke.

*  *  *  *  *

The next Saturday, Dulcie called an exterminator. She’d decided that we should pay for one out of our own pocket, because she’d read that some rats carry airborne viruses.

“People died in New Mexico,” she said. “ChiIdren too.”

It turns out that the exterminator you call to get rid of bugs is not the kind you call to get rid of a rat. There’s a subspecialty—Rodent Removal. Our rodent remover was named Rod. Rod the Rodent Remover. I was scared of him already.

When he came to the door, he was wearing a clean, pressed uniform with his name on it. “Rod,” I said,“thanks for coming.”

“It’s really Ricardo, but I get more jobs as Rod. Ricardo is too hard for most people to remember. You have a problem with rats?” he said helpfully.

“Yeah. In here.” I opened the door wider and led him into the apartment. “It’s not really in the apartment, but we hear it from in here.”

If Ricardo thought it was strange that the mattress was on the living room floor, he didn’t say anything. Dulcie was waiting for us in the bedroom.

“It’s there,” Dulcie said. pointing to a gray smudge where the head of our bed frame met the wall. “He’s in there.”

Ricardo went over and tapped the wall with his knuckle. Dulcie held her breath. There was no sound from the rat.

“They usually leave the house during the day,” Ricardo said.

“How does he get in?” Dulcie said.

Ricardo raised his finger toward the ceiling. “Spanish tile roof. Very pretty, but bad for the rat problem,” he said. “They come in through the holes between the tiles.”

“So there’s nothing we can do?” Dulcie asked, alarmed.

“We can set a trap in the wall through the heating vent there,” Ricardo said, pointing to the one vent in our entire apartment, which was, unhelpfully, in the hallway outside our bedroom.

“Then he’ll die in the wall?”

“It’s a bad smell for a few days, but then it goes away,” Ricardo said.

I could see that none of this was making Dulcie feel any better.

“Or I can put a trap on the roof,” Ricardo said.

“Do that,” Dulcie said quickly.

“Okay,” he said. “Now we have a plan.”

He reached into his pockets and took out two yellow surgical gloves. Dulcie was horrified, the gloves confirming her suspicions about disease. But Ricardo smiled pleasantly. This was a guy who dealt with rats every day of his life, and it didn’t seem to faze him.

“Why do they come inside?” Dulcie said. as we followed Ricardo towards the door. “The rats. Why do they live in the walls? There’s no food there.”

“To keep warm,” Ricardo said. “Sometimes to have their babies.”

He smiled and gave us a courtly nod as I let him out. When I turned back, Dulcie was still staring at the closed door, her hand over her mouth.

“It’s just a rat,” I said. I touched her shoulder. She was shaking.

*  *  *  *  *

A month after the baby died, the mailman delivered a package that I had to sign for. We don’t get a lot of packages, so it was an event. The box was from a company called La Tierra. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it; I was about to call back into the apartment for Dulcie when I remembered. La Tierra was the name of the company that cremated the baby.

“What is it?” Dulcie said from behind me. “Who was at the door?”

I turned around. This will kill her, I thought.

“What is it?” she said again, holding out her hand.

I had no choice but to hand it to her. She looked at it. Her face crumpled. “It’s so light,” she said finally.

I went to put my arms around her, but she stepped back. Then she started laughing. Her laughter became the kind of giggling you can’t turn off. She bit her lips and clenched her teeth, but the giggles kept coming, as if they were tickling her insides in order to get out.

“You probably thought it was something from your mom,” she said through her laughter. “Or some freebie from a computer company. Oh, my God,” she said. “Can you believe this is our life?” I smiled, but it was that weird, embarrassed smile you offer when you feel left out of a joke.

We decided to take the ashes to the beach and scatter them on the water. We drove out to the Ventura County line, to a beach called El Pescador. You have to climb down a steep hillside to get to it, and there’s usually no one there, especially in the offseason. We parked and scrambled unsteadily down the trail. We were so busy concentrating on not falling that we didn’t see the ocean until we were at its level. We both got quiet for a moment. The water was slate gray, pocked by the few white gulls that every so often swooped down to the surface and then rose up again. There were no boats in the ocean, only a couple of prehistoric oil derricks in the distance. “I think we should do it now,” Dulcie said.

We opened the box. Inside was some Styrofoam with a hole gouged out. Nestled inside that hole, like a tiny bird, was a plastic bag filled with brown dust. There could not have been more than a tablespoonful. I took the bag and handed the box to Dulcie. Then I kicked off my shoes, rolled up my jeans, and walked out into the water. When I was calf deep, I opened up the bag. I waited for something to happen, for some gust of wind to kick up and take the ashes out to sea. But the day was calm, so I finally dumped the ashes into the water at my feet. A tiny wave moved them towards the shore. I worried that the ashes would end upgin the sand, where somebody could step all over them, but then I felt the undertow dragging the water back towards the sea.

“I think that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a person do,” Dulcie said as I came out of the water.

As we headed back to the trail, she picked up a smooth stone and slipped it into her pocket. Halfway up the path, she took the stone out and let it drop to the ground.

*  *  *  *  *

A week after the holdup, the police called. They had found our stolen car. Once the kids run out of gas, the officer explained, they usually abandon the car rather than pay for more. He gave us the address of the car lot, somewhere in South Central.

“Go early in the morning,” the officer warned. “Before they get up.”

“They?” I asked.

“You a white guy?” the policeman asked.

“Yeah.”

“You want to be down there before wake-up time. Trust me.”

Dulcie said it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everybody expected things to be bad, so people made them bad. She saw it at her school. The kids who were expected to fail, well, they blew it every time out, even if they knew the work cold.

Still, we took the officer’ advice and went down to the lot at seven in the morning. I admit I was nervous, driving through those streets. You like to think you’re more open-minded than that, but I guess I’m not. I kept thinking about drive-by shootings and gangs and riots and all the things you read about, thinking, Those things don’t happen near where I live, so I’m okay.

We found our car. It was a mess. It had been stripped; even the steering wheel was gone. There was every kind of fast-food wrapper scattered on the back seat. and French fries and old hamburger buns on the floor. You get hungry when you’re high. It wasn’t worth the price of towing, so we signed it over to the pound and left it there.

As I drove Dulcie to work, I told her the police had asked us to come identify the suspects in a lineup.

“But they’ll know it was us who identified them.” she said. “They know where we live.”

“They were busy getting high. I don’t think they were memorizing our address.”

“I don’t even remember what they looked like. It was dark.”

“Once you see some faces, it might come back.”

“Charles, don’t make me do this. Don’t make me!” she cried.

“I’m not going to make you do anything. Jesus. What do you think I am?”

She didn’t answer me. I dropped her off at the school. She got out and walked towards the front door, then turned to wave at me, as if it were any regular day, as if we weren’t living like some rat trapped in our own wall.

I took the day off. I’d already used up my sick days, and I knew we couldn’t throw away the money, but I thought I’d go crazy if I had to be nice to a customer or listen to some technician talk about his bodacious girlfriend or his kids troubles in school.

I didn’t have a plan. I picked up a paper and got breakfast at a hipster coffee shop on Silver Lake Boulevard. There were a lot of tattooed and pierced people eating eggs and bacon; they looked as though they were ending a night, not beginning a day. I tried to concentrate on my paper, but nothing sank in. Then I got back into my car. I ended up driving along Vermont into Griffith Park, past the roads where guys stop to cruise, all the way up to the Observatory. I parked in the empty lot and got out.

The Observatory was closed; it was still early. I was trying to think of something to do with myself when I saw a trail heading up into the hills. The path was well worn; on the weekends, it was usually packed with tourists and families making a cheap day of it. But that morning I had it to myself. I wanted to walk. I walked for hours. I felt the sun rise up, and I saw the darkness that covered the canyons lift, as if someone were sliding a blanket off the ground.

By the time I stopped, others were on the trail—runners, or people walking their dogs, some kids who were probably playing hooky. I looked out over the canyon and thought about how I could go either way: I could stay with Dulcie and be as far away from life as a person could be, or I could leave.

I had been looking forward to the baby. I didn’t mind talking to Dulcie about whether or not the kid should sleep in bed with us, or use a pacifier, or how long she would nurse him, or any of the things she could think about happily for days. I got excited about it, too. But I had no idea what it meant. What was real to me was watching Dulcie’s body grow bigger and bigger, watching that stripe appear on her belly, watching as her breasts got fuller and that part around her nipples got as wide and dark as pancakes. When the doctors took the baby out of her, they handed him to me without bothering to clean him up; I guess there was no point to it. Every inch of him was perfectly formed. For a second, I thought he would open his eyes and be a baby. It didn’t look like anything was wrong with him, like there was any reason for him not to be breathing and crying and getting on with the business of being in the world. I kept saying to myself, This is my baby, this is my baby. But I had no idea what I was saying. The only thing I truly felt was that I would die if something happened to Dulcie.

A runner came towards me on the trail. His face was red, and sweat had made his T-shirt transparent. He gave me a pained smile as he ran past. He kicked a small rock with his shoe, and it flew over the side of the canyon. For some reason, I looked over the edge for the rock. What I saw from where I stood was amazing to me. I saw all kinds of strange cactus plants—tall ones like baseball bats, others like spiky fans. There were dry green eucalyptus trees and a hundred different kinds of bushes I couldn’t name. I heard the rustle of animals, skunks or coyotes, maybe even deer. There was garbage on the ground and in the bushes—soda cans, fast-food drink cups, napkins with restaurant logos on them. I saw a condom hanging off a branch, like a burst balloon. For some reason, the garbage didn’t bother me. For all I knew, this was one of those mountains that was made of trash, and it was nature that didn’t belong. Maybe the trash, the dirt, the plants, bugs, condoms—maybe they were all just fighting fora little space.

I got home before Dulcie. I dragged the mattress back into the bedroom. I took my shirt off the light fixture in the living room and put it in the dresser. When Dulcie came back, she saw what I had done, but she didn’t say anything. We ate dinner early. I watched a soccer game while she corrected papers. Then I tumed off the lights in the living room, and we went into the bedroom. She knew my mind was made up, and she climbed into bed like a soldier following orders. When I snapped off the bedside lamp, she gave a little gasp.

We lay quietly for a while, getting used to the dark. We listened for the rat, but,he wassn’t there.

“You think the traps worked?” she said.

“Maybe.”

I reached for her. At first it was awkward, as though we were two people who had never had sex with each other. Truthfully, I was half ready for her to push me away. But she didn’t, and, after a while, things became familiar again. When I rolled on top of her, though, I felt her tense up underneath me. She started to speak, “should go and get—”

I put my fingers on her mouth to stop her. “It’s okay,” I said.

She looked up at me with her big watery eyes. She was terrified. She started again to say something about her diaphragm. I stopped her once more.

“It’s okay,” I repeated.

I could feel her heart beating on my skin. I could feel my own heart beating even harder. We were scared, but we kept going.