She had no interest in luminarias, none whatsoever, but Erik’s mother insisted that they line the processional and Erik didn’t care enough either way to fight.

Insists? she said. Well how about I insist that she pays for this whole goddamn affair? Even a single goddamn dollar? How about that? Emily didn’t give a damn for this old country handwringing, but Erik didn’t care enough to argue. He just apologized. It was important to his mother, he told her, with that belt-whipped dog look that she said he was too smart for and did her best to disabuse him of. Luminarias are for Christmas! But now Emily had to figure out the luminarias. She hoped to heaven that the flames didn’t distract people, or start a blaze, or reproduce themselves in the beads of her dress in the pictures.

So now, along with everything else, these goddamn luminarias. The arrangements, the reservations, the planning and deciding and the writing of checks. The invitations, the inclusion and exclusion. The second guessing, the fights. Stiff lavender cardstock, printed to look hand-written. S'il vous plaîts. Things to do in Santa Fe, for those flying in from out of town, for children of all ages. Call the vendors. Confirm the dates and place the orders. The bridal shower, the bachelorette party, Kelly and Georgia and Evelyn and Fiona and Dana, and knowing that none of them can be trusted to plan things right, and doing whatever is necessary to keep Georgia from acting like she always does, like it’s all about her. The piles of glossy magazines and their endless hourglass brides. The dress fitting. Explain to Erik why calling his dipshit frat brothers right now is a bad idea, especially if it’s just to chat. Stay diplomatic. Stay on task. Follow up with everybody that’s a definite yes but hasn’t yet responded. Size the rings. Reconsider the setting. The caterers and the test menus. The cake tastings. The bridesmaids’ gift. Something easy. Something store bought. Something memorable. Dissuade Erik from monogrammed flasks for his groomsmen. Design and print and distribute the programs. The set list to Erik’s cousin the DJ. Audition the chamber ensemble. Arrange for the priest. Don’t get annoyed that it won’t be a secular service. Mom’s dead, Dad won’t know to care, and there are bigger fish that need frying. Bags of favors for the guests. Bottled water, espresso beans in dark chocolate, ibuprofen, and the itinerary. Something fun but small and cheap in an appropriate motif, red sand horizons and perfect green cacti. Probably should include sunscreen. The planner. The registry. Flatware and electronics and magnificent frivolous appliances in brushed steel and ivory. Decide who will give toasts, and when. Finalize honeymoon plans. Get measurements from the girls, and send them on for tailoring. Lose weight until collarbones show in photos. Hire a personal trainer. No bread until the wedding, and no alcohol during the workweek. Appear composed and gracious and graceful at all times. Change the will. Does Erik even have a will? Talk to an attorney. Write vows. Write vows? Scour the internet for poems or sermons or aphorisms which sufficiently capture and succinctly convey the beauty and solemnity and transcendent singularity of this most holy and forceful binding of spirits and plans and bodies and hands.

* * *

The call came while Emily was in the shower. The second came as she was drying her hair. She was sitting in idle traffic drumming her fingers on the trough of the steering wheel when she noticed the messages. It was the woman from the home, the Director, with her pleasant and annoying Canadian hesitancies.

“Hello. Ms. Vacilli? This is Donna Herman, from St. Ebenezer’s. In Victoria. I must ask that you give me a call at your earliest possible convenience. Thank you.”

And the second message.

“Ms. Vacilli, this is Donna Herman. I’m sorry to bother you once again, but I’m afraid that I did not adequately convey the urgency… I… I assure you that it has nothing to do with our recent… it has nothing to do with our rates, or any changes to your father’s arrangements. Please do call back? It really is quite important.”

After the biweekly ten A.M. with Risk Assessment and Planning, Emily sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. She called her assistant and asked whether the people that water the plants had been doing anything different. Her lily had discolored. She rubbed her palms on the leather padding of the chair’s arms, and sat forward to dial the number for St. Ebenezer’s.

No amount of screaming, no reasoning, no threat, could settle the issue. The home’s standard contract quite clearly absolved the corporation and all employees of any criminal fault or civil liability in situations such as these, and he had not yet been missing long enough to file a missing persons report. And then there was the question of the stolen vehicle. It would be best to not involve the police, if at all possible, given his state, given the legal uncertainties. Surely Emily understood.

Emily hung up and walked out to her assistant’s desk. She asked for him to use her personal credit card and arrange for the earliest possible flight to Victoria. She would have to cancel the remainder of the week’s appointments, reason being a family emergency.

At home she packed, and thought about what she would tell Erik. There was no sense in crafting anything elaborate. She would tell him that she was going to British Columbia to check up on her dad. He was sick. No, not sick. He was already sick enough. He had fallen. And broken his leg. No, shattered his ankle. He might need surgery. He’ll likely need surgery. Emily had to sign some forms, and spend some time with him. She needed to see to his needs.

She called Erik from the cab on the way to the airport and left a message, asking that he call her. She watched the swirling neighborhoods of languid homes blur by, the red lava landscaping and Spanish barrel roofing, the segmented concrete driveways, the green crabgrass lawns and their assiduous irrigation systems. The occasional Eichler. The retail monoliths drawn up to look local, all sandstone and stucco, perpetuating the suggestion that there is some local to look like.

She called Erik again and told him that she flying to Canada to deal with her father. He had had an accident. It was nothing serious, but she needed to be there for him. She would be back in a few days. Could he please keep punching the RSVPs into the spreadsheet?

Emily bought a cappuccino after checking in, after waiting in line and removing her shoes for security. She riffled through the bright graphics of an abandoned USA Today, but could not get into any of the articles past the headlines. She called Erik again, but did not leave a message. She tore out a leaf of paper from her yellow notepad, and drew a line down its center. To the left of the line she listed things she would say to Donna Herman, and to the right she listed things she would not.

She called St. Ebenezer’s with her flight information.

“There damn well better be a car waiting for me at baggage claim.”

* * *

They had fought terribly over whether her father would come.

The flashing disgust in Erik’s eyes when she had first said she was considering not inviting him had kept her from saying what she needed to say. She wanted to explain that having him there would embarrass her, would keep her from enjoying herself. She would worry that he was safe, and that his presence, even if he was sedate and well-behaved, would impinge on everybody else’s good time. It would change the dynamic, subtly but irrevocably. It was her wedding, for Christ’s sake, and she wanted it to be about her, not her demented, diseased old man. A wedding should be about establishing new memories, not exhuming and wringing the last joys from old ones. Dr. Giardi kept saying to remember that he wasn’t even her father any more! Not in the sense that we speak of fathers. He was a yellowing, wrinkling shell, fully incoherent, full of base rage and biology. After a deep breath it was clear: there was nothing to hold on to. She did not look at him, think about him, and picture her childhood; she saw her adulthood, and what had been lost by it. She looked into the face of what should be her resolute, knowing father, the man who had been there for her, quietly, through each of her self-ideations, and saw instead fury and decay and her dead mother and the maddening indistinctness of her own memories. She looked at him and saw not love but its limits, stretched taut and worn thin over the slow tumult of human history.

But of course she did not tell Erik any of this. She listened to his indignations and pronouncements, she heard him say “heartless” and “selfish”. She then mentioned the costs of getting him through customs, and on a plane, and to a wedding. They would have to hire a nurse to make all the arrangements and see them through. They would have to pay for her hotel and airfare as well. Those energies, that money, could be better spent. Put so, Erik soon acknowledged the merits of her argument.

* * *

Waiting in line at customs, Emily listened to the latest message from Donna Herman.

“Ms. Vacilli? Hello. This is Donna Herman again. I’m very happy to hear that you have decided to come to Victoria to, well, deal with this situation. Very compassionate. I know how difficult it must, well… We will have a car waiting for you, of course. And I have some interesting news to share with you when you arrive.”

Customs took longer than Emily would have liked. As she walked down the concourse, her small bag rolling behind her, she was encircled by three dancing, tambourine jangling Hare Krishnas. She wondered how they had gotten past security. She tried to get around them but they jumped in her path, whirling around in their orange robes and braids and sounding their finger chimes and droning. Finally Emily gave the youngest of them two American dollars, accepted the amaranth tulip he gave her, and told them to leave her the hell alone. From what she could tell, with the redolent fast food and coffee shops and unclean travelers lining the concourse, the flower had no odor, but the velvet of its petals against her lips and nose helped to calm her.

The letters of her name on the placard were written so small that Emily was close enough to shake the hand of the Vietnamese man holding it before she could read it. He wore a fading black suit, scuffed black sneakers, and a bolo tie with a silver and ebony choker. A mole on his neck had a copse of inch-long hairs cropping out of it. He looked past her over her shoulder until she pointed to the sign and then to herself. He nodded and, without looking at her or taking her bag, turned and walked toward the sliding doors. She thought of her parents, her father warm and her mother breathlessly enthusiastic, greeting her at the baggage carousels countless times throughout college and into her twenties.

The trees lining the highway looked the same, straight and tall and thin and nude of low-lying branches. The speed limit had been increased another 10 kilometers. Occasionally a new home would provide a break in the trees, and the blue of the strait shone through. Emily thought of asking the driver go past her old high school, the old neighborhood, but reconsidered. Instead she asked if it had snowed at all in the past few years. He did not respond.

The back border of St. Ebenezer’s rested against the parking lot of a supermarket. A gaunt, muff-headed woman met Emily at the turn-in, next to a statue of a bearded man with birds alit on his shoulders and hands and rabbits looking up at him from his feet.

“Is that St. Ebenezer?” Emily said as they walked inside.

“No,” the woman said, “I don’t believe it is.”

Seated at a small round table in the small round staff room, Emily was offered coffee in a styrofoam cup and informed that Donna Herman would not be able to attend to her, that she was forced to leave to deal with a family issue of her own. She was given Donna’s most sincere apologies and asked, several times, to control her anger. These things happen. Surely Emily understood. Donna had prepared a memo and some materials to help her get underway with her search and…

“My search? What are you talking about?”

… And there is every reason to believe that Mr. Vacilli will be found safe and sound. Emily was handed a thick manila envelope, and reminded that her father had stolen a St. Ebenezer’s vehicle. Unless it was Emily’s goal to see her father spend the rest of his life in a prison hospital the police would be of little service.

“But wouldn’t that require that you press charges?”

“Please, Ms. Vacilli, we’re wasting time.”

In her hotel room Emily pulled back the green and blue plaid quilt, sat cross-legged on the bed, and opened the bottle of cabernet she had purchased in the gift shop. On her yellow piece of paper Emily wrote that she would demand remuneration from St. Ebenezer’s for all costs incurred. She would, if anything happened to her or her father, bring suit. She would speak in a monotone. She would not make idle threats. She would not raise her voice, or involve anyone unnecessarily. She would not curse, nor would she flush or sneer. She would go to the gym, or take a Xanax, before any substantive conversation. Her hands would not shake. She would not chew on the inside of her cheek, she would not clench her jaw.

The envelope from Donna Herman was overstuffed. The adhesive was cheap, or had been too heavily moistened, and Emily’s finger was gummed as she ran it under the flap. Inside was a note written punctiliously in blue ink. It was clipped to a large stack of dittoed photographs of her father’s face, grainy and faint. Beneath his deep set eyes, gazing to his left and down, wide and dilated, as if in the hair’s breadth between sleepy passivity and startled reprehension, beneath his long chin, his slack mouth, were written in the same careful script Emily’s and Donna Herman’s phone numbers, and the request that in the event that he is seen they be notified immediately.

The note was apologetic, too apologetic, and it made Emily furious, but she could not identify a tone she would have preferred. It told her that they noticed the missing car before they realized he was gone. He must have snuck away in the night. How he did so Donna Herman could not imagine. Security was a priority at St. Ebenezer’s. The car was a white two-door Peugeot with the facility’s logo painted on each side in green and purple. Nothing of the home’s had been taken, and it was unknown if he had any clothes or food with him. The good news is that he had with him Emily’s mother’s expired credit card. A sandwich shop had declined his purchase. The credit card company’s fraud department had called and, understanding the situation’s sensitivity, agreed to not yet involve law enforcement. The shop is in a small town several hours East of Vancouver. It would be wise to start there. Perhaps the fliers (attached) will be of use if pasted up at post offices, libraries and eateries. If any more comes to light, Emily will of course be informed right away.

Erik called, but he asked too many questions that Emily did not want to answer, so she explained that she was exhausted and hung up.

On the ferry to Vancouver she stood for as long as she could at the railing, clutching herself, watching the fanged coastline, hoping to see a whale or two, but soon enough went inside to sit on the long wooden benches of the galley and drink hot cocoa with everybody else. She took a cab to a rental car company that had two totem poles out front and a fat Québécois cashier. On her way out of town she purchased an insulated windbreaker and a tuque. It had not occurred to her that it would be so cold, and she had packed accordingly.

* * *

Keremeos had been punched into the car’s onboard computer carefully, and several times, but the sign at the town border said Tulameen. So did the signs on the hardware store and the appliance repair shop. The computer’s bouncing green arrow kept hopped up and down, signaling her arrival. She typed Keremeos into the computer again. The arrow hopped up and down.

She ordered a coffee at a diner and asked how to get Keremeos. She said she was looking for a sandwich shop there.

“We have sandwiches here.”

On her way out of town Emily stopped at the post office and pinned a flier to the bulletin board. In Coalmont she taped up a few more fliers in the windows of the businesses lining Columbia Street, and stopped at a filling station to get gas. The pimply attendant tried to charge her twenty dollars for an atlas that said $9.99 in big yellow letters on its cover.

It was late and she was into Keremeos by the time her phone got reception again. Donna Herman had left her a message, as had Erik. Donna Herman said that she was sorry, three times, once at the beginning and twice at the end, and told her that the credit card company had called to report an attempted charge in Peachland, just north of Summerland. Erik called to see how her day had been. Emily did not return either call.

There was no salad beyond the Caesar, and no Chicken Caesar Salad, so she ordered a Caesar Salad and deep-fried chicken strips, to be sliced up and dumped on top, at a bar wallpapered to look like wood grain and lit almost entirely by decorative neon advertisements. Cigarette smoke clung to the room as if suspended from the ceiling and fought with the pale sick smell of a floor pasted with dried beer for the privilege of being the dominant sensory impression. She peeled the labels off of sweating bottles, increasingly transparent as their golden contents drained. She chopped away at her cuticles and then removed her nail polish, relishing in the solvent’s brief masking of the smoke and beer. She drew an emery board over each nail, absorbed, picturing a luthier drawing his bow over a series of new creations to decide which should bear his name, forever, in the hands of a virtuoso. She applied two coats of opalescent pink and, while it dried, used her fork to continue peeling labels.

She moved from her booth to the bar and did her best not to smile. The first was married, and had a double chin and a moustache. The second was handsome enough, but was either not very smart or was too drunk to put it on display. He called her a cunt as he walked away. Another sat next to her and looked at her, saying nothing. He ordered two beers, and slid one to Emily, and they sat there silent, looking forward, their elbows on the bar. A fourth introduced himself as Tyler. Emily asked him if he had made the name up as he walked over to her.

“It’s the same to me if you think that or not.”

Exhausted from the day, and groggy beneath the haze of beer and heavy food and Tyler’s sweat and semen and aftershave, Emily told him that he could spend the night in her hotel room if he wanted but that she did not want him to be there when she woke up.

He stood above her and shook her awake by the shoulder as he was preparing to leave. “This place has been around as long as I remember,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody that’s stayed here.”

* * *

In the morning it was Cawston, with about three more pet grooming parlors than such a small town’s demand could warrant. Emily imagined a family of groomers, and a tremendous, bloody falling out. Later it was Oliver and after that Okanagan Falls. Kaledan did not seem to have any businesses, at least any that were open, and so Emily tacked her father’s photograph up on the bulletin board in the town square with a thumbtack stolen from the flier of a young guitarist searching for a bassist and drummer. She smelled something coming from the bakery that she could not place, but it reminded her for some reason of Montessori. In Penticton she stopped for gas, and ate a half a pack of Timbits on a bench in front of the police station. She considered speaking to the police, leaving a flier, asking for advice, but thought better of it. She called Donna Herman, but got the machine and hung up. She called back again, determined to leave a message, and got the machine again but could not think of what to say. She sat staring a huge red barn, right there, downtown. It looked freshly painted.

She swerved toward Peachland, zooming out on the car’s computer and setting a course by poking the nearest town that seemed more or less on the way. She was proud of herself, of her capacity to adjust and do what needed doing. She had to think like her father, her father’s disease, might. She had to cut a swath, to lay waste, she and her rented car and its computer and her credit card, she had to pepper this country with fliers like leaflets from the tail of a bomber. Who else could do this? Who else would, ability be damned? Erik would never do this for his father. Or his mother. He would just defend the twittering old bitch on nonsense like those luminarias. Callow, deferential, attractive, belt-whipped Erik and his bigoted sanctimonious sisters and his terrible taste in clothes and film. Emily had double-majored in art history and finance! She ran the Santa Fe office! She pictured a life of tepid festivities in uninteresting places in the company of people with whom she had nothing enjoyable to discuss. She foresaw paying for the small things and getting no help on the big things. Would mom have been proud of her? And dad? No matter. She was a good daughter. No matter. She was a good daughter, and strong, and she was proud of herself even if there was no one else to be strong for, to be proud for, and, if she believed Dr. Giardi, she was no longer a daughter.

She rear-ended a teenager at a railroad crossing in Summerland, and laughed as she gave him her insurance information. The wind blew so cold off the lake that the tears on her face froze in the block and a half walk from the car to the restaurant. She sat at the bar. She ordered and, passing him the flier, asked if the bartender had seen her father. He had not.

“So this is it?” she said, sitting on her hands and bouncing her knees. “Summerland?”

“That’s the rumor,” he said, and he turned to take another order.

* * *

She arrived in Peachland around six thirty, and called Donna Herman.

“Oh, Emily! I’m so glad you called. Oh, dear. How are… Are you having any luck? Please say yes.”

“Where was that last charge, Donna? Your message wasn’t explicit.”

“Oh! Oh, yes. Sorry. It appears… really sorry… let me get my notes… it appears he tried to buy ice skates at Houghton’s Sporting Goods… What on earth could…?”

Emily hung up and drove until she saw a pay phone. She looked up the address in the phonebook. She tried to tear the phonebook out of the booth but it was too well anchored and she hurt her shoulder slightly. By the time she arrived at Houghton’s it had closed.

An officer was locking the front door of the station when she pulled up. He was younger than Emily by several years, and had a shallow chin and narrow jaw and his face beneath his cap melted into his ruddy razor-burned neck and Emily was struck with the impression that he had been constructed, just for her in just that twilight, entirely of cylinders. Cylinders of difference dimensions, of different uses, but cylinders all the same.

“I need your help,” she said.

She told him everything she could think of. Donna Herman and Keremeos and dozens of grey and white and black pictures of an old man’s bewilderment papering a nation she had thought she had left for good. She did not say that it was the foreseeable debilitation of advanced age, it was not the inexorable human backlash against the forward march of science, but rather that it was cancer, simply cancer, that infirmity easily named and communally embraced as within us all and sparked by a draw stronger than a roulette stone’s to gravity. She said that he gone away to die, to allay the family’s suffering, to reduce its costs. She said he was noble, if misguided. He was a good man, if misguided. She began to cry, but stopped herself.

“Well, I’m real sorry, ma’am, real sorry, but the station is closed for the evening. No, well, there’s not often very much that needs seeing to at this hour and, honestly, most of what there is is best off waiting till morning. He’s, your father, he’s not going to die… I mean, not tonight, okay? I… You’re right, I don’t know for sure, but we have to believe that. Now, now, wait… why wouldn’t he just be in a motel somewhere? See? See? He’ll be fine, at least for tonight. Now I’ll tell you what. You come back tomorrow, early as you can, and the Chief’ll be here. The Chief knows how to… I appreciate that. I do. No, see, I can’t really do that. He’s real particular, and he does not take well to being disturbed in the evening. Come back tomorrow, ma’am, talk to the Chief. We’ll get this squared away. I promise you that.”

Emily saw those cylinders for what they were, discs, discs which were lines, lines which were points. She saw those points amassed into cylinders by no mechanism but their their likeness, and she saw herself stand tall and square her jaw and grasp the Canadian winter’s bitterness by the hand and smash the points apart and disperse them on the wind until their likeness and their unity was no more than a memory, a comment on their future and permanent forlornness. She thanked the young officer for his time.

* * *

She stood on a frost-hardened patch of grass in a park, staring at a large concrete and bronze fountain that had been drained of its water for the winter. The wind moved against her and the cold bit viciously into her face and neck and wrists, which were left uncovered by the pockets of her jeans and the sleeves of the windbreaker. Her phone rang. She let it go to voicemail. It rang again twice more before she looked at it and saw an unfamiliar number. A woman whose voice she did not recognize spoke.

“Eric Tuttle, returning your call.”

“But, I…” Emily said. Her eyes rolled and she laughed into the night sky. “I didn’t call Eric.”

“I’ll patch him through. Just one moment.”

“This is Eric.”

“Why are you doing this? We… You and I don’t have anything to say to one another. We established that a long time ago.”

“Oh. Well, I just thought I’d call to see how you were doing, and see if I couldn’t convince you to break off your engagement and run away with me.”

“That’s ludicrous, Eric. You’re an idiot.” Emily smiled, and wiped her eyes. The snow, whipped by the wind, flew up the cuffs of her jeans and sent a nervous thrill up her legs and into her spine. “You and I were a disaster; and that was a long, long time ago.”

“When I heard that you were getting married I thought it was some sort of perverse joke. Everybody, everybody, knows that you and I are destined to be together. We’re star-cross’d.”

“Is that your assistant?” Emily said. She looked around for somewhere to sit down. “You keep her this late? Jesus. You must be a real son of a bitch to work for.”

“Theresa’s hours are flexible. She…”

“And I’m not sure you understand what star-cross’d means.”

“… she was told that there would, tonight, be a special project, and she was told to come in to the office later than usual to compensate. You should have seen her light up when I told her that I was planning to break up my true love’s wedding and rescue her from years of emotional tailspin. She loves this stuff.”

“True love? Get a handle on yourself,” Emily said, laughing, chattering, her spine in knots from the cold. “Jesus, you’re a nightmare. Do you ever listen to yourself? Did you write this down ahead of time?”

“Well, I will tell you that I gave it a great deal of thought. He has my name. That’s something.”

“No it’s not, and no he doesn’t.” Emily saw a bench on the far side of the fountain and began walking toward it.

“Yes he does, and yes it is. It’s like you sent out a beacon: Save me, Eric, save me from... Well, I don’t know much about the guy other than the name.”

There was a crumpled, shivering form on the bench, a heavy wool coat used as a blanket. In the light of the streetlamp Emily could see large grey ears, threadbare brown corduroy slacks, a nose that looked as if it had been shaped by gnashing molars.

“People say good things about him, that he’s perfectly nice. But let me say this: next to nice, there’s nothing in the entire world easier than irretrievable decisions. We sprint toward them. And, almost always, without what we would later have seen as the due deliberation.”

The old man stared straight ahead. His knees were pulled up to his stomach. Warm air spurted from his nostrils, rhythmically and forcefully as if he was clearing an unpleasant odor. His head rested on a half-eaten loaf of bread. His hands were curled up at the wrists and drawn into his chest. His long chin shook on his trembling jaw. He had been there long enough to collect a fine dusting of snow.

“Eric,” she said. “I have to go. I’ll call you.”

“Listen, Em, I mean it. I do. We’ll laugh at how we were.”

“I’ll call you.”

Emily stood in front of the old man for a few minutes, and then squatted, her face inches from his. He did not look her in the eye, he did not change his expression. He just stared ahead and blew steam from his nose, a bull pawing the earth. She had to pull him by the collar to get him to sit. She had to take his loaf of bread to get him to stand and follow her.

She checked into a hotel, and ran a warm bath. She undressed and slipped him into the water, and sat on the toilet taking account of the body her mother had lain next to, made love to, held for all those years. The scar from his appendicitis, the washed out sepia cobra on his left shoulder from his years in the National Defence, the burn scars on the insides of his forearms from his decades as a welder. His tiny jagged hipbones, the black and greying nest of pubic hair. The missing toe.

From room service she ordered hot water bottles and two extra quilts. She wrapped him up and laid him down between the bottles. She sat in an armchair watching him, and then moved to the bed to be next to him. She felt him begin to get an erection, and moved back to the armchair.

* * *

On the drive back to Victoria, in the morning, Emily realized that she had not seen to St. Ebenezer’s Peugeot.

Neither she nor her father spoke. He stared forward limply, interested only by the onboard computer. He perked up each time it beeped or announced an upcoming turn or destination. As they drove through Vancouver, the heightened frequency of the computer’s alerts agitated him and he began to shift and squirm.

“Dad, are you ok?” she said, but he did not respond.

Security would not let them sit in the car in the belly of the ferry, so she led him by the arm up the stairs, through the wind around the curve of the deck, and to a bench under the windows of the galley. She sat him down and explained to a nearby middle-aged couple that he was ill and that she was going to use the restroom and purchase some food. Would they please watch him for a few minutes? He shouldn’t be any trouble.

When she returned, carrying two waters and two egg sandwiches, he was speaking to the couple. His hands were weaving his words, he was smiling.

“It was wrong, though, the rib. The rib and the soil. Where the rib? Where the soil? There was no soil, that’s the wrong idea. There was only muck. All muck, hardening when it dried. Wet and slick, a ball of it, a poached egg, but slicker and wetter and not an egg, but muck. On top of it it held us, on its leg as it sat and stared into it. It stared and said nothing because it saw nothing and nothing was there to listen. It said nothing for a long long time and it began to dry, and so it wept to wet it and as it wept it pulled it close with all its furious strength and our shape shot out as it pulled us close into itself around its arms and legs and around its face which it buried into it. So there was no rib, just itself and muck and then the legs and arms and face from its own legs and arms and face.”

“Dad, come on.” Emily, abashed, smiled wanly at the couple. “Let’s leave these poor people alone.”

“And it tuckered itself out, squabbling and clutching, crying with nothing to hear it, and it fell asleep. When it woke, everything was dry but there we had our legs through its legs and our arms over its and with a neck and a head from its face. But the face looked unlike its face, even though it looked back at it. And we were very, very dry and all its weeping couldn’t wet us again. And it remembered how it had wept, and had pulled the muck to itself with its lovely strength, and that there was nothing there to hear it, and how it had slept and awoken to see what it had done and it rose from its seat and our legs fell from its legs. It spoke, but we were dry forever and still could not listen. It struck, furious and strong, angry, regretful, but we were dry and could not listen.”

“Yeah?” Emily laughed nervously. “And how’d the leopard get its spots, Dad?”

Emily apologized to the middle-aged couple. The wife looked out the window to the blue it beheld. The husband smiled at Emily tenderly and asked, chuckling, if her father had been a newsman. He said that he had quite a way with words.

When she looked up from the unwrapped sandwiches and turned to her father she saw that he was looking at her for the first time since she had found him shuddering on the bench. She recognized the slope of his mouth, the glint of his eyes. She had seen it before. She was twelve years old. He was still wearing his jacket, but his hands were warm. After turning off the car, he had sat in the garage. She had waited for the sound of the doorknob. From across the kitchen table he held her hand. He said that things would be different. He said that her mother was still at the hospital, seeing to what needed seeing to, but that Joanna would not be coming home this time. He said that things would be different, and would feel different, and that it may seem from the pain and from the quiet that the only thing that mattered was her dead sister. He said that was not how it was. How it was, he said, was that the only thing that mattered was Emily. And that would never change, he said. That would never change, he promised.