Every movie Sam's seen, every paperback he's read has told him that hysteria always ebbs to calm. So he tightens his hand around the phone and waits for his mother to stop sobbing.

He isn't troubled by the tears or their duration. She's cried from Election Day through Inauguration Day, at three graduation ceremonies, at Hallmark cards and sand tracked over a clean-swept floor. It's the hitches between sobs, ugly inward gasps that seem to clot in her throat.

And it's that she started crying by laughing. Laughter as cold and sour as milk forgotten in the back of the fridge. Not at all his mother's laugh.

"Mom," he says, for the twentieth time in ten minutes. "Maybe try and... tell me what's going on? Or, at least, try to breathe?"

He isn't sure she hears him. He spins his chair toward the window. Even the White House landscapers can't produce a green lawn in midwinter. A patchwork of brown grass and brown mud, a sky bricked up by clouds. Nothing moves but dead leaves rolling over in the wind. He wishes it would break into a snowfall. His mother is still crying.

"Whatever it is," he says, "it can't be that bad. It'll be okay. I promise." He bites his lip. Of course he can't promise. His fingers on the receiver freeze.

Nightmares flurry through his mind. There's been an accident. There's been a fire. Maybe she's sick--that thought seizes him and then lets go. She'd never cry this hard about herself. He thinks of his grandmother, nearly eighty, but still sharp. Last he knew.

His mother's coughing, spluttering because she can't possibly get enough oxygen through her tears. Drowning. He has to pull her through to the other side of this, calm her, save her.

"Are you by yourself? Is anyone else--"

His father.

His blood stops moving, and he sees nothing but white. His father. It must be. A February fog; a car crash between the house and his office? A heart attack. A stroke. Are there strokes in his family? Do strokes run in a family?

The back of his chair hits the rim of his desk, snaps his focus away from the solid white of the sky. The phone cord has snared his elbow. The coughs on the other end of the line break like waves of static.

"Mom?" He sounds hoarse. He frees his arm, keeping one hand clenched, white-knuckled, around the receiver. "Mom. Where's Dad?"

The sound she makes wants to be a sob but twists, twists on the line and turns into that rancid laugh. "He's in Santa Monica. With a--with another--" Finally, her breath catches up with her. It's his mother's voice after all. "Oh, Sam," she says. "It's been going on for years."

This is how he learns that the books have it half right. Calm comes from hysteria. But he never knew that shame, shame flows from one sick split-second of perfect, perfectly calm, relief.