Now and then, since, I have remembered to keep an eye out for a squirrel with one hind leg just a little stiffer and straighter than the other, but I’ve never been able to pick him out. Maybe he went away. Of course he’s probably dead by now, of old age if nothing else. I don’t know how long squirrels can expect to live.

There is still a scar on my hand, between the thumb and the forefinger, and sometimes it still hurts a little.

I’ve never since had an animal in my home, and that is for the best. It was not right, twisting the nature of something, making it less free. In a way, it’s not right to do anything; or it’s right to do nothing. It is necessary to let things be.

Still, I felt it necessary to try to save the squirrel’s life; I could not have left it on the ground to starve. But I know that if something can survive on its own, then I have no right. Then it is necessary to let it be.

I’ve been alone since then. No one, nothing and no one, has been here. Until Katie.

Not until Katie.

14

14

I don’t understand why she wants me to go back to the city with her, but she does. She’s been pressing me for several days now, at first subtly, testing me out, now quite straightforwardly asking me. I would stay, she says, with her in an apartment; there is no question of going back to the other house, where her father lives.

He has married again, she tells me at last. (Did she think it would hurt me?) A tall woman who is thirty-five years old and who has deep red hair cut long and a low, calm voice. Elliott, she says, is not fond of her, apparently finding it strange to have a “mother” who is a mere fifteen years older than him; although surely he must realize that the distance between twenty and thirty-five is very great, not just any fifteen years. That cannot really be the reason.