“Don’t die,” she said to me. “That’s all I can say to you. Don’t you dare die. When Pappa died, I thought about Mamma right away. She’s not so young. I want her to live to be a hundred, a hundred and five, and be just as good as she is now . . .” Inga paused. “You know, I’ve been reading both Max and Pappa these days, trying to find them in the words, trying to explain my husband and my father to myself, but there’s something missing, and I don’t mean their bodies. They had a quality in common, something obtuse and unknowing. I think that’s what drew me to Max—that hidden and oblique shadow I recognized without ever knowing what it was.” She paused. “Do you remember when it started, the walking? Do you know when he disappeared for the first time?”

I heard the door click softly shut in my mind and felt the ache and fear that accompanied it—a memory in my body. “When we were small,” I said. “I don’t remember that he did it; it was later. I think I was twelve or thirteen the first time I realized—the time when he didn’t come back until morning.”

“Mamma didn’t want us to know. He never took the car. Do you think he just walked and walked for hours?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I think he had to flee. Emotions would build up in him, and then he couldn’t stay. I don’t know where he went.”

Inga looked at me. “I remember hearing him leave. I was lying in bed wide awake because I’d seen it at dinner, that brooding, cut-off, distressed look in his face. It’s strange,” my sister continued. “Taking a walk, even at night, even if you’re upset, is such an innocent thing, and yet it was so secretive, so thick with feeling that it became terrible. I never knew what caused it. It never followed an argument with Mamma or anything like that.”

“There was a moment in medical school when I thought Pappa might be a fugueur.”

“A fugueur?” Inga said smiling. “On a fugue?”

“Yes, it got a lot of attention in the nineteenth century, and it’s still diagnosed as dissociative fugue. I’ve never heard of it happening to a woman. It’s always men, who suddenly run off and vanish for hours or days or weeks, even months, and then wake up somewhere without remembering who they are or what happened to them. It’s extremely rare, but I did see one case years ago when I was a resident at Payne Whitney. A man was brought in after a bad fall on the street. He had broken his elbow and had several contusions, but no head injury. They fixed him up, but he didn’t have identification and told the staff he couldn’t recall anything prior to a month earlier, and he didn’t seem to care. They sent him over to us in psychiatry. Eventually, they discovered that his wife had filed a missing persons report in South Carolina four weeks earlier. When she came in, he didn’t recognize her.”