The Why of Things: A Novel by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop

him, slips it in the hollow beneath his back. “But you know that.”
    Anders breathes in slowly through his nose, feeling Joan’s gaze upon him. He is acutely aware of her hand beneath him, and he knows that this is partly a gesture, that one time upon feeling her hand there, he would have next rolled toward her and pulled her against him, and that things would have proceeded from there according to an intimate, unspoken choreography. He doesn’t move. Somewhere nearby, a dog is barking, and he finds himself counting the number of barks.
    “Don’t you?”
    “Yuh,” he says. “I know.”
    Joan returns her gaze to the ceiling. “But I know I can’t force you.”
    “No,” Anders says.
    When, a moment later, Joan glances over at Anders again, he has closed his eyes. She studies his profile, the shadows of his cheekbones, the jut of his Adam’s apple, and even though he is right there beside her, she feels as if there is a giant space between them. He seems very far away, or buried deep within himself; she would give anything to reach inside and yank him out, and her powerlessness to do so fills her with panic, as if time were somehow of the essence and slipping quickly away.
    “Anders,” she whispers. “Anders.”
    But Anders has fallen asleep. For a moment, Joan watches the rise and fall of his chest in the moonlight, her chest tight with a mixture of love and sadness. And then she turns her head, closes her eyes; and though her fingers have begun to tingle beneath her husband’s back, she leaves her hand where it is.

Three

    A nders wakes on Monday morning in the blue light of dawn, which creeps like fog over the windowsills and spreads across the floorboards, rustling the curtains and bluing the tangled sheets. Outside, the night bugs are chirping less and less, their argument lost to the morning birds, whose songs are growing bolder. For a moment, he only lies there with his eyes closed, hoping that he will fall back to sleep even as he understands that he will not; his eyelids twitch and tremble as thoughts begin to tumble in, many small ones at a time, and about nothing in particular—just noisy enough to keep sleep at bay.
    After several minutes, he opens his eyes again, amazed by the process of dawn, by how quickly morning happens; objects in the room that only moments before were grainy and undefined have gathered themselves, taken distinct shape, as if their particles had strayed by night and are returning now in the brightening light. Quietly, he gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom to getdressed, where it is dark enough yet that his face is just a shadow in the mirror; still, he does not turn the lights on.
    He passes barefoot around the bed, where Joan lies sleeping on her side; she stirs at the creak of floorboards, and Anders pauses in the doorway. Then he pulls the door shut behind him. He passes Eve’s room first as he makes his way to the stairs. Her door is cracked open; when he looks inside he can see her splayed out across the mattress, one arm dangling over an edge, a foot sticking out from beneath the sheets. The door to Eloise’s room is closed; quietly he turns the knob, compelled to check in on his daughter even if he risks waking her. Eloise is curled on her side, facing away from the door, cocooned in sheets he tucked at her insistence as tightly as possible around her little body last night, as she demands he do every night after he has finished reading her the latest chapter in whatever book they’re reading, which right now is Alice in Wonderland . Anders vividly remembers reading this years ago to the older girls, as he lay against pillows on the floor between their beds in Maryland. The familiarity of the text as he reads this book to Eloise now has a curious effect, making him feel as if no time has passed at all since last he read the book, and at the same time very old when he compares his present self to the person he was then. Gently, he shuts her door again and