“And the guilt and the black moods when the sun disappears for days, and from your father who refuses to die.”

I wanted to weep then. I felt the tension in my chest and the pressure in my nose and eyes and the tightening around my mouth, but I had a sense that I wouldn’t stop if I began to cry and closed my eyes to press down the emotion.

“In one of his essays,” Magda said, “Hans Loewald wrote, ‘The work of psychoanalysis can turn ghosts into ancestors.’ ”

I TOOK NO notes the day Eggy fell, but I remember the alien cadence of Miranda’s voice on the message she left me and exactly where I was standing in the cold rain on East Fortieth Street. “Eggy fell at Jeff’s. She hit her head. She’s in pediatric emergency at Bellevue Hospital. They put a tube in her so she can breathe. They’re doing a CT scan.” She stopped talking then, and I heard nothing for a couple of seconds. “Erik, she’s unconscious.” Miranda didn’t say good-bye, and she didn’t ask me to come. At Jeff’s. Eggy fell at Jeff’s. As soon as I heard those words, an unformed accusation against Lane rose up in me, and the cloud of sinister possibility that had always hung about him thickened. Stalker, thief, poseur. I remembered Miranda’s bloody finger, Lane’s face in my hallway mirror as he delivered his soliloquy. I remembered the break-in, the photograph, the hammer, and my heart began to beat faster. I saw Eglantine on the floor, unconscious, saw paramedics leaning over her body as they intubated her. When I stepped into the street to hail a cab, I continued Eggy’s story in my mind, and although I knew it was irrational even to imagine an outcome until I knew more, I saw her in the ICU dead, saw a woman with a clipboard sit down beside Miranda and explain in a hushed voice about organ donation. The decision had to be made now. In the taxi, I rehearsed everything I could remember about the Glasgow Coma Scale and its relation to recovery rates, the possible impairments after head injury—seizures, cognitive deficits, memory problems, personality changes. I wasn’t an expert. Once I knew what had happened, I would call Fred Kaplan—that’s all he did, head injury day and night.