Free In Case We're Separated by Alice Mattison

inside the apartment, she had reached for his hand again.
    Now he began clearing the food. Laura, who worked for a congresswoman, had grown up in Boston, but her parents, divorced, lived elsewhere. Josh was flattered that when Laura came to Boston, she wanted to stay with him.
    Jo and Laura continued talking. To Josh’s surprise, Jo told Laura the whole story in more detail than he’d heard it. She stood and turned, stretching the curly cord around her elbow and then revolving slowly as she spoke, until it was released. She listened, talked, listened. “No, no,” she said once, her voice urgent. She leaned forward, and her hair fell forward; then she tipped her head back to clear her face, then leaned forward again. “It wasn’t precisely shame,” she said. She laughed bitterly. “In the nudity department, it didn’t exactly count.”
    After a pause she said, “Fear of getting killed.” Soon she hung up. “They’re coming on Friday in time for supper, which they’re going to bring.”
    â€œThey?”
    â€œHer boyfriend. Chandler?”
    â€œI didn’t know Laura had a boyfriend.”
    Â 
    T he director had urged Jo to stay home the day after the assault, but Jo felt uncompromisingly competent, and arrived at work on time. The other teachers knew what had happened; all day, gusts of concern passed to her through walls, or as doors closed. Each adult seemed surrounded by a swirling windstorm of pain. Ignoring them, Jo read picture books to her charges in a loud voice, one book five times.
    But at night she was immobile in front of the television, not knowing if she wanted Josh to speak to her or not. “I’ll give you . . .” he said, finally, coming to stand behind her. She was watching an old movie. He stood watching behind her, one hand on her shoulder, but didn’t speak again.
    â€œNo,” she said. The movie was a crime story in black and white, set in Scotland, with looming stone fireplaces and sooty pots. A mute child was the only witness to her mother’s murder.
    â€œIs she too traumatized to talk?” Josh said, after a while.
    â€œShe never talked.”
    â€œWhere’s her father?”
    â€œNo father. The girl had a signal, and the mother cut her a piece of bread. Then the mother went out of the room and died, while the girl watched through the window.”
    â€œShe’ll talk,” Josh said.
    He annoyed her. She turned off the TV, went to bed, and pulled the blankets around her.
    In the morning, Josh said, “I dreamed that movie. In my dream, the mother came back to life.” Like the mother before she was murdered, he was cutting bread. He liked bread from the bakery, not the supermarket.
    â€œThat’s sillier than the real movie,” Jo said.
    â€œShe was under a pile of wood and the child pointed. Then somebody pulled the wood off. I remember long golden planks lying across the mother, and how she stared up at me.”
    â€œ You pulled the wood off?”
    â€œI guess I was in the movie.”
    In the movie, the mother had been stabbed with the bread knife, not buried under planks. Josh’s bread knife looked nothing like the knife of the man who had assaulted Jo, but Jo found herself angry with Josh for owning and using a knife, for being a snob about packaged, sliced bread. She ate cold cereal.
    â€œSince I moved into your room, I don’t dream,” Jo said. “The ghost stayed in the back room.”
    â€œNow the multitalented ghost causes dreams.”
    â€œYou don’t believe me, but you never slept in there.” Jo prided herself on her coolheadedness. The ghost (if that was the right word) was a breath of pessimism, of dread; it could always be sensed in particular parts of the apartment, never in others. The ghost was evidence of her resistance to sentiment, not the opposite. “The ghost was a murderer,” she said. “Or she was