The basketball coach gathers her team together and leads the girls across the street toward the school, where their parents are waiting to fetch them. In the relative quiet, Ruth walks the few steps back to where Isabelle stands frozen, and tries to take her hand. Isabelle yanks it away and hurries in the direction of home, her eyes on the ground all the while. Ruth watches the small, hatless creature of a child stalk away, and she feels her heart sink. She hadn’t exactly planned on such an encounter—how could she know the basketball team would pull up just as they were passing?—but she had known that in coming this way the possibility of such an encounter did exist, and she had taken that chance. Part of her thought that coming by the school might be a good thing for Isabelle, might remind her of the world she’s left behind; she hadn’t meant to rub that world in Isabelle’s face. Yet again, Ruth thinks, she has fucked up.

She thinks back to the earliest days of Isabelle’s silence, and how she and Wilson had thought that the silence was reserved for them, and that Isabelle was herself at school. This was maybe a month after the jump-rope incident. How humiliating it had been to be called into school that second time! Are you aware that Isabelle is not speaking? Mrs. Mason had asked. Of course they were! But not that she wasn’t speaking at school! Not that she wasn’t speaking to her teachers and friends! It was that afternoon that Caroline, over at their apartment for a prearranged playdate, appeared in the doorway of Ruth’s study and asked if she could please go home.

“Are you all right?” Ruth had asked. “Are you sick?”

Caroline had looked at the floor. “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m just ready to go home.”

It had all happened so quickly, the silence, Ruth thinks. Though had it? Had she and Wilson just been oblivious? They had. Of course they had. And now things have come to this!

Ruth watches Isabelle vanish around the corner, and she hurries after her, dragging Maggie along. When she rounds the corner herself, she is almost surprised to find that Isabelle has not disappeared entirely, following her voice into whatever void it’s gone to, but there she is, hunched and quick and silent against the cold, hurrying in the direction of home.

The midtown streets are crowded. From behind, the pack of businesspeople waiting to cross the street looks vaguely cartoonish: a collection of broad shoulders all cloaked in shades of brown, whether leather, canvas, or fur, their breaths hovering as a single cloud above them like a blank speech bubble. If he were to draw this cartoon, Wilson thinks, he would have them pawing at the slushy ground with their feet, anxious to be released into motion by a green light. Maybe he’d also give them spears and shields with which to face the oncoming crowd crossing the street the other way.