Catherine stood in the empty upper yard. She felt restless, yet there was no place to go. He had walked to his car and driven home. He had not told anyone he was going home. Catherine thought it was a strange, upsetting thing to have done, and all at once she felt an immense pity for Peter Schiller, and for herself, as if someone had done something to them and gone away. But it was Peter Schiller who had gone away. Catherine shook her head, as if to shake out the words. She looked about. Everything seemed suspenseful and mysterious—the blue snow, the deep boot-hollows in the snow, the floodlit black of the driveway, startling as spilled ink rushing across a table. It seemed to her that everything she looked at was about to change shape suddenly. But it all remained peaceful, suspended, still. And the sledders rushing down the slope were part of it too, as if their motion were only another form of stillness. A hill of summer blueberries, sledders in the snow. Catherine felt lifted up into stillness, as if things were about to shift slightly, or crack open like kernels, thrusting up inner blossoms. She felt a faint cracking inside her. In another moment she would understand everything. And as she waited, she bowed her head against the cold, as if in prayer.

A shout from the hill startled her. Catherine hugged herself, and shivered in the cold. It had slipped away, whatever it was. She felt tired, as if she had been running for a long time. It seemed to her that she had been set spinning, like a top that travels across a table, touches an object, and, still spinning, rushes off in another direction. The words had set her spinning to the tree, and from there to the playroom, and from there to the kitchen, and from there to the snowy wasteland of the upper yard. And once you were set spinning, who knew where you would stop? She was spinning, spinning, and now she was about to go spinning off again, because she could not bear to be alone. She no longer knew what was going to happen to her. She no longer knew anything at all.

Gravely, her head bowed slightly, Catherine walked down the hill.