For the first time since Shad called me with the news of Viola’s death, I feel utterly directionless—a ship without a rudder. Stranger still, I feel a temporal dislocation that’s almost dizzying. Some passing pedestrians clutch Christmas packages in their hands, but that makes no sense. Caitlin and I were supposed to be married on Christmas Eve, which can’t be many days from now, yet the idea seems absurd. I don’t even have a firm grip on the year. The last definite event in my mind is Hurricane Katrina, which must have been … four months ago? Everything since seems a blur, with my father’s face at the center of it. Leaning out of the doorway, I blink against the chill wind, and whatever grip I still had on the present falls way.

I am eight years old. My father has dropped me off at the hospital to visit a friend who broke both his legs in a motorcycle accident. Dad promises to return by 9:30 P.M., when visiting hours are over. If I’m late, he says, walk outside and wait under the light pole by the flower bed in front of the hospital. I do what I can to amuse my friend, who’s in constant agony from the traction cables attached to pins through his femurs, and I silently resolve never to get on a motorcycle. At nine thirty, the nurses tell me I have to go.

As instructed, I take the elevator down and walk out into the humid night, then make my way down to the empty flower bed. An hour passes. Dad doesn’t come for me. I have no change for a pay phone. The hospital doors are locked. Standing under the humming streetlight, I watch the cars roar past; I’m fighting tears, afraid to do anything, until my father finally drives up sometime after eleven. He tells me he’s been on a house call (his all-purpose answer for every late arrival, one that is never questioned). For some reason, though, I don’t believe him this time. Something in his voice, or maybe his averted eyes, tells me that he’s lying. This realization terrifies me. From this moment forward, some part of me knows I cannot completely trust my father. I know only this: My mother would never have left me alone beside the highway with no idea where to go or what to do.