“It looks as if Katie’s in better shape than Elliott, but I’m not so sure. She’s quieter now. She doesn’t dance any more, and we never hear her singing. She just kind of pads around the house, and she watches us. Just after you left I heard her and a couple of friends talking, and one of them was asking where you were. They were in the kitchen, at the table, and I was walking down the hall past the door. I saw Katie shrug, just the way you did a minute ago, and she just said, ‘Oh, she’s gone.’ That’s all. You wouldn’t have known from her voice, but I saw her face just then, when she was saying it, and it was terrible, she was smiling but still it was so bleak, so lost, I wanted to go in and hug her and tell her to go ahead and cry. But of course she wouldn’t have wanted that, with her friends there. I don’t know how to help her.”

Yes, the picture, this one, touched me, and I felt for a moment as if I couldn’t breathe, the need to reach out to the children was so strong in me.

And then I saw the way it was there now in that house, and the way the children were, and it stretched ahead and I could see them growing up, growing older. I could see how they would be, insecure and unsure. But they would become strong against it, testing the unsureness until they found it was untrue, and I saw that finally they might be terribly powerful, in their own ways. “They’ll be all right, you know,” I said, and he looked as if he might hit me, there was that kind of tension in his body, but he didn’t say anything.

“And what about you, Stephen, what’s happened to you?”

“Oh well,” he said ironically, “I suppose you could say I’ve been surviving. Nothing very interesting. Nothing like making myself a whole new life, just struggling along with the old one, trying to do my best, you know the way it is.”

“Yes,” I said.

There was a long silence. He had come with hope and forgiveness, would leave with hate. And I? I would go on here, I was just an observer now in these things, and I watched him.