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She studied the snow falling outside the window, aimless and infinite, white against the dark sky. “Do you think he’ll come back?”

“He always has before,” he said, turning a page of the newspaper.

“It’s been longer this time.”

The fire was hot. The room, small—smaller every day that he was gone. She wanted to go out to the fields, to call his name and bring him home. It was winter, though, and she could die—like the others—and be found only in the spring thaw. They would not know when she had died, what day to put on the stone.

“What if we took him abroad again, when he returns home?” she asked. “Would that cure it?”

“He enjoyed Europe. The trains, hotels, all that. I don’t know.”

“I remember his face,” she said. “On the ferry. As we docked in Corsica, from Toulon. It was like he was home. Do you remember?”

“He was better then, yes.”

All alone now, out in the cold. She pictured him as a roving creature, misunderstood, at war with himself.

Then she pictured the boys he killed: perfect boys. Boys he could never be. Or never be with, otherwise.

“I biked with him up the coast from Bastia to Erbalunga—that little village—while you were working in town," she said. "He collected rocks from the beach, the smoothest stones, the ones he said were the color of the sky. He wanted to imagine they were pieces of the sky. And I told him yes. Yes, those stones were pieces of the sky.”

“You shouldn’t tell him things like that.”

“Why? Oh, I know, but why?”

She had found the first boy, Peter, the son of a family in the valley. He had been about to go off to university. He was in the grove, attached to one of the dead trees, looking somehow used, perhaps in the fulfillment of desire or the painful process of longing for but never being. Her son was turning into something foreign to her. She wished, too late, that all boys could be beautiful.

And she hid the body, never imagining that it would happen again.

“I should teach him business,” said her husband, the reluctant conspirator. “A trade.”

“But he wants to tell stories.”

“Yes, I know.”

“My favorite is the one about the castle, and the thief who steals the golden bell from the tower. The thief no one can see.”

“Yes. He tells that one often.”

Stories of magical places, imaginary worlds. Anywhere but here, any life but this. Why, she wondered, are we never satisfied? Why can we not convince ourselves to want less? But for our children, we always want everything. A world full of rightness, a world that will embrace them.

“Do you like the tea?” she asked.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s a new kind that I found at the little store in town. Behind the bakery.”

“It’s a fine tea.”

“I think so, too. A change. I thought a change would be good. A new kind of tea is a good place to start, right? To start changing?”

“The tea is fine. I don’t really taste a difference.”

She stood, clutching the cup close to her chest. “I won’t sleep tonight, I can’t bear it. I just think of what could happen, what will eventually happen someday. You just sit there and read the newspaper as though we were normal, like everyone else. We aren’t normal.”

They will catch him, she knew. And she didn't know if she would be strong enough for revenge—she was already so tired—but they would come anyway and make her remember, make her pay for what she had brought into the world.

“Don’t be cross with me.”

“But nothing normal is that way, the way he is. The way we are, now. You just sit there, taking no responsibility for any of it—”

“Stop it.”

She took a breath and sat down. “I’m sorry. Tell me the news. Something good, something happy.”

“There’s a travel story on Spain. People are going to Spain again.”

“When were people not going to Spain?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anyone who has gone to Spain.”

“We went to Spain.”

“Did we?” he asked, smiling. He was kidding her as though he had forgotten, but he remembered. She could tell by the way he looked at her as though she was a young girl again, standing on church steps in Pamplona with a flower in her hair. She spoke French back then and pretended to be French in Spain, thinking it was so funny to change her country, to be from somewhere else.

She finished her tea. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

“I thought you wouldn’t sleep tonight.”

“I might try.”

“He’ll come back.”

“You can’t know that. He may never come back.” She thought that she might cry. “You try so hard to know them,” she said, looking away. “To understand.”

He stood. “I’ll go to bed with you.”

They climbed the stairs, passing the photographs on the wall and ignoring the half-open door to a room they never entered. Sometimes she did not even see it, that room—she could forget entirely that it was ever there at all. How had she come to hide him, to push him to the corners of the house? But it wasn't that she didn’t know where he was, what he was doing; it was that she did know. Maybe she had made him that way, somehow, and maybe he would come for her eventually.

Or maybe this was already enough punishment, enough torture. Maybe when he is talked about years later as something evil, an abomination, they will forget to mention her. She had paid her dues, trying so hard to make everything right again. In bed, her husband kissed her on the forehead. She noticed his eyes linger on the window; the snow falling, the world slowly burying itself.

“Good night,” he said.

“Why do you always say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“Slow, sad, like you’ve already given up.”

Ever since the beginning, he had stepped back and let her shoulder the burden. He only had to bear it, to keep quiet and bear it. That’s all. And his eyes were so different, they would never recognize him. When she was pregnant all those years ago, she had known that the thing she carried was distinctly hers, and sure enough, he had emerged a near likeness—same chin, same ears, same small bones. Yet more than anything else, it was the eyes that they shared: pale blue mirrors, endlessly deep. It was the eyes that would always give her away, the eyes that would attach her to him, binding them together forever. His boys would recognize those eyes, someday in some other world, and would come for her.

"I'm sorry," he said.

“Don’t apologize."

“Okay.”

The wind pushed against the house from all sides as though to collapse it in upon them. She thought of the boys waiting in the basement, all the boys she had found and taken home, their heads turned up now toward the cold, dark world above, arranged just the way he liked them. She thought of all young boys, how they should be able to grow up to be anything, everything, whatever they wanted.

“Good night,” she said, but it wasn't, and she did not sleep.

Richard Larson is a transplanted Midwesterner now living in New York City. He is a graduate student at New York University, where he studies a variety of things that hopefully will eventually cohere into something useful. His writing has appeared in several places including Pindeldyboz, Strange Horizons, and Electric Velocipede, and he blogs at http://rlarson.typepad.com.