It was the same every time:

He had a couple drinks at dinner and suddenly everything he did was wrong. Tell the waiter a joke he’d heard in the teachers lounge? Wrong. Give the hostess—who they’d known for years—a hug on the way out the door? Wrong. Put on music in the car, roll the windows down, and take the faster route? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Benno couldn't remember when it started, when Kay started taking issue with every little thing he did. All he knew was that it wasn’t always like this. Years ago, before Nick was born, everything was easy. Benno liked to have a few drinks back then, and so did Kay. They had fun together. There were never any problems.

But then she stopped drinking. Sometime after Nick was born she just stopped drinking. No more drinks at dinner, no more date nights at the bar, no more glasses of red wine in the living room after Nick had gone to bed. No reason, no explanation. At first, Benno was worried. Was there something going on with her health that she wasn’t disclosing? Had something happened—at a work party or out with friends—that had soured her to alcohol? When he asked, she’d shrugged; “I just don’t want to anymore.” And that would have been fine. Benno didn’t mind if Kay didn’t want to drink. It was her choice. He supported her in everything she did.

But it wasn’t enough for her to stop; she decided that Benno needed to stop too. Suddenly, his drinking was a problem. Suddenly, that third or fourth whiskey was over the line. Suddenly, Benno’s behavior was an issue. But Benno wasn’t the issue. Benno hadn’t changed. Kay had changed. Kay was the issue.

The night of the Close Call was no different. The three of them went to the White Hart Inn for dinner, as they did almost every Friday. Benno had a whiskey while they waited for their food, and two more with his meal. It wasn’t an excessive quantity of alcohol by anyone’s standards. He wasn’t sloppy. He wasn’t any tipsier than anyone else at the restaurant trying to unwind after a hard week. But Kay didn’t see it that way.

“Will you keep your voice down?” she scolded when Benno greeted his buddy, Mark, who was sitting down with his own family across the restaurant.

Benno plopped his napkin back on his lap and lifted an eyebrow at his wife. “What are you talking about?”

“Everybody’s looking.”

“Nobody’s looking.”

“If you want to talk to your friend you can go over there and talk to him. You don’t need to shout across the restaurant.”

Benno rolled his eyes.

“Are you gonna finish your food?” Kay asked Nick.

Nick shrugged.

“Let’s just get the check.” Kay scanned the restaurant for their waiter.

“We had a faculty meeting today about Andy Schultz,” Benno said. “His sentencing is coming up next month and the Defense wanted to see if any of us—any of his old teachers—wanted to speak on his behalf.”

Nick perked up. “The kid who killed his parents?”

“And his sister,” Benno said. “Didn’t just kill them. Cut their throats with a saw.”

“Benno!” Kay hissed.

“What? He knows.”

“Yeah I know,” Nick said. “Everybody talks about it. And it’s on the internet.”

“Yeah it’s on the internet.” Benno winked over the rim of his whiskey, which, as he tried to sip, he discovered was empty.

The waiter approached. “Can I get anyone anything else?”

“Just the check,” said Kay.

“And one more whiskey.” Benno held up his empty glass. “Oh and you’ll like this. I heard it today. Why are murders in Kentucky so hard to solve? Because there are no dental records and all the DNA matches.”

The waiter chuckled, nodded, and walked off.

“I don’t get it,” said Nick.

“I’ll explain it to you later.” Benno stood. “I’m gonna say goodnight to Anna.”

Kay ran her tongue across the sharp crest of her lower teeth. “You don’t want to wait for your drink?” she articulated.

“I’ll get it at the bar.” Benno headed toward the front of the restaurant, where Anna leaned over the host stand checking upcoming seatings. Benno always enjoyed talking to Anna. She was still young. It felt like everyone else in Benno’s life was growing old. When she saw him, she smiled softly and adjusted her hair. Behind him, Nick’s little voice asked a question, and Kay’s flat voice responded, but Benno couldn’t make out what either of them had said.

#

“Why are you going this way?”

Hail swooped into the patch of headlights on the rushing road. Damp wind and freezing specks billowed through the open windows. TOOL’s fevered, angsty droning blasted through the speakers. Benno drove a little over the speed limit—nothing crazy.

“You know this way is bad at night.” Kay twisted the music’s volume down into nonexistence and rolled up her window so that the air from Benno’s window reverberated against his eardrum until he capitulated and followed suit.

“It’s faster this way,” Benno said, inching the volume back up.

“It’s not faster. And we hate this music. You’re driving me crazy tonight.”

“Nick loves it.” Benno half-turned toward the backseat. “You love TOOL, right, kiddo?”

“I like the one song.”

“Will you slow down?”

“I’m going the speed limit.”

“The roads are slick.”

“They’re not, Kay.”

Kay huffed and tented her eyes with her hand.

Benno drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Up ahead, obscured by the whorling hail, the light at the intersection went from green to yellow.

“Dad, can you explain the joke?”

“What?”

“The joke you told. About Kentucky.”

Benno glanced sideways at Kay, whose clenched jaw rippled in the faint glow of the dashboard’s orange light. “What’s your problem?” he said. “You’ve really been on one tonight.”

Kay looked at Benno as if he’d just admitted he was three children in a trench coat. “I’ve been on one?”

Benno’s finger played with the window switch.

Kay’s face sunk into the shadows of the car’s passenger side. “I don’t think we should do Friday night dinners anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“What’s embarrassing?”

The light went from yellow to red.

“You’re embarrassing.”

“More of this again?” Benno smacked the wiper lever, which smeared streaks of melting hail across the windshield. “I had three drinks tonight.”

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“You had six.”

Nick’s little hand found Benno’s shoulder. “Are there a lot of murders in Kentucky?”

“You think I’m too drunk to drive?”

“As a matter of fact I don’t. You know why? Because you drink so much that after six drinks you’re actually still sober. You’re just an asshole.”

“First of all, I only had three drinks—”

“Sure.”

“—Second of all, you’re a bit of an asshole yourself.”

The red light at the intersection refracted along the wet road like a fresh wound. Benno toed the edge of the brake pedal.

“You don’t even realize how obnoxious you get. It’s mortifying.”

“To who?”

“To me. To everyone.”

“Ridiculous.”

“You think Mark likes being shouted at across the restaurant?”

“I was saying hi.”

“You think Anna enjoys you hitting on her with your wife and son sitting ten feet away?”

“What are you fucking crazy? We’ve known Anna since she was a kid.”

The red light turned green. Benno abandoned the brake pedal and hit the gas.

“But I could live with all of that.” Kay’s dark hair looked blue in the green light as they sped into the intersection. “It’s annoying and it’s frustrating but I could live with it. But Benno… You’re waking up every morning shaking. You understand what that means, right?”

“It’s a muscular thing. My father had it.”

“Do people in Kentucky not have teeth?”

“You know what else your father had?”

“I can’t even talk to you right now.”

“You don’t get to decide when—Watch out!!!”

Benno’s heart leapt, and he turned to scream right back at Kay, enraged that she would elevate their argument to shouting. But her eyes were looking past him, and he turned the other way into a blinding white light bearing down on the side of their car far. Too fast.

Benno slammed the brake—pointless and dangerous but instinctive and undeniable—as the other car roared into them. Nick shrieked in the back seat, an ugly but yet sweet sound to Benno’s ears. Kay’s hand clawed into Benno’s forearm, and despite his dread he could not help but appreciate that it was the first time in many days they had touched. And in this instant, suspended just before impact, his son’s voice and his wife’s fingernails melding into ardor, there was sudden silence, and a gray expanse yawned open before his eyes. In the gray, a shape stood, tall. A triangle. A pyramid. All gray. And from it, words—silent yet rapid. Manic. Unrecognizable and yet which Benno understood innately.

Safe.

Forever.

From violence.

From mud.

From sickness.

From nothing.

Benno reached toward the pyramid.

From place. From language. From body. From time.

His fingertips danced with static.

Safe.

He was calm.

From pain.

The pyramid was bigger than the sky.

Forever.

Then the sound stopped, and the pyramid raced away from him, and the gray wastes burned into light with a screech of brakes as the blinding headlights of the oncoming car angled and blurred past the hood. There was a grinding sound—metal-on-metal—as the two vehicles scraped against one another. The car rocked as Benno clutched the wheel and Kay called out, Nick’s little hand again finding Benno’s shoulder, and then the other car was around them, on the other side, its wheels screeching, its brake lights flaring and dimming, and its engine thrummed as it sped off into the darkness of the narrow, winding road.

Three heartbeats thudded audibly as Benno guided the car through the remainder of the intersection and onto the shoulder. His hand shook as it sought out the hazard lights. Kay took slow breaths, blinking rapidly. Faintly, TOOL hissed from the speakers.

“Are we okay?” Nick asked, his voice quavering.

Benno looked in the rear view mirror at his son’s face, smothered in shadow. Kay’s fingernails dug into his arm. It hurt, but the thought of her letting go hurt even more.

Safe.

Forever.

The delirium of a panicked mind.

Hail drummed on the car’s roof.

“Are we okay?”

#

Benno stood in the driveway surveying the damage.

The bumper was torn up and dangling off the fender. One of the plastic casings on the headlights was broken, and the exposed bulb stung Benno’s eyes. He should call the police, call his insurance… Overall, the damage was minimal; Benno had busted up cars worse in his twenties from running up on curbs or backing into spots too quickly. This was just a scrape. A scrape that could have been something else. Just a few inches—let alone a few feet—and the result would have been disastrous. Benno might not be standing here. His wife and son might not be inside, warm and whole and safe. If things had been different, if the world had been shifted just slightly this way or that… They were lucky. Benno and Kay and Nick were so lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky…

“Dad?”

Benno turned. Nick stood in the doorway, his little face—soft and dark like his mother’s—peering out.

“What’s up, kiddo?”

“Recipient killed another mouse.”

Benno nodded. He would deal with the insurance in the morning. There was no rush. There was time. They had time.

He kissed Nick’s dark hair as he went inside—the vanilla shampoo he’d been using since he was a baby the most familiar smell on earth—and closed the garage door behind them.

#

The mouse’s little abdomen was slit from neck to groin. Its organs—still attached by veins and viscera—were drawn from the slit and arranged neatly on the floor beside it. The little heart—no larger that a grain of rice—still managed to beat weakly in a widening pool of its own blood.

In the hallway off the living room, Recipient’s large shadow skulked.

“Why does he do that?” Nick asked, standing behind Benno.

“It’s in his nature,” Benno said. “He has an instinct to kill for food. But we feed him, so he doesn’t need to eat his prey.”

“But why spell?”

“Spell?”

“With the organs.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks like a word.”

Benno peered at the thuck of entrails. It was true they were arranged curiously: The lungs were angled almost like a letter, the fluttering heart staged like punctuation, and the intestines unspooled with the careful lull of cursive…

“Is he trying to tell us something?” Nick asked.

“No.” Benno tossed a towel over the eviscerated mouse and stood up, his knees whining. “It’s called apophenia. Seeing patterns in randomness. It’s part of being human.”

Nick chewed his lip. “Like in clouds.”

“Exactly.”

“Does Recipient see patterns?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Did we almost die tonight?”

Benno looked down at the top of his son’s head. “No. Of course not.”

Nick frowned at the towel, his nose wrinkled, his lips churning along with the thoughts in his head. “What if we had?”

“What if we’d what?”

“Died.”

Benno exhaled slowly, old whiskey fumes gathering in his sinuses. “We didn’t.”

“But we could’ve. I mean, even if we couldn’t have tonight, we still could at any moment. Like, something could happen. Lightning. Or a satellite falling out of the sky. You never know. Something could always happen.”

The ice maker sighed from the kitchen, and the lights dimmed.

“And if we did, I mean if we did die tonight, then we would’ve died with you and mom mad at each other.”

“Nick…”

“And even if it wasn’t tonight, even if it was some other time, like last night or last week or tomorrow or a month from now, you guys would still be mad at each other. And if we die and you’re mad at each other then you’re gonna be mad at each other forever. Because when you die you get stuck however you were when it happened.”

“Who told you that?”

“And then you’d never have a chance to fix it.”

“It doesn’t work that way…”

Nick’s lips trembled, his dark, wet eyes reflecting the towel spread atop the dead mouse.

Benno understood that this moment mattered. His son’s life, his attitudes, his beliefs, his fears and his confusions, were forged in moments like this one. Now, here, in front of his eyes, Nick was learning to cope, or to crumble. Benno had a chance, and a choice, and a grave responsibility. He’d made a decision long ago not to repeat his own father’s failures. I will do better, he’d whispered to Nick in the hospital the day he was born. I will do better.

But Benno had come to understand something over the last eight years: As a parent, you could promise and plan and prepare all you wanted, and the world would have its way with your children just to spite you. So much of parenthood, he’d learned, was letting go. And besides, the right thing to say was not obvious, the words to piece it together not liquid. He was tired. He still had to clean up a dead mouse, run the dishwasher, feed Recipient… And the premise of Nick’s anxiety—that death locked people in place—was silly. He would grow out of it. He would work through it on his own. Yes, that was Benno’s responsibility here: To stay out of the way. To let his son figure it out for himself.

He touched the boy’s shoulder. “Go put on your PJs and brush your teeth,” he said. “I’ll be there in a couple minutes to read.”

Nick looked up at him. He looked so much like Kay.

“Teeth, kiddo,” Benno said. “Then you can climb the Daddy tree.”

“I’m too big for that.” Nick walked off, his feet scrrrching on the hallway carpet.

Benno ignored a pang of longing. Of course Nick was too old for that. Why had Benno even suggested it? He knelt and lifted the towel. Despite all likelihood, the little disembodied heart continued to beat. When you die you get stuck however you were when it happened. Who had told him that? Probably something he’d read online. Benno would have to talk to Kay about revisiting the child-safety settings on the laptop.

He scooped up the carcass with the towel, went to the back door, and threw the dead mouse out toward the shed in the dark yard.

#

Kay refused to look up from her book while Benno got ready for bed.

He busied himself at the dresser, folding and refolding his t-shirt before wadding it up and tossing it in the hamper, then stood at the bathroom mirror with the water running, looking at himself with as neutral an expression as he could muster. He needed to shave. He needed to tweeze his eyebrows. He needed his teeth whitened. He needed to lose weight. It was late. He’d do it all tomorrow.

“We should sit down with the laptop,” he said, climbing into bed. “I think Nick’s been looking at some stuff online he shouldn’t be.”

Kay set her book down on the bedside table, turned off the light, and rolled onto her side with her back to Benno.

Hail pattered the window pane. Increasingly over the last few years, Benno found it more and more difficult fall asleep and easier and easier to wake up. If sleep was a glacier, it was melting, exposing the rock and fossils beneath. He listened to Kay breathe slowly in the dark, and remembered his first sleep over—when he was about Nick’s age, come to think of it. He’d cried, homesick and exhausted, interrupting the late night revelry, only to find, once the other boys, for his benefit, had turned in, that he was unable to sleep. He had lay awake for hours. Now, beside his wife of ten years, in the home they’d lived in together for seven years, he felt again inexplicably homesick. He rolled onto his side and shut his eyes tight, willing sleep to come. His pillow smelled like nothing. Shapes flickered on the cave walls of his eyelids: The mouse’s heart, still beating on the ground at the foot of the shed behind the house; Recipient’s orange eyes watching from a window; Another pair of eyes—pared, bulging—looking back from the open door of the shed, and a long hand picking up the heart between two long fingers—beige and fingernail-less—and holding it aloft so that it bled down, endlessly, mixing with the hail and the invisible torrent of time.