After a visit to the doctor, on our way home we stopped at the Starbucks at Bailey’s Crossroads. We used to go there sometimes, in the days when we lived near the café, which is frequented mostly by immigrants from Africa. I watched her stop in front of the door of the women’s toilet, which was, it turned out, locked, so she waited patiently. Sanja always does this: first she goes to wash her hands, like a religious ritual. After a minute or two, the door opened and then I saw a girl coming out, she could have been nineteen or twenty; immediately after her, a young man emerged as well. It’s not exactly a frequent phenomenon here, in puritan America, to see a man coming out of a space intended only for women. Sanja turned to me, spread her hands, and smiled. There was a smile on the face of the girl as well, but it expressed her embarrassment, in fact shame, because she’d been caught in an act that wasn’t publicly approved, and as though she felt a need to hide, she went over to the newspaper stand and stared at the photograph on the front page of The New York Times; the young man followed her and they quickly slipped out of the café. The lovers were young Arabs (the girl’s face was framed in a gray silk scarf).

After that, we drank our coffee, laughing, and didn’t mention the event that had caused this gaiety. “It’s all going to be all right,” I said. Everything will be good. And from time to time I turned toward the newspaper stand and looked at the photograph on the front page of The New York Times.

It was a photo of a rickety bridge made of old rough boards, in a gentle arc over a stream, the tributary of a river or sea with tropical marsh plants growing beside it. In the foreground sits a three-year-old girl in a light gray sleeveless top and trousers of the same color, her feet are apart, but her knees touch, so that her whole little child’s body forms the shape of an X. Her little fingers are fiddling with a small orange flower, which she’s looking at as though she were hiding and she’s clearly uncomfortable about being photographed. The bridge leads to a house without a door, and a white cat with black ears and a black tail (its back turned to the camera lens) has stopped in the middle of the little bridge and turned to look at the child. There’s something inconsolable in the pose of the little girl and in the cat’s turning. (The caption under the photo is Resettling the First American “Climate Refugees.”)

She has begun to read, she says she must inform herself about world events, but her problems with her sight slow her down; she can’t stay long at the computer screen, and she’s irritable. She reads the news on the internet, then says: “It says in the paper . . .”