Free Surrender, Dorothy by Meg Wolitzer Page B

skittering across the finishing line, and then someone would wash up or get a glass of water, and then they would lie in bed for a while, perhaps picking up the remote control to see what was on television, perhaps not. It was pleasurable but not thrilling. Somewhere else, Maddy knew, Sara was probably wrapping her long and enveloping legs around a brooding, worldly man, practically bringing him to tears with pleasure. Now Sara would never have a baby, would never even get married, would never experience the natural arc of life that everyone assumed was their birthright.
    Maddy and Peter rustled and turned in bed, and across the room, as if in synchrony, so did the baby. Down the hall, Adam and Shawn rustled and turned too. Despite the tragedy, the entire household was moving softly in preparation for sleep; there was no choice. Finally, before morning arrived, everyone slept. Thehouse fell silent for a while until suddenly there was a series of creaks and oddly heavy, stumbling footsteps that seemed close by. Maddy and Peter woke at the same time and lay listening, puzzled and a little scared. Then Peter got up and opened the door, and there in the hall they saw Adam, wandering around in the dark and trying doorknobs. First he opened the bathroom and peered in, then he went into the linen closet. It was as though he was looking for something, but he seemed strange, clumsier than usual.
    “Adam?” said Peter. “Are you okay?” But Adam barely heard him. He had pulled open the door of Sara’s room and was walking right in. “Adam?” Peter said again, but it was pointless. Behind Peter came Maddy and Shawn, who was naked to the waist, the hair on his head standing up in sleep-clumps.
    “What’s going on?” Shawn asked nervously. “I woke up and he was gone. Then I heard this weird stomping around.”
    “He’s sleepwalking,” said Peter. They all looked at Adam, who was now yawning the open-mouthed yawn of a child, then climbing up onto the bed Sara Swerdlow had slept in every August, his head on her pillow.

4
With Sara
    Mrs. Hope Moyles spent every August in Virginia, visiting her sister Verna. Both women had long been widowed, and their children never came around anymore, so once again, as it had been in childhood, they had each other.
    That had always been the thing about Hope’s house: although it wasn’t very nice, she could rent it out in August and make enough money to help her get through the winter. Who would have predicted this, so many years ago when she and her husband had bought the place? The island had always been rigidly stratified: Rich summering families had their mansions on the water, and everyone else—lobstermen, policemen, plumbers—had their small houses and neat quarter-acres of land. The summer people fled on Labor Day, packing up their cars and leaving behind nothingbut the occasional abandoned inner tube. Everyone else stayed on all year, the regular local folk and a few eccentric types, writers and painters and the like, who decided that the beach was the place to be all winter. The children all attended the public school with its unvarying line-up of teachers: Miss Hill, Mrs. Cullen, and Miss Manzino. For the rest of the year the wind blew hard across the island, and the sky darkened early. In summer, though, the children were set free, and they swam and ran and crabbed and came home with sudden blond, beach-baked heads of hair. One summer, the island no longer seemed to belong to them; it belonged to the rich people with their big houses and their own children, who came to the beach with snorkels and expensive sound systems and suntan lotions that smelled of coconut and vanilla. Then other people followed, less rich but still privileged, renting anything they could grab, and soon all of the Moyles’s friends were letting strangers stay in their unexceptional houses for shocking sums of money, and taking their own families off to Jersey until Labor Day, struck dumb by this new