Free I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates

not to ring. Without Holly overhearing, he has called Scott’s parents, who tell him that Brandon hasn’t yet arrived. It’s been forty minutes since Owen left, and Scott’s house is a ten-minute drive from theirs, but Steven tells himself there’s no need for alarm, yet. Owen and Brandon might have stopped at a video store, a McDonald’s…Holly is in the kitchen preparing dinner. Steven sits in the family room, the portable phone at his elbow, Caitlin in the crook of his arm reading from The Wind in the Willows; the TV’s on, CNN with the sound nearly inaudible; Steven’s thumb on the remote control, poised and ready to strike.

Fugitive
    C RAZY IN LOVE with the man. Such a man! She laughed shaking her head in wonderment: her luck he was crazy in love with her.
    So they were married. In quick succession she had his children who were beautiful like him, though lighter-skinned, the girl, the youngest, nearly as light as she, the mother. He’d warned her in the early giddy days of their love (it was one of many jokes between them: his pretending to think that she might require such a warning) that most of his family was dark-skinned, very dark, black you might say, tarry-black, up from Georgia in the 1950’s and settled in and around Detroit, Michigan. It wasn’t until the wedding that she met his mother, two older sisters, and three brothers of whom one, D., was a child of eleven, his family smiling but stiffly silent in her presence; not out of resentment, she believed, of her creamy pale skin and wheat-colored gold-glinting hair but out of their sense of being alien to her, and she to them, a difference so profound it might have been molecular, cellular. Afterward in his arms hearing herself say almost in self-pity, hurt, “I’m afraid your family doesn’t like me,” and her husband said, laughing, teasing, “Never met anybody before who didn’t fall all over you, eh girl?—that’s the problem?”
    He was joking, of course. Teasing. His playful sometimes rough manner. So she’d catch her breath, almost frightened. But only almost. Knowing he loved her, adored her. Their souls merging like flame in flame.
    Must not make others envy us. Her Quaker modesty checked her gloating pride.
    It was not the color of her husband’s skin that had so powerfully attracted her to him, she was certain. Except of course it was his skin, his color; and all that was his was exalted, ennobled in her eyes. His maleness, his blackness. His “personality” like no other. Because as the daughter of white liberal Quakers (wealthy Philadelphians, a family history dating to pre-Revolutionary times) she was truly without prejudice. No longer a practicing Quaker (as he, her husband, was no longer a practicing Baptist) but retaining the old Quaker principles of respect for others, common decency, fair-mindedness, the interior light; perhaps in her heart she did still believe there existed a secret flamelike luminosity inside her she would have named, had she been sentimentally inclined, my soul. Or was it rather, simply soul. The divine essence, breath of God, sacred radiance—whatever. You knew somehow it did exist, does exist. And love, physical love, love between a man and a woman—in their fierce lovemaking sometimes especially in the early years of their marriage it seemed to her the soulness of their beings merged startling and incandescent as flame in flame.
    It surprised no one, least of all her who loved him, that the man was such a success. In college, in graduate school. In New York City where he rose rapidly through the ranks of quality publishing, a black intellectual who was also an athlete (tennis, golf) and an amateur jazz pianist and handsome and kind. And when at the age of thirty-two he left his New York job to accept a position as director of a university press in California, a very good but not yet distinguished press, she, his wife, understood what none of his puzzled friends and acquaintances understood: it