"Oh, I'm fine."

But her knees buckled as they reached the bottom of the stairs, and she was breathing hard. Erika's arm was around her. "Hey, wait, maybe you should stay in bed."

"No, it's all right." And when they were outdoors, in the cold air, she felt better. "Come on, I'm fine."

She liked the way Erika took her arm, hugging it against her side so that her warmth penetrated their two sleeves. Don't be silly, she scolded herself. She's only being kind. But she hoped Erika wouldn't move away from her.

They walked around the block, looking at the houses and filling stations and small run-down stores, closed now for Sunday. This was a shabby area, once a good neighborhood now becoming a slum. A few homes still tried to keep up a front: flower beds, swept walks, hedges on which a few dry leaves whispered in the early-winter wind.

The air was cold, but she didn't mind. She looked into Erika's face, but Erika seemed lost in thought.

Kate didn't want to think about the last two days. She could reconstruct them from experience: the nausea, the weeping, the horrible dreams, the blanked-out hours. She had never told anyone about these times except, unwillingly, Dr. Liebermann.

But with Erika there had been no strangeness. She hoped it would stay that way—but then, she had had the same hopes with Connie, at first. She didn't want with this girl what she had known with Connie, a physical satisfaction that didn't last and left her feeling sad and ashamed. But what else was there?

They had reached a little corner lot where the small children played all summer. There was a patch of grass with a sandbox, teeter-totter and two swings as well as a bench for the mothers. The Tasti-Freez hut behind the sandbox was deserted now, the windows boarded over. The sandbox was drifted over with dead leaves.

"Want to sit down?"

Her knees were beginning to melt again. She sat down on the green bench, wrapping her coat around her legs to avoid contact with the icy wood. Erika sat down beside her, silently. But she continued to hold Kate's arm.

Kate said abruptly, "What was the camp like?"

"It's a dull story. Nothing is more dull than being cold and hungry and afraid all the time. You stop having feelings and get bored, that's all."

"Were you alone when you went there?"

"Away from my family, sure. They took my father a long time before. Then we lived with my aunt-well, she was my uncle's wife actually, but she was a Gentile and when things started to get bad my uncle divorced her for her own sake and made her take her name back. But she never wanted it so, never. My father was one of the first they took. Then my uncle. Then my aunt Lisa took me and my mother and my little brother Kurt."

"That was brave."

“I think she didn't care to live after they took him away." Erika's forehead creased with remembered pain. "I think she was also in some kind of an underground movement."