Excerpt from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Seventeen years together. Three children.

And here we are, the five of us, floating up Route 1 in this boat of a car, the children beginning to scramble again in the back: Michael calling out additions to his list of a hundred names for Kelsey ending in ator—the eviscerator, the nebulator, the constipator—all of which she answers to from the bucket seat, yelping in response, having ears only for the tone of a voice, causing Celia to climb over the backseat to protect her from Michael's mockery, while Alec stands up behind his father's seat and reaches his hand around to play with John's double chin, asking how much longer it's going to be, all of them their father's impatient children.

I'm the only one who doesn't always want answers. John may never articulate his questions, but they are with him, a way of being. And the children want answers to everything all the time: What's for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner? Where's Kelsey? Where's Dad? Why do we have to vanish like the weather and stay lost, but then somehow, after six weeks or so, return with such self-forgetting that he didn't see anything strange about how blithely he led me by the arm into a car showroom to look at MGs, and then took me out to lunch and a bottle of wine, as if nothing had ever happened.

In the fifteen years of our marriage, he's never gone back to a hospital or come anywhere close, in fact. He's never had to stop working, or gone nearly so low as he did that fall. He has moods, and occasionally a stretch of a few weeks when I notice his energy flagging, and I don't suppose I'll ever be able to rid myself of the worry I have then, that it will all get much worse. Which is part of what keeps the mystery between us going. You could call that perverse. Fear playing that role. But it's not only fear, and what's hard to explain is that the fear is also a kind of tenderness. I'm the only one who knows in the way I do that he needs someone to watch over him. At the worst moments, when the children are tired and the house is a mess and I see from the pace of his walk up the drive at the end of the day that he's at a lower ebb, it can seem no better than having a fourth child and I want to walk straight out the door and not come back for a month. But most of the time it's not like that. I may not be able to tell what he's thinking, but he reaches for me. And the excitement from the beginning fills me again at those moments. I don't see how it could if I understood him through and through.

Seventeen years together. Three children.

And here we are, the five of us, floating up Route 1 in this boat of a car, the children beginning to scramble again in the back: Michael calling out additions to his list of a hundred names for Kelsey ending in ator—the eviscerator, the nebulator, the constipator—all of which she answers to from the bucket seat, yelping in response, having ears only for the tone of a voice, causing Celia to climb over the backseat to protect her from Michael's mockery, while Alec stands up behind his father's seat and reaches his hand around to play with John's double chin, asking how much longer it's going to be, all of them their father's impatient children.

I'm the only one who doesn't always want answers. John may never articulate his questions, but they are with him, a way of being. And the children want answers to everything all the time: What's for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner? Where's Kelsey? Where's Dad? Why do we have to come in? Why do we have to go to bed? Some days the only words I speak to them are answers, and reasons I can't answer, and instructions in place of the answers they want.

The questions won't stop up here, but once we're on the island and the three of them are spending most of the day playing on the rocks, or in the boat with their father, or traipsing up and down from the porch to the tide pools and back with their crabs in tin saucepans, the salt water and sun will wear down the edges of their nervous energy, and now and then I'll get to be with myself long enough that when they come back, or I spy them going about their business, I will actually see them for a moment. Which ordinarily I don't. Sight isn't really my sense of them. They're touch and sound. I can look at pictures from just a few years ago and barely recognize them. But the day starts and ends with their voices and bodies. John is something else. There are parallel worlds. Apparently science says so now, too. I didn't know it until Michael was born. Now it's obvious. I was reading a novel the other day and some character said, "We live among the dead until we join them," something portentous like that, dreary, and I thought, Maybe, but who's got time for the dead with all this life, all these lives, all jumbled up?

Excerpted from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Haslett. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.