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Show 17 They will forfeit nothing; the policies have been in force for more than the required two years. Even were it otherwise, she will- tell Collings, it would not dissuade her. After all, insurance is for unforseen and calamitous circumstances, not those one knows are coming; calamity is just what she wishes to avoid. But Collings comes tomorrow, not today. Annis finds herself further down in the last drawer that swims with memorabilia of the children; she is down below the layer of recent, adult correspondence, and even down below the layers of late adolescence: at the bottom of the drawer they are children again, Roddy, Evan, and Luel, and she finds yellowed photographs of childish smiles, tediously crayoned drawings, valentines, an envelope with a small coarse lump in one bottom corner, bearing the notation "Evan's tooth" and a distant date in his own proud hand, locks of retroactively blonder hair, the silver rattle an old-fashioned aunt had presented, and all the children had used. Annnis pauses: she will pack the things in boxes, again labelled with their names, but she is caught for a moment by an extraordinary sense of receding time, as if the lives of the children were unfolding backwards. She starts: she can begin to see the inner secrets of their early being; it is as if she can see the shapes of their lives, all at once, reducing backwards to an early infancy in which their characters are already fully formed. Now she can see back even before these infancies to a moment of tremendous pregnancy, in which she can contain these three future people perfectly and entirely. Even in their birthing-- though she sees already that they will become imperfect, ordinary beings, who grow fat and cross, or die--she is overwhelmed with a sudden sense of the |