ainie knows the kind of man she married. Once, after slashing himself building Tammy’s crib, he’d wrapped his palm in duct tape and kept going. Another time he’d returned from a military exercise in Virginia sporting a forehead gash sealed shut with superglue. Finger reattachment is a different scale of injury, she understands that, yet still a dread rumbles her stomach each time she sees him gobble those painkillers.

Even before the Amazon, Richard had scared her a little. She figured that wasn’t so rare; she’d noticed an arm bruise now and then on her Orlando friends. Now it’s a different kind of fear. It’s unpredictability, the scariest thing of all. There’s nothing to panic about. It’s only that the idea of drugs dulling Richard’s investment in normal, everyday reality—well, it concerns her. A few pills down his hatch, and he starts looking like a stone-hearted hunter willing to destroy anything. Tammy’s Thirstee Cry-Baby doll: Its mewl is suspicious. The Kem-Tone wall-finish samples she’d brought home from the hardware store: Stratford Green is too much like jungle, Cameo Rose too much like blood.

Lainie trots up the stairs. It’s not to escape Richard’s opaque glower. It’s to find Timmy, the one person around who doesn’t show proper fear—respect, she corrects herself—to the head of the family. This is troubling, though not as troubling as Richard’s indulgence of it. Some days it seems like Richard is encouraging his son to denigrate his sister and challenge his mother, as if Timmy, at eight years old, is already superior to the household’s females.

“Timmy,” she sings. “It’s breakfast time, young man.”

A good wife doesn’t think such thoughts, not about her son and not about her husband. She understands the use of pharmaceuticals. Six weeks after Richard disappeared into the Amazon, she’d been a disaster, face puffy from lack of sleep, throat raw from weeping. At the urging of a Washington secretary forced to listen to her sob over the phone, she’d gone to the family practitioner and, staring at her lap, asked him if it was true there was a drug that could make lonely wives stop crying. The doctor, made fidgety by her sniffling, dropped his just-lit cigarette in his rush to prescribe her Miltown—“mother’s little helper,” he called it, penicillin for your thoughts. He’d patted her hand and reassured her. All feminine minds were fragile.

The Miltown had worked. Oh, how it had worked! The snowballing panic of her every dire day smoothed into a drowsy disquiet, nudged even closer to calmness by an afternoon cocktail or two. She had an inkling she might be overdoing it, but when she saw fellow army wives at the mailboxes or grocery store, they too were slurring and butterfingered. But then Lainie had pulled herself together and tossed the tranquilizers into the toilet. On her way to Timmy’s room, she catches carnivalesque reflections of herself in doorknobs, vases, picture frames. Is the independent Orlando Lainie entirely gone?

Lainie’s relieved to find Timmy sitting with his back to the door at his table, a darling replica, she likes to imagine, of his father’s workplace desk. She lingers at the door frame, chiding herself for having any misgivings about this cherub. He’s his father’s son, but he’s also his mother’s baby, a bright child with a voracious thirst for life, and she is lucky to have him.

“Knock-knock,” she says.

He doesn’t hear and she can’t help but smile. Timmy is as focused as his father. Lainie comes forward, her bare feet silent on the carpet, feeling like an angel floating down to check on one of the world’s saints, until she’s directly above him and can see the lizard pinned through its four legs to the tabletop, still twitching, its abdomen an open slit that Timmy explores with a knife.