It was darkening outside when Burton and I left the hotel, a little tipsy in the twilight as we stood together on the sidewalk. The Walrus and the Carpenter, I said to myself. While we waited for cabs, we looked downtown, and I know we both thought not about what was there, but about what wasn’t, and neither of us said a word as we gazed at the empty sky above lower Manhattan. I watched Burton stop a cab. Dorothy had been mostly dismantled by then. Without the wig, makeup, and breast-and-buttock padding, his masculinity had been restored, but as he lifted his leg to enter the taxi, the long coat swung open, and I glimpsed his blue dress swish beneath it for an instant. I had a thought then, which as soon as it had passed through my mind, made me smile. It was this: The man is really coming into his own.

THREE DAYS LATER, when I came out of the subway, I thought I saw Jeffrey Lane walking along Prospect Park, but I wasn’t sure. When a person occupies a subliminal presence in my mind, any number of strangers can take on his or her form. I saw Miranda several times in the two weeks that followed, but Eggy was always with her. Something had changed between Miranda and me, however, a thickening of knowledge that nevertheless kept us apart. We weren’t awkward or shy together. It was as if Miranda’s confession were locked up in a room that had become inaccessible by ordinary means, a sealed chamber we remembered but couldn’t return to. I knew that she was working hard, drawing into the night. When she spoke about the pictures, her voice grew vehement and her eyes took on a feverish glaze that made me deferent and quiet in her presence. When I asked to see what she was doing, she told me to wait.

Eggy carried her ball of string everywhere, “just in case.” Her teacher at P.S. 321 let her keep it inside her desk during school hours, and Miranda had allowed her daughter to hang string in her bedroom that connected the ceiling lamp to the bedposts and chair. “It can’t be dangerous, that’s all,” Eggy told me. “I can’t trip in the night. I have to be able to get out in a fire, you see. That’s what Mommy says.” The child was sitting beside me fingering her ball when she spoke. “I don’t want to burn up.” Eggy clutched the ball harder. “Sometimes bad people turn into fire just like that. They don’t even need a match.”

She turned her fierce, small face to mine, as if she were challenging me.

“No, Eggy,” I said, “people don’t just burst into flames without a match. Did somebody tell you that?”

“Frankie’s babysitter said that God makes bad people burn.”

“I see, but it’s not true.”