From down the beach comes the sound of laughter, as Doris screeches her delight over some seashell. The sun’s come out, but the wind still churns, and the surf arrives in tall, angry, chaotic waves. I think that I would like to be a wave myself right now, to throw myself against a rock and just expire.

At the bar in Nuremberg, after Captain Hawley put his officer’s cap back on his head and left me alone with my letter, I went upstairs and took off my clothes and lay on my bed. I considered whether I wanted to live or not. It seemed to me that nobody was left alive who mattered to me, nobody on earth left to live for. Velázquez was dead; my father, or so I then supposed, had been dead for years. I might as well have been dead to my mother and stepfather. My own body appeared to recognize its isolation and was now wasting away, day by day. Every morning I trudged into the tribunal courtroom and learned that the world itself was not worth living in, that man was so corrupt and so evil that further existence was pointless, that humanity did not deserve to continue.

You are like Sam reborn as a woman, Irene had said.

I don’t know if that’s true. In my last memory of my father, I’m thirteen years old and he’s taking me out to dinner for my birthday, just the two of us, at some restaurant in San Francisco. He orders turbot and Scotch whiskey; I have chicken and a lemon soda. Over some chocolate cake for dessert, he hands me a box, and inside that box is a necklace on a silver chain, on which hangs a tiny shell containing a tiny freshwater pearl. I’m so overcome by this beautiful object, I burst into tears. Dad fastens it around my neck and says that whenever we’re apart, as we must be, I should look at this necklace and remember how much he loves me. That I am everything in the world to him, and always will be. He drives me home the long way and walks me to the door, but he doesn’t go inside because of Mama. He just hugs me and kisses me good-bye and walks down the step and gets into his car. He waves out the window as he leaves. I remain on the step until the smell of him drifts away. And that’s all there is.