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she said.
    “Then why are you so upset? You think I’ll stop loving you ’cause there’s a baby? I’ll never stop loving you. Nothing can change that. I loved you the moment I saw you. I’ll love you forever.”
    She stared at him. “You promise, Jack? Do you promise you’ll love me no matter what?”
    “Absolutely.”
    She closed her eyes. “Oh God,” she whispered.
    He held her again. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll have a fine pregnancy and we’ll have a wonderful boy or girl.”
    “Boy,” she said, her voice muffled by his shoulder.
    He let go slightly so he could look at her. “Are you sure?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Did you get an ultrasound? I mean, it’s okay, but I would have liked to have been there.”
    She gave him that sweet smile of hers. “No medical tests,” she said.
    “Then how can you—? Oh. Right.”
    She said, “Can we go and get that champagne now?”
    The pregnancy went easily. Rebecca insisted on a midwife, though she agreed to see a doctor as well. The midwife, Jennie, said she’d never seen a baby so eager to be born. They named him Simon, for Rebecca’s grandfather, though she’d never mentioned him before. “Simon, Simon,” Rebecca half chanted, and held him so close Jack worried she might cut off his breath.
    From his first moments, Simon looked at the world, and especially his mother, with curiosity and delight. Jack’s cousin said, “He has your eyes.”
    “Come on,” Jack said, “he looks like his mother. Lucky kid.”
    “Oh, the shape of his eyes, yes. But that slightly bewildered look? Jack, that’s you.”
    It wasn’t until a few days after the birth that Jack admitted to himself how scared he’d been that Rebecca would reject the baby. He didn’t know why he’d thought that, but he was glad he was wrong. If anything, she went the other way, almost obsessed with spending every moment with her son. And yet, at the same time, Rebecca grew sadder and sadder. When she wasn’t feeding or rocking Simon, she would stare out of the window, silently crying. Jack did everything he could to cheer her up. He brought her presents, he took her and the baby on weekend trips, he played with Simon with her, but none of it seemed to work. After four months he took her hands, and suggested, as gently as possible, that she see a psychiatrist. Postpartum depression, he said, was perfectly normal, it came from hormonal changes, and best of all, it was treatable.
    Her smile was far sadder than tears. “Sweet Jack,” she said, and touched her fingertips to his cheek. “This has nothing to do with my hormones. I wish it did.”
    It was late on a cold October night when the disaster happened. Curiously, Jack had been thinking of disaster when he went to sleep, for he’d been watching the late news, with reports of floods in Florida, earthquakes in California and Peru, and arsonists bringing down a library in Prague. When he woke up and smelled burning wood, he thought he was dreaming and was angry at himself for letting hiscontrol slip. But no, it was part of the “awake-world,” as Rebecca sometimes called reality. “Honey?” he said sleepily, and turned over to discover she was gone.
    From downstairs he could hear her voice. She was singing, or chanting or something.
    Simon, Simon,
    Rhymin’ Simon,
    Take the time an’
    Stop the crime an’
    Set the children free.
    Jack said, “What the hell?” and got out of bed. The first thing he saw when he came into the living room was the Tarot cards. They lay on the floor, fanned out in concentric half-circles of color and action. And then he saw his wife in the epicenter, crouched down in front of the fireplace, her back to him as she leaned toward the high flames. “Bec?” he said. “What are you doing?”
    She turned, her face a mix of rage and despair. “Get away!” she yelled, then, “Please, Jack. Trust me.”
    Only then did he see that she’d immersed her arms up to the elbow in the flames, and in her hands