Wednesday we walked in the woods. It was a mild and delicate evening. An oriole sang, unconcerned that he had missed the last thermal to Dixie. We held hands. I told her about my father.

Thursday night was Latin. Amo amas amat. Venite adoramus and all that.

Friday, “I want to show you something,” she said, leading me through the dark house, up the stairs to the workshop. Stealthily we raised the ladder and climbed through the trap. Moonlight silvered the attic, dusting the accumulated junk with a luminous wand. I stumbled over a mattress on the floorboards as she steered me to the bull’s-eye and, as if from a height far greater than an eagle’s nest, we looked out over the shrouded countryside. A solitary star poked a little white hole in the sky, then another. They doubled, trebled, multiplied mysteriously—a tumult of stars—until the night was no more than a frame for their cold fire, and the moon a pale medallion. Beneath them stretched a flat and tarry canvas without dimension, but even as we watched it took shape, its stencils sharpened, until a perfect toy landscape emerged, as still and immaculate as a village under a Christmas tree—gently sloping meadows and rock-ribbed hills, forests and farmhouses with one light quietly burning, gray smoke flecked with the spindrift of orange embers flaring from the chimney tops. The headlights of a car sliced through the trees and from far away a train whistled a wild, lost chord, ghostly, timeless, unbearably sad.

“Isn’t it great?” she whispered. “I come here all the time.”

“What’s that over there? The lights?”

“Pikesville—where I go to school.”

She was so achingly beautiful, standing there in the darkness, her lips full and rounded in a half-smile. At the sewing machine table she took a matchbox from a drawer and lit the candle stubs. They flared up and her trembling shadow fused sinuously with mine on the wall of books. She turned to me, direct and grave, while in the portrait on the table her mother’s eyes in the long-dead face stalked me in the candlelight. Far from dead she was, terribly alive in that attic with that still, enshrined Madonna look of hers, watching over her child.

I was stunned by that ghost on the table, and all the while Val waited, expecting something more from me than paralysis. But how is it possible to ravish a daughter before her mother’s eyes? Where was the electric spark to ignite my engine? Was Val already aware of my panic? Had she anticipated it? Was that the meaning of her knowing half-smile?

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“Once—did I tell you?—I went to Sam’s Peerless Fresh Fish in Pikesville and bought a live lobster and took it to school on a leash.”