“No.”
“Not much call to at sea.”
“Nor in prison.”
“I suppose not, no. You’ll pick it up right away. I’ll teach you. Marian can already do everything except reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel at the same time. It’s still one or the other. Jamie is less interested in learning—less insistent about learning, I should say. Generally he gives Marian’s passions a wide berth. He’s not one to jostle. He’s…well, he’s quite tender. You’ll see. Driving, though—once you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll be able to get around on your own. We might even think about finding you a car. I think you’d like—”
“Wallace,” Addison interrupted, “is there somewhere we could go to swim?”
“Swim?”
“Yes.”
“Let me think.” Wallace slowed the car, wanting to please. Not the Clark Fork or the Bitterroot, not at night. An idea came. “There might be somewhere.” He turned west, presently steered onto a gravel track that became a dirt lane. Trees grew alongside, though not densely, and the air was cool. A leaping deer, caught in the headlights, seemed to float over the rutted track and was gone. Addison winced as they jounced and rattled, and Wallace had to fight the urge to apologize. As though this expedition had been his idea, as though any of it were his idea.
He had never wanted children, never wanted to be anything other than a bachelor, and yet he had not hesitated to respond in the affirmative to Chester Fine’s telegrammed question, to take in two babies who would grow into two children who would occupy his house, his time, some portion of his attention. He had swept his seedier appetites to the edges of his life, mostly out of sight. Willingly, he had done all this. He had studied Jamie and Marian for clues about the character of his own brother, whom he had never known well. He wondered if Marian’s obstinacy was from her father or from the mythical Annabel, wondered who had bequeathed Jamie his almost debilitating horror of animal suffering. The boy was undone by birds fallen from the nest, injured rabbits, stray dogs, whipped horses. Cruelty was inextricable from life, Wallace tried to explain, but Jamie was not easily persuaded or consoled. No mystery why there were seldom fewer than five dogs in the house.
Though Wallace was eager to have Addison take a share of responsibility for the children, he’d also been surprised by his pleasure that Addison had （tersely） accepted his offer to stay in the cottage after his release and by his relief that Addison did not plan to take Jamie and Marian away immediately. He hadn’t realized he was afraid of losing them.
The lane ended at a shallow grassy rise, the headlights angling up off the top into nothing. “There’s a little pond down there,” Wallace said, turning off the engine. An insect cacophony welled up.
Addison got out and folded his jacket on the seat, set his hat on top, walked toward the water. Wallace followed. It was only a little oxbow pond, a silty crescent left behind when the river had changed course. The moon floated in its fat middle. Addison began to jerk at his tie, tugging at the knot and yanking it off over his head as though escaping a hangman’s noose. He shed his shirt with the same feverishness. In the moonlight Wallace could see the knobs of his spine, the shadows under his shoulder blades. Addison pried off his shoes, peeled off his socks, fumbled with his belt and the buttons at his waist until his trousers and drawers dropped around his ankles, revealing pale buttocks. He waded in on knobby heron’s legs. As the water rose around his calves, something seemed to break in him, and he charged like a maddened beast, splashing and galloping, diving under. The dog chased after him, barking.
Wallace shed his clothes and followed more deliberately, the pond bottom sucking at his feet. He took a breath and sank under the surface. Surfacing, he found he could stand on his toes, but only just. Addison was floating with his arms out, his chest breaking the surface, looking at the sky. The dog’s V-shaped wake disturbed the moon.
“Is this all right? Is it what you wanted?” Wallace asked.
“I haven’t wanted anything for years,” Addison said. “But then I wanted to swim.”
* * *
—
Over the more than nine years he had spent in Sing Sing, Addison had slept very little. His cell, seven feet by three feet, made from limestone quarried by prisoners long since dead, was a tomb in which, after lights-out, he lay perfectly still, perfectly awake, listening to the snores and murmurs and masturbatory rhythms of the eight hundred men stacked six high in cells identical to his. On ships, he had always been able to sleep, no matter how rough the seas or uncomfortable his berth. In prison, the persistence of his consciousness had seemed a particularly severe aspect of his punishment, meted out not by the court but by his soul.