By midafternoon Clinton and Annabel had set out on their trip. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. There were the sounds of Lake Erie’s strong winds, which made the earth seem flagrantly alive. But the journey was otherwise a quiet one. Annabel occasionally gave voice to her inability to believe that this dreadful thing had actually taken place, but from time to time, when the fact itself momentarily overwhelmed her disbelief, she wept silently into her handkerchief.

There were, however, in Clinton, no such fluctuations: no disbelief and no sorrow. He was waiting. His mind and his heart and his spirit were waiting. He knew, though he could not have put the knowledge into words, that there was still some event that had yet to take place. And when it had—whatever it was—his feelings would then take some outward form. Meanwhile, it did not even occur to him to question his lack of emotion. Instead, he drove through the afternoon and across northern Ohio, experiencing only a kind of elation that was almost pleasurable. And he waited.

They arrived in Toledo during the first moments of twilight. The O’Brien cottage looked familiar to Clinton, even though he had never seen it before. As he drove the car into the driveway, he saw the garage at the end of the yard, its doors flung wide, yawning with emptiness. The sight of it caused him to shudder.

“I guess I better not come in,” Clinton said.

“Well precious,” Annabel said, “to tell you the truth, I don’t know what shape she’ll be in. —Will you do something about food?”

“Yes.”

“And before you start that long drive back. Promise?”

“I promise.”

They kissed each other. “Bless you,” Annabel said, “for being so sweet.”

“‘Bye,” he said.

Clinton backed out of the driveway and started at once on the trip back to Cleveland. He had no intention of eating. The possibility, even when Annabel had mentioned it, did not actually touch him at all. He filled the gas tank at a station near the edge of town, and even before the twilight had ended, he was on the highway again.

He could not remember a time in which his senses had been so keen. His eyes beheld colors and forms with a new clarity that gave to the pavement and the countryside and the sky a fresh kinship with one another, and with himself. The steering wheel did not seem to him any different from his own hands, but an extension of them, of himself; and it possessed no lesser degree of life and reality than his own flesh.