We’d had such a nice trip so far, I figured I’d indulge her. We had no schedule, after all.

Of course Bess wanted to know “What sound?” and, as we followed Ellie, I explained the episode on Friday as best I could.

“That’s not normal, Mom,” Bess whispered.

“But it’s not necessarily bad. Maybe her ears are just…different.”

I wanted so very much to believe that.

Ellie led us this way and that way along intersecting paths and across the wide, bench-lined mall that seems to pop up in so many films set in Manhattan, past volleyball courts, and then into a wide-open field.

“This is called the Sheep Meadow,” Ellie announced, continuing to the center where she stopped and pointed downtown toward the apartment buildings and hotels that lined Central Park South. “And right down there is where Seventh Avenue stops.”

“So?” Bess said.

“So this is where I think the sound came from. At least it’s my best guess.”

Bess made a face. “That doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing around but grass. Unless someone drove a speaker system into the middle here and started broadcasting a sound only weirdoes can hear—”

Ellie screamed then. A piercing, agonized sound ripped from her throat as her face paled and I swear her sneakers lifted a foot off the turf. She dropped her phone and clapped her hands over her ears and took off at a dead run, screaming all the while. With shock and terror spiking my chest, I chased after her, Bess close behind.

Ellie slowed when she reached a pathway at the far edge of the Sheep Meadow and staggered in a circle with a finger jammed into each ear.

As Bess and I approached she turned toward me and shouted, “Don’t tell me you can’t hear it now?”

Her distress was so genuine, and I felt so helpless.

“I don’t know what else to tell you, Ellie. I don’t hear anything.” I turned to Bess. “Do you?”

She shook her head. “I hear the traffic up on the street but that’s all. What’s it sound like?”

“Like a moan—a long moan that never stops. And so loud! Not as loud as it was back in the field, but—” She jammed her hands over her ears again. “I can’t stand it!”

I hovered beside her. “I don’t know what to do!”

“Make it stop. Please, Mom, you’ve got to make it stop!”

“We can’t hear it, Ellie. That means it’s in your head. Does covering your ears help?”

“No, it’s all around.”

A man had trotted up and skidded to a stop before her.

“You hear it too?” he said, staring.

Ellie nodded as her face paled further, and her cheeks…they seemed to be sinking.

I looked at the man—tall and wiry with ruddy skin, high cheekbones, and a sharp nose. He looked Indian—not the Hindu kind, the Native American kind. If he heard it, that meant it wasn’t just in Ellie’s head, not some mental aberration.