“I should have been skiing with them, Molly—I have to see them,” the snowshoer said. The little Barlows had been afraid that AIDS would be the death of their gay son—later, of their trans daughter. During the AIDS pandemic, we were so afraid of the death of loved ones we imagined were vulnerable; there was a kind of forgetting or relaxing about all the other things that could kill us.

It wasn’t that seeing their little faces pressed against the window of the train was worse than anything Elliot had imagined, although it was. And when we were all inside the train car, with our flashlights on their frozen faces, no one said (in English or in German) that the little Barlows hadn’t suffered, for they surely had—if only for a few seconds. They’d died quickly; it wasn’t that.

What would stay with the snowshoer was reflected in their little faces in those few terrible seconds: the thriller writers’ recognition of the enormity of their miscalculation—how the writing team had failed to imagine a force of nature as capable of catastrophic damage as criminal or political intrigue. I saw only their fear of pain, or their actual but quickly passing pain, in the little Barlows’ faces. I saw how their little noses were flattened against the window, and how their skin was whitened by the cold—as if their freezing blood had turned them the whitish gray of ice. But the little English teacher would read more into her parents’ expressions than I could see. What the snowshoer saw had eluded me; she’d seen “a kind of crazy rapture, or at least relief,” in their frozen faces, the snowshoer would later say. I saw no such rapture in the little Barlows’ shocked expressions, but the little English teacher would later tell me what I’d missed. She’d seen (or had imagined) “the intense joy, or at least relief,” parents feel when they know their children will outlive them. In the case of Elliot’s parents, their rapture came from knowing that their only child would not predecease them or die with them. “For once, they were happy that I wasn’t skiing with them,” the snowshoer would say.

That frigid night, in the derailed car, we didn’t talk much more than the policeman I’ll call Möglich, because the one-word cop never divulged his name and “möglich” was all he’d said so far. In the freezing-cold car, our breathing fogged up the window where the snowshoer knelt and cried. The two policemen were patient with the pretty Mr. Barlow, who took her time saying goodbye to her parents. Their little faces were disappearing in the foggy window, which their loving daughter wiped clear with her ski glove.

“We should tell Ray—she’ll be worrying more, as the time goes by,” the ski patroller finally said.