Six nights later, Sarah’s car died a noisy and inconvenient death just outside of Wilton. The night was at its strongest, so I left the automobile carcass where it lay and began to walk.

The night was moonless and still; there was no traffic on the little two-lane road into town. I had become quite adept at depending on my cane for stability; the rhythm of my footsteps was regular and pleasing, slow and deliberate, thoughtful and restrained. It was good to walk the highway again.

I watched the night deepen, felt the cold crinkle of the stars in the clear sky, listened to the sounds of the night animals in the fields.

I walked past the little green sign with its pebbly, light-­reflecting letters that said, “Wilton, Pa., Pop. 4780,” and I held my head a little higher, my back a little more erect. Home. The place to which I vowed I would never return, for it held ties—emotional ties—and I cared little for all the burdens of human life.

Yet here I was, and it wasn’t an emotional cord that tugged me back into this place; it was something else, something stronger, darker, more substantial than the petty stuff of human emotions, yet its nature eluded me. I knew only that this was where I was meant to be.

The night was on the wane as I walked past the first service station, then the barn-sized tavern that exuded country western music of a weekend night. I walked on into town, beyond the feed store, past the laundromat, the bank, and the real estate office. I stood on the corner by the one theater, which played only family features, and I looked to the north.

The neighborhood was up there, on the knoll. The house where Rolf took Alice and me to live, the place where Alice eventually died, was there somewhere, dark, filled with sleeping strangers. An occasional light showing through a square pane was all that signified that a neighborhood was there, and not just an empty field full of Pennsylvania January.

I turned and looked south. The train tracks ran along the back side of the main street, and it was four blocks beyond this that Alice and I had lived before Rolf. The house I was born in, the house that my father laughed in, died in, the house that held memories of childhood ostracism—the house I swore I would never see again—stood just four blocks away.

Like a magnet, it drew me.