I stroked her head and her back, felt the rough texture of her hair under my fingers and then the small protuberance of each vertebra down her spine beneath the white terrycloth and experienced a subdued erotic pleasure. I was playing the mother, after all, not the lover. I had finally taken hold of what Laura had called my “fantasy object,” a woman I had lusted after for months, only to find a child in my arms. It started to rain then. We listened to the drops hitting the windows in the room and battering the skylight one floor above us, and I remembered Lane running across the roofs. It’s a miracle when the passions of two people actually collide, I thought. So often they dart off in unexpected directions, and there’s no chasing them down.

I don’t know how long I held her or what time it was when she left me and walked down the stairs to the apartment. I think it was around one. I do know that when she gave me a last hug it had stopped raining.

IN THE MORNING, I woke to an erection and the confused, discomfiting fragments of a dream about a strange woman in dishabille, her naked breasts entangled in the limp spaghetti that had mysteriously enveloped my kitchen—a translation of Eggy’s umbilical string, no doubt. It was only as I emerged from that woozy, liminal state that I remembered Miranda coming into the room in her white robe to tell me the story of her uncle Richard’s murder and to find some consolation in my arms. During the day, as I listened to my patients, the memory of her voice intruded a few times. I played the boy. Good old competent Miranda. He said to tell you it’s transference. I also imagined a man lying in a street bleeding and broken and wondered what West Kingston looked like, because the street I conjured belonged to no real place. Mr. T. came to visit me that day. After two weeks in the hospital, he had been in outpatient care at Payne Whitney. I was pleased to see him more coherent and thinner now that he had dispensed with the olanzapine. His new regimen—carbamazepine, risperidone, a low dose of lithium, the antidepressant bupropion, and zolpidem for sleep—had helped him.

“There are wobbles and lurches,” he said to me. “But it’s better, no glooming, dooming death thoughts, hardly any voices, and they’re not loud, kinda fuzzy in the background, receding not impeding. Dr. Odin doesn’t talk much, though. A nodder, a scribbler, a grunter. I thought maybe I could see you.”

“Will your insurance cover it?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know.”

“We could make an arrangement—ability to pay.”

Mr. T. rubbed his hands hard. His fingernails were thickly lined with dirt, and his expression was soft. “Herz und Herz,” he said. “Zu schwer befunden. Schwerer werden. Leichter sein.”

“What’s that?