Aurelia is sobbing harder, nodding her head, tears dripping off the underside of her nose as she nods, clicking open her purse and looking for a handkerchief.

Let's just pretend it never happened, Sylvia says. "That's what you told me when I got out of the hospital. But I'm telling you now, it's all a miracle. You have to understand. This is why it's so precious to me -- " precious to me. It scares her even now to say it. She says it. "I should be dead."

Her mother is crying helplessly, wedged between the car seat and the door, a cowering animal. She is nodding her head and wiping her nose with her hankie. She doesn't look up; her mouth hangs open in a gash. It awes Sylvia to see it, this stunning, unspeakable power.

She turns her head, searches the dashboard to locate the car's starter. Her hands are still gripping the steering wheel. She turns the key in the starter and steps on the gas; there is a loud metallic grind from the engine, and she jumps. It's still running. She never turned it off. She flicks on her signal and glances into her rear-view mirror, preparing to reenter the line of traffic.

She listens to her mother's quiet, steady keening beside her as she pulls onto the single lane road. The green Devon landscape revolves past the windshield and away.

She enters the house blinded, as by a bright explosion.

Her pupils flare, adjust, and the rooms of her house emerge, washed in the submarine light of summer afternoon. Her life takes tangible shape again, returned to her in high relief: the curtains she's sewn wavering at the windows. Her pewter candlesticks, her braided rug; her Chesterfield sofa and its worn blue velvet undulating like a reef at the edge of the parlor. The playroom abandoned for naptime, the debris of toys and storybooks scattered over the floor. Her mother follows behind, brittle, carrying more packages, her face wrung like a rag. The ringing of the telephone begins to surface. The house is otherwise still.

"Ted?" Sylvia calls, peeling off her purse and bags. She hears his chair's faint scrape across the floor of his attic study. Another ring stiffens in the air. "I'll get it," she says to no one, anxious to pull her life close, crossing the parlor and turning into the hall, where the phone table is centered against the wall between the main staircase and the kitchen. Ted's feet are clattering down the attic steps.

"I've got it," she calls as she reaches the phone table, rounding her voice: calm, efficient. As her hand extends toward the black receiver she sees Ted turn the corner at the top of the carpeted stairs and hesitate in the blue shadows. She raises her chin to him and sends him a tight, hopeful little smile -- a tiny intimate motion between people long married, almost a reflex, almost benign. She picks up the telephone, cutting off its shrill pulse. She brings the receiver to her ear. "Hullo?"

A second of dead air, then another, hisses at the other end of the line.

"Hullo?" Sylvia says again, her hand already tensing to hang up, her swiftly shaped composure going liquid at its center.

Ted is walking quickly from the second-floor landing down the remaining flight of stairs.

The line crackles with the oceanic suck of a hand covering the mouthpiece. The hand slides back, and the caller speaks into a tinny void. "Hello," says a deep, gravelly voice devoid of affect. "I'm calling for Ted Hughes."

The muscles and joints and pearly taut sinews of Sylvia's body go slack with immediate relief -- it's nothing, it's only for Ted -- and then something in the caller's muffled, genderless voice sets off a rush of blood from deep in the cage of her being. The voice has a Germanic edge.

"Who is calling, please?" Sylvia asks, her vocal cords tightening.

There is no answer; just the vibration of air in the line.

"Who is this?" she asks, her voice suddenly gummy with fear. Ted stops halfway down the stairs, listening, his head bowed like a mourner's.

The caller hesitates. "I'd like to speak to Ted Hughes," it asks with sudden, false briskness.

Sylvia grips the phone and holds it tight to her ear. The bones of her hand whiten under the skin. She twists to face Ted, her face an appeal of helpless terror. He does not meet her terrified eyes; he cannot look at her. He listens, his head bowed, his shoulders sagging, as if he holds the ancient weight of the rafters on his back.

"Who -- is -- this," Sylvia demands, drawing herself up, her desperation mounting, throwing off panic and dread like sparks.

The caller says nothing.

She knows this voice: it is the voice of her nightmares. Not the voice itself, but the ceaseless void it comes from.

Sylvia's voice rises up in a wave, crashing into the receiver of the phone, flooding the mouthpiece, the full force of her fear transforming, becoming an unchallengeable furious anguish. She has been betrayed. "I know who this is, Assia," she says. "I know it's you." She jerks the phone away from her face, as if it stung her, and stabs it at arm's length into the air at Ted. "It's for you," she says to him, looking away, her face contorting.

For a second, for hours, no one moves.

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