It seemed like no time passed before Isaac was two months old and it was the evening before their train journey. Timothy was taking Isaac to Varanasi first, to visit a place of old fears and try to reconcile them. He had to stay in India, though his mother really didn't understand.
"Why can't you come home?" she asked him on the phone. She was still only forty-five, having had Timothy at age twenty, and she was a person who had never been crippled by fear, who had barreled over all the obstacles in her life. "You must be running out of savings by now. You should come home before you get into trouble."
"If I leave," Timothy told her, "Isabel will be swallowed up by all the rest of it. She'll be gone."
She was silent.
"Can you try to understand?" he asked.
"I can try," she said. "Send s
