Clearly she had used her own baby pictures for the drawings. But the more I stared, the less it looked like Maddy at any age. I had never seen a face like it. It was a child given over to a kind of laughter no child should know about, triumphant and without hope and indifferent to anything but its own release. While I had been downstairs loading the dishwasher, taking out the trash, assembling trays of crackers and soup that she would thank me for and leave untouched, she had been making this.

When Robin came home, I told him about my visitors and replayed the segment screened during the march. When the earth-head had been wiped clean of habitation, I pressed stop and closed the file.

“Whoa,” said Robin hoarsely. “I’d kind of forgotten what it was like.”

“Not easy to watch.”

“Great that she made it. That she could make something like that.”

“Should I let them use it?” I asked him.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Well, why would I?”

I didn’t show Robin the new ending. I copied the file to a memory stick and carried it around in my wallet. Whenever I had a private moment at work or at home, I watched the film, pausing the frames, speeding it up or slowing it down, and sometimes, with an image frozen on the screen, I would glance away and whip back to catch it unawares.

The defiant and despairing expressions were painful, the crumbling face filled me with horror, but at least I could understand them. I could not understand the laughing baby’s head. And what kept me awake was this: If Maddy had left the ending for me to find, we were in some kind of bizarre and exhilarating contact. If she had made it for herself and herself only, I was trampling on her private life in a way I’d vowed never to do.

27

Thanksgiving came and went unmarked, as it had the previous year. We postponed our family dinner, until the anniversary of Maddy’s death. That proved to be a mistake. I had not understood the strange power of calendar dates. The twenty-fifth of November rushed toward me like the edge of a cliff, and that morning the events were upon me as vividly as if they had just taken place.

As in those first terrible weeks, bed was a sanctuary and a trap. If I faced the wall, the frames of misery awaited me. If I faced the door, I could see people entering and leaving, in the weird light that precedes a storm, people who weren’t Maddy and never would be Maddy.

“Wouldn’t you feel better if you got up?” said Robin, stroking my forehead with one hand and my wrist with the other. “You don’t have to do anything. Just come downstairs. Watch TV or something?”

Go over there. By that cloud. I’ll swim to you.

“No, thanks.”