Maggie’s hand clenches around her phone, knuckles taut under the skin.

“What do you mean, he fell?”

The line is silent. In the living room, Alec chatters to himself, arranging stuffed animals on a blanket for a picnic.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Niskanen.”

She blinks again, but everything is still the same: the hiss of the electric kettle coming to a boil on the counter, the oatmeal-brown carpet in need of a vacuum. Then something pushes hard against her lungs. “Tell me what? What the hell do you even mean, he fell?”

Alec looks up, sensitive blue eyes frowning under pale blond hair. Maggie turns away and steps to the window; morning sunlight falls through the yard in golden swathes, soaking the grass and crumbling concrete patio.

“I’m afraid he . . . jumped, Mrs. Niskanen.”

No, Maggie cannot speak the word aloud. Just this morning Rick bent his head down, lips warm against hers. “Love you,” he said, and then he was out the door, and Alec ran to the bay window, and she stood next to him with Aida in her arms. Rick lifted a hand from the steering wheel as he pulled back out of the driveway, and Alec said, “Bye, Daddy.”

Maggie puts a hand to her forehead. “He jumped?”

“He didn’t seem to trip or anything like that. He went a ways off the edge. He must’ve fallen in the river . . . They can’t find the body.”

“Mommy?”

Alec is standing there, his favorite sea turtle in his arms. “Can I have real blueberries for Sammy’s picnic?”

“Just a second, baby.”

“Is there anything we can do for you right now, Mrs. Niskanen?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Mommy?”

She raises a finger and turns back to the window.

“We’ll be in touch as soon as we know anything more.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Again, we’re so sorry, Mrs. Niskanen.”

“Thanks.”

She hangs up. The lock screen flashes on her phone: Rick smiling and holding Alec and Aida in his arms, posing with the horses for a hayride at Robinette’s. The electric kettle clicks itself off. The carpet is still oatmeal brown. And that’s Aida crying. Maggie looks at the oven clock: she’s only been asleep for twenty minutes.

“Mommy?” Alec is in front of the fridge, rifling through the fruit crisper.

She can hear how loud the wind whistles in your ears when you fall from three hundred feet, see how fast the ground rises up to break you. Wasn’t it just this morning Rick bent down, lips warm against hers? If only she’d caught at the back of his shirt, the cotton gingham starched between her fingers, and pulled him back, and he would’ve tilted his head and smiled, surprised and not surprised. And she’d have never let him go.

“Mommy, I can’t find them anywhere!”

“I’ll help you in just one minute, baby, but I need to see if Aida’ll go back to sleep.”

She walks up the stairs, the third one creaking as always. The nursery is dark, the blinds rolled down, but Maggie moves across the room with practiced steps, familiar from countless interrupted nights. Aida is getting to fever pitch. Maggie reaches down into the crib gently, shushing her baby, and Aida scowls at her with crinkled, offended eyes peering out from a bald head. Maggie sways back and forth, stepping sideways, lowering herself into the gliding chair. Aida roots, disconsolate, and though they’ve been talking about weaning her during the daytime, Maggie does not care.

Milk streams from her body to nourish her child in the darkness. She rocks deeply with her feet, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing.

It isn’t possible. Rick wouldn’t do that. She can see him right there, standing in his skates and knit hat, Alec in his arms, his breath steaming with life in the freezing air. Or leaning across the table at Founder’s, yelling over the din and the smell of beer, joking with Dave. So why the fuck would he jump?

Aida is slowing, drifting to sleep, and Maggie remembers to ease off her feet, swinging more softly. But what happens now? A sigh trembles through her daughter’s tiny body. Alec is quiet downstairs—probably too quiet. And Maggie needs to start making calls: Rick’s mom and dad, and Scott, and Chris, and her mom and dad, and work.

What does she even say? Sorry, Mom, your son decided to jump off the Amway Grand.

Don’t people leave notes if they commit suicide? Where would’ve Rick left a note?

Maggie stands to lay Aida in her cradle, but her baby twitches awake, whimpering faintly. She pulls Aida back to her breast and steps out into the hall, standing at the top of the steps long enough to see that Alec has returned to the living room, passing a bowl of imaginary blueberries to his stuffed animals.

Suddenly the tears come to her eyes, hot and blurring. What could Alec even do with the words, Daddy’s dead. He’s gone. He’s not coming back. He looks so much like Rick, his sun-blond hair already darkening, his face wide-set with rounded cheeks.

She once told Rick, “If you ever die, I’d never be the same, obviously, but at least I’d still have you in our children.” He’d raised himself up on his elbow, leaning over so he could see her face: “I’m not leaving, Mags.”

She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and pads as silently as she can down the hall to their room. The bed is still unmade, the sheets kicked to the bottom; she was going to change them today. She presses her hand to his side of the bed: cold, left hours ago. Her reflection stares back at her from the mirror on the wall, hers arms jiggling Aida up and down instinctively, and the whole room feels empty.

Where would’ve Rick left a note? She steps over to the dresser, her hand ranging across the surface: a pack of gum, reading glasses, erasers, an Eiffel Tower paperweight, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her bedside table hasn’t been rearranged either, carrying the same issues of Layers and Pottery Barn, sketchbooks, Goodnight, Gorilla. Dust lies undisturbed on the TV console. She stands in the middle of the room, spinning slowly in a circle, and her eyes come to rest on the print of Una and the Lion hanging over the dresser.

Briton Rivière painted the original with all the pretension and wistfulness of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and yet there’s something truly affecting about Una’s downcast face, the twining of her melancholic hands. The lion strides behind her, careful not to tread on her train, his haunches and front legs muscular and sexy, his mane curling and lustrous in a way that reminds her more of ancient Roman statuary than the pictures she’s seen of real lions. For all his power, though, his head is turned up toward Una’s, his face calm and loyal and sympathetic. A lamb cavorts ahead of them, perhaps the most detailed character in the piece, its neck turned in careless innocence. The forest behind them ranges in carefully planted rows, suggesting a manicured park rather than Una’s “yrksome way,” but Rivière’s domestication of the scene actually echoes Spenser’s own conflation of the present day with a heroic past.

Rick gave her the print shortly after they started dating, and carefully she hung it in the bedroom of her apartment that night. Five years before then, she had fallen in love with The Faerie Queene in Professor Beach’s intro to English literature, the fall semester of their sophomore year. She already enjoyed all things Arthur, having grown up on The Once and Future King and The Mists of Avalon and eventually tackling Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry and parts of Le Morte D’Arthur on her own. But Una’s meeting with the lion had thrilled her on some deeper level. As a child, Maggie had had a recurring dream of a lion bounding out of a forest, come to protect her and play with her, and in one of her earliest memories she had nursed from the lion’s nipples. Professor Beach’s course had been their first class together, Rick always sitting in the back in loose jeans and wiry glasses, his head turned down and his hair shaggy.

Maggie moves by intuition, settles Aida between two pillows on the bed, and lifts Una and the Lion off the wall. But there’s no note from Rick hidden behind the frame. She undoes the backing: nothing.

Maybe she is going crazy. Maybe Rick did fall. Maybe he bent down and kissed her for the last time.

Aida sleeps, her mouth parted just so below the nub of her nose.

Maggie has to go downstairs. Alec is trying to spread a blanket over the kitchen table and chairs, heedless of the butternut-squash-and-apple puree in front of Aida’s high chair. Wordlessly she pulls the corners of the blanket into place, then scoops up her son, holding him close in her arms.

“I love you, baby,” she whispers. “You know that, right?”

He squiggles and gives her one of those wry, Rick looks. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

Tears prickle in her eyes. She smiles: three-year-olds see everything.

“I have to make some calls. Later today, Grandpa and Grandma, and Papa and Nana, and Uncle Scott, and Aunt Chris—they’re all coming to visit us soon, okay?”

“Like Christmas?”

She nods, swallowing. “Sort of like Christmas, but they’re coming for a sad reason.”

“Why?”

“Because someone in the family has died. He’s gone away, so he’ll never come back again to see us.”

Alec’s face furrows, and Maggie brushes her hand across his cheek. “I need to make those calls, okay, honey?”

She kisses his forehead and sets him down by the couch, then searches for where she left her phone, on the kitchen counter. She scrolls through her contacts to the Ms: Mom (Rick). Her hand is shaking.

Sorry, Mom, your son decided to jump off the Amway Grand.

She walks upstairs to the nursery and shuts the door. The dimness closes around her, and she breathes it in, deep and trembling. She sits on the footrest, elbows on her knees, her eyes flitting over the toys and blankets sprawled across the rug.

Her thumb moves then, exact and sure, punching over to her recent calls. She raises the phone to her ear, listening to the grainy ringtones.

“Hey, girlfriend!” She can just imagine the way Tara tilts her head to the side, chestnut hair trailing from a loose hair clip. “Are you still taking the kiddos to the park this afternoon?”

“Hey, Tara.”

“Uh-oh, is something wrong?”

The words are right there, but her throat catches. She has to use the true words—nothing softer or harder.

“Maggie, you there?” Tara’s voice comes from so far away.

“Rick jumped off the Amway Grand this morning.”

“What?”

“They can’t find his body, so they think he must’ve fallen in the river.”

“Oh my God! Mags, are you all right?”

“No.”

“When—how did you—?”

“The head of construction called maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

“He jumped?”

“Apparently.”

The line is silent, again. Loneliness gapes open, staring straight into her. Tara may as well be saying, I can’t feel what you’re going through. I am searching for magic words to make you feel better, to make it go away.

“Do you want me to come over?”

The tears comes unbidden, for the third time, and she realizes they are simply a part of her life now. “That would be amazing. Can you?”

“Of course. I’ll be over in fifteen.”

“Thank you.”

“Hang in there.”

Call ended. Forty-nine seconds. The screen blinks, too bright in the curtained nursery. Before she can lose her nerve again, she scrolls through her contacts as fast as she can to Mom (Rick) and hit the call button. Her whole body tightens together, like an early contraction—like her grief is preparing to be born.

“Hello, sweetie.” Her voice comes bright across the two-hundred-fifty miles.

“Hi, Mom. How are things?”

“Oh, fine, fine. I’m just taking Barb to the hospital. You remember Mrs. Murphy? Breast cancer, you know.”

“Right.”

“Are you okay, sweetie? You sound sniffly.”

“I’ve got some really bad news.”

“Oh no.”

“Can you pull over?”

“Well, we’re running a little late—”

“I think you should pull over.”

“Okay, okay. Here we are. What is it?”

The words are right there. She swallows. “Rick jumped off a hotel this morning. I’m really sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“The renovation at the Amway Grand, where they’re redoing all the glass. Rick went to do inspections, and he jumped off into the river.” It sounds less real every time she explains it. “They can’t find the body.”

“Rick jumped? Are they sure? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“It doesn’t to me either.”

“Did he leave a note? Have things been all right at home?”

Maggie’s jaw clenches, and she slips her hand under her thigh. Here we go. “Things have been fine. There’s no note at home.”

“Has he seemed depressed? Or not eating well? Have you not been . . . ?”

“What the hell, Mom? My husband is dead—your son just died—and that’s what we’re going to talk about?”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m just—I don’t even—”

“I know.” Maggie closes her eyes tight. “I’m sorry. Can you call Scott, and Chris? I’ll let you know as soon as I know more, or if they find him.”

“Of course. Your father and I, we’ll drive down as soon as we can.”

“I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“Oh God!”

“Are you all right?”

She’s crying, her breath shuddering over the line.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m—I’ll be all right.”

“Sorry.”

Rick’s mom doesn’t say anything, trying to calm her sobs.

“Okay,” Maggie says. “Love you.”

The phone light flickers to black. Aida’s teddy bear, pitched on his side, stares back up at her.

Dry-eyed, mechanical, she walks downstairs. Alec looks up as the third step creaks and emerges from his blanket cave under the table.

“Mommy, can I have some real blueberries?”

“Not right now, baby.”

She picks him up, kissing his hair, then slumps down on the couch together. Alec squirms free, and Maggie relinquishes him, staring at the blank TV screen, her whole body tight, clutching at nothing.