WHEN THE PHONE RANG, Irene let it go because it came in the middle of a reality show she would not have wanted her children to waste their time on, it was so stupid; but since nobody else was home, she’d decided to indulge herself. She didn’t listen to the phone message until the commercial. A man’s voice, deep toned but without inflection, rumbled through the wire: “Lieutenant John Scully of the Morton Police here, I’m looking for Joseph or Irene Ludwig. We have your son Brian in custody at the station. You probably know where it is on Elm...

THEY GREW UP playing hockey on Everett Pond, long after supper, after homework and Happy Days, after they said good night and went to their rooms yawning as if headed to sleep. The grown-ups pretended not to know about the rendezvous at the rink, but some of the fathers had, as boys, given birth to the midnight game, a raucous winter lullaby at the far end of the street.

Allie Sprinkle was one of five or six girls who listened for their parents to fall quiet behind their bedroom doors before they padded downstairs in their nighties, tucked hems into...

TWENTY YEARS EARLIER, Elizabeth had made a long-distance phone call to her friend Deborah in Maryland. Elizabeth lived in Vermont, and as she dialed Deborah’s number, which she felt embarrassed to know by heart (because surely Deborah would have to open her own address book, to locate Elizabeth), she looked out her kitchen window at the broken snowplow. It belonged to her next-door neighbor, who fixed cars for a living on his front lawn.

The neighbor’s name was Wily Cobb and the plow had been broken since the winter before. All summer it sat on the strip of dead grass...

THE BABY HAD BEEN CRYING for nine hours. Since four o’clock in the morning, through all of Nina’s beseeching and ministrations—re-diapering, trying to feed, shuffling around the house while rocking him up and down, sitting in front of the TV, holding him like a football, showing him every stuffed animal she could find, putting him down on his back, putting him down on his stomach, putting him in the baby swing, bathing him, and singing—he kept it up, not a rhythmic squall, which would have worn him out eventually, but a continuous mewling she thought might go on...

WHEN SHE LEFT in the mornings, her husband and baby were still asleep. It was four o’clock, black and silent, a time when it felt illegal to be awake. She laid her clothes out the night before so she could dress in the dark, just jeans and a sweatshirt, sneakers and socks. And earrings—though no one would see her alone in the dawn-lit car, she felt nervous leaving the house without the familiar weight in her ears, as if gravity weren’t enough.

She tiptoed out of the bedroom praying Don’t wake up, and making toast in the kitchen, she...

DO NOT FEAR WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO SUFFER. Anne found the note tucked into the flap of her purse where she kept her cell phone. At first she thought it was her own grocery list, or a receipt she intended to save; it was written on a scrap of white paper, in black ballpoint pen. The handwriting looked neither masculine nor feminine, and was a cross between printing and cursive.

The first time, it didn’t bother her. She figured it had found its way into her bag by accident, dropped in the flurry of human traffic she navigated each...

ALL THAT DAY as she waited for her sister to come home, Maxine remembered the goats. She did not know what it was that had nudged them into her mind—there was nothing remotely goat-like, or even countryish, about her sister’s house or the neighborhood—but once the image presented itself of the white faces, the angular slit mouths emitting their treble bleats, she could not get rid of it.

They’d been given the goats the spring Maxine was eleven and Tillie nine. Tillie went by Tildra now; she corrected anyone who tried to use the nickname, even Maxine, which...

THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS, Dorrie was finishing the last carton of eggnog with her mother and Jeanne Marie Ettlinger, who had been her best friend when they were children and who now went to medical school.

“I want to show you a picture,” Dorrie said to Jeanne Marie. “Tell me what you think.” Out of an envelope in her purse she pulled a snapshot of her husband, Chris, sitting on the beach. She directed Jeanne Marie’s attention to Chris’s left arm, which was bare from the shoulder down (he wore a sleeveless tee that said “Endangered Species”), and which rested...