“What’s it about?” I whispered.

“About?” Stella shook her head. “It’s not that kind of movie.”

She could be this way, impatient.

The upstairs was full of massive white molds that looked like somebody had bleached a bunch of gelatin salads. Lucy used to make fruit molds for PTA meetings no matter what time of day they happened. “It’s always nice to bring something,” she’d said. “It shows you care.”

The statue I liked best was a fallen concrete pillar stuck all over with husks of shrimp and drizzled with glaze. Stella whispered in my ear, “Looks like a doughnut.”

“More like a cruller,” I said. “Those are the long ones.”

It was hard to tell if the material was brittle or soft, jammy or dried. It looked like hardened jelly. Would it smear against our fingers? The sign said: DO NOT TOUCH. Maybe they’d broken walls for this one. It looked big enough.

That piece had a kind of power over me. I wanted to feel the shape with my fingers. I was tired of just looking. I had to clench my hands into fists. I kept thinking about touching it. There were times I needed, more than anything, to bring the thing inside me, to bring it close.

“What is it?” Stella whispered. “Are you upset?”

I could barely breathe. I ran downstairs and into the sunlight.

Stella found me in a park across the street. “What happened in there?” she said. “You okay?”

I was quiet for a moment. I took big breaths that felt cold behind my ribs.

We were only a few blocks from the office. I thought of Abe, somewhere close, typing spreadsheets. He worked most Saturdays.

Stella sat on the grass and patted the dirt next to her. She waited for me to speak, pulling up tufts and rubbing them back into the ground. I could tell she was trying not to say anything. The sound of her keeping quiet got to seem like a question on its own. We watched a woman farther down the hill, twirling with her arms high in the air.

“One time I saw a bird trapped in a house,” I said finally. “A very small house. My house.”

She nodded. I kept going.

“I didn’t want to kill it. I just wanted to touch it. I stood there and clutched my one hand with the other until it got to feel so bad—like hurting or busting open.”

“Did you catch it?”

I lied. I said, “It flew out a window.”

At the bottom of the hill, the twirling woman started walking toward us. She looked a little like Toledo but she was walking funny, like she had a limp, and Toledo walked just fine. The figure got closer, kept getting bigger, and in a minute I could see: It was her. She was strung out on something, I didn’t know what. She jerked her head back and forth. Her white sneakers were covered with little red lights that glowed with every stride.