Eggy brought the ball to her nose and pressed it against her face. Then she whispered, “I’m bad.”

We talked for a while about bad feelings and good ones. I stressed that every person has both, that having bad feelings didn’t make you bad. I don’t know if these therapeutic platitudes did any good, but by the time Miranda called her, Eggy seemed relieved. I know that what’s said is often less important than the tone of voice in which the words are spoken. There is music in dialogue, mysterious harmonies and dissonances that vibrate in the body like a tuning fork.

AS THE ANNIVERSARY of my father’s death approached, I returned home from work in the dark November evenings. On the lined pages of my notebook, I recorded one dream after another, in which my father, whom I believe to be dead, is still alive. He sits across the room at a neuroscience lecture on East Eighty-second Street. I see him from behind as he writes in his study, but he can’t hear me when I speak to him. I find him wooden and inert on a sofa, and yet when I get close to him, he blinks. Every time I woke from one of these nocturnal sightings, I would remember the others, which had brought with them the same discomfort, an ambivalence so highly calibrated I felt that each side of the emotional strain could be mathematically measured into a perfect half. Unlike the ghostly presence in Minnesota, these paternal figures said nothing. They were mutes, dummies that barely breathed. When I spoke of them to Magda the day I went to see her, she said that my descriptions made her think of the word “deadlock.”

Many of my childhood hours were spent with my father as he went about his work. I sat on his lap when he plowed, on top of the drill when he seeded, and trotted behind him and stumbled over clods of soil when he dragged. In winter, to the weak light of a kerosene lantern, my father milked in the barn while I sat beside him and asked him questions. Could a cat win in a fight with a weasel? Why did skunks invade chicken houses? Why were bulls dangerous while cows were not? How many rattlesnakes had my father killed and what was the safest way to do it?

“Pappa, how can you tell it’s going to snow?”

“Pappa, why is tobacco juice coming out of the grasshopper?”

“Pappa, how come burning grass stings you?”