Trying now to remember her lover. The emotional young painter who’d later killed himself, possibly by accident, with a heroin overdose.

Almost, she can remember him. Was his name Lester? Esdra. His olive-pale face. Thick dark hair. Serious, somber manner. The hesitancy of his touch.

She had not heard of Esdra’s death until months after. Somehow that had made the death seem less urgent, less real.

She’d wept, her heart had been rent. But then she’d dried her eyes and hurried out to her car … For always in that phase of her life people had awaited her.

Hears herself ask if Detroit is still a center for drugs.

An annoying question, L.K. knows. When Vann has been regarding her with soft, solicitous eyes.

“Depends on which drug. No more than anywhere in the Midwest.”

She doubts that that can be true. In its boom years Detroit was besieged by drugs: crack cocaine, a killer. And now, from what she has heard and read, methamphetamine, manufactured illicitly in the devastated inner city, indeed in old buildings like those surrounding the Durant, is the leading killer.

“Why do people insist upon poisoning themselves? I’ve always wondered.”

“I don’t.” Vann snorts, laughs. He is the experienced one, knowing all the answers. “I don’t wonder at all.”

“Yes, but why?”—L.K. persists.

“When you’re high, you don’t want—anything. And when you’re not high, you’re waiting for the high, which is what you want—not anything else.”

L.K. feels rebuffed by these words.

Words of wisdom, she supposes.

But yes. It is the great weakness of her life. Wanting.

A moment’s stiffness between them: the woman and the man.

From a window L.K. can see the Detroit River, not so scintillate from this distance, lead gray. Belle Isle is obscured by buildings. Lake Saint Clair is invisible. But she can see something of the skyline of Windsor, Ontario.

Living in Detroit, she’d fantasized a parallel life in Canada. In the city so much smaller than Detroit she would live a smaller, more virtuous and saner life, a life of anonymity. A husband, a child or two. A life lacking in invention and novelty and for that reason a life of immense satisfaction.

Once, with Esdra, in his rattletrap pickup truck that had aroused suspicions at the border crossing, she’d driven into Canada, not to the small city of Windsor but to Point Pelee, a vast national park south and east of the city, bordering Lake Erie. Esdra had wanted to take photographs of migrating birds, but his heavy Nike camera had malfunctioned. (L.K.’s camera had functioned well enough.) She recalls crossing the windswept Ambassador Bridge, returning late to Detroit. Storm clouds overhead, flashes of lightning.

Determined to tell her husband yes, she loved him, but no she could not remain with him. Her soul had been lacerated, lashed. For she’d fallen in love with …

She shakes her head to clear it. Oh, where is she now.