At home, his daughter, Iris, is waiting, there for a weekend visit. She wasn’t feeling well tonight, so she and Dave skipped the carnival. He worries that Iris doesn’t sleep enough, that Dave doesn’t seem to know how to help her. Is there always someone to worry about?
He looks down at Kay’s polished nails, a dusty pink, and they walk down Maple Street, toward the neighborhood where the Tylers lived. Alex thinks of Greg for a second, and wishes they could stop by the house. How odd to think of that house being empty: the refrigerator unplugged, the mail forwarded. How odd to know that Greg and Freddie and Addie aren’t inside it, like perfect dolls in a dollhouse.
Greg. Alex thinks of his face—before the illness, during the illness. What a damn fighter.
Kay looks up because there is a rush of movement next to them, and she gasps as a boy darts by them on a bike, barely missing scraping them as he says, “Sorry.” In that second, they release hands, and stare longingly at the boy’s fine hair that bounces as he rides, his small legs and the blue jersey he wears.
Alex puts his hand on Kay’s back as together they watch the boy glide his bike onto the sidewalk ahead of them and pedal, pedal, pedal until he is just a blur. Both of them keep hearing his Sorry echo in their heads. Alex wonders what the boy is rushing toward. He imagines a sweet quiet house with the porch light on and parents who smile when he walks in the door. “I was getting worried,” the boy’s mother will say, and kiss his head.
Iris sleeps in the Lionels’ guest room （she went to bed even though it’s early evening because she can’t sleep when she should sleep） and dreams about one of her clients in the nursing home, who loves to sit at the table and put puzzles together, and all of a sudden, right next to her client, she sees Benny in her dream, the half brother she never met.
His picture is on the wall next to the cuckoo clock in Alex and Kay’s kitchen. She is surprised in her dream, for she knows he is dead, but she reaches out and touches his arm, and says, I’ve always wanted a brother. In truth, she thinks about Benny quite often, and in dreams, those things come out, she supposes. There is Benny, wearing the yellow and blue striped shirt he’s wearing in a photo album she looked at today when her dad and Kay left for the carnival.
“Good news,” Benny says to her, his voice so distinct and unfamiliar, and she wakes and the room spins. She feels a quick rush of dizziness and nausea, takes deep breaths. She sits up in bed and braces herself and wonders about the carnival. She hopes Alex and Kay are having fun. She imagines everyone stopping to talk to them.
“Oh, you’re not coming?” Kay had said earlier.
“I’m not feeling great,” Iris said. And that was half true. She does feel odd, as though at the very, very beginning of a stomach flu, but she might be imagining it. She could have gone. She would have probably been fine.
The whole truth is she can’t stand to think of all the children she’d see there—running around with cotton candy, riding the rides and laughing. The toddlers with sweaty foreheads and tired faces reaching up to be held by their parents.
She thinks about Benny coming to her in the dream. Why did he say good news? She doesn’t believe in messages from the universe, but that dizziness feels like something she remembers, and hope, like a sensation she’d forgotten, warms her for a second. She looks out the open window and sees Dave walking the yard, his hands in his pockets, his thoughtful expression as he checks the Lionels’ birdfeeders and sits down on the small stone bench under a big tree.
Yes, she is late. Yes, she felt similar with Phoebe. Half of her will not allow the feeling of possibility, but the other half has a thousand excited questions. Could it be? Could it possibly be?
She watches Dave outside. His tranquil eyes. His hands folded on his chest. His glasses slipped down to the edge of his nose, his ponytail loose. Dave with the birds and trees around him. His kind face not broken, still believing good things can come. She should get dressed, rush out to meet him, tell him about the dream, about the feeling. Life is always possible, she thinks, and she doesn’t bother to get dressed. She knocks on the window, and he looks up and grins. “I’ll be right out,” she mouths to him, and she hurries out of the room.
Two miles away, Hannah Johnson leans against her new boyfriend, Brandon Giorio, on one of the benches outside the library. She sips her strawberry milkshake from Shake Superior as she reads a book of poems by Sharon Olds, and Brandon nods and sighs the way he always does when he’s lost in something good, as he reads the biography of J. Edgar Hoover. She can feel his breathing against her, and every once in a while, his stomach makes a noise or she adjusts her head and hears a few thumps of his heartbeat.