Perhaps you loved Miranda because you knew you couldn’t find her, I said to myself, and that kept you from moving forward and left you shivering like Ms. L. on the steps outside a locked door. Deadlocked. People need to be seen. Mr. R. looks up and sees the rug on the wall in my office. Something has broken inside him. The Depression never seemed to end. I see my father walking across campus with his long strides, and he doesn’t recognize me. He passes his son, but he’s not looking for me at that moment. He’s too sad to see me, absorbed in old sorrows that return again and again. It’s something about Dad. Inga is talking about Max. We have different selves over the course of a life. My father is telling his story about the farm, his army days, his travels, and his work, about people he knew and loved, and about us, about my mother, Inga, and me. The speech seems to be over. My father pauses. His eyes are gleaming with humor. “And that’s why,” he says, “I answer to the name of Lucky.” It’s new, Sonia says about being in love. It’s new. The New World. A dugout on the prairie. The vanished. His vacant corpse had lost the man I knew. Joel will never know his father. Kyss Pappa. My young mother bends over the body of her father. The war is still going on. The wars are raging. Men and women are raging. My father sleeps in a hole on the beach as the rocket fire booms above him. Our brave young men and women in uniform fighting for freedom. A log house goes up in flames. A little girl is rescued from a burning house. We cleaned up them graves real nice, didn’t we? The towers are burning. Bad people burn up. No they don’t. My father cuts down trees. His fist slams into the low ceiling above his narrow bed. My grandfather cries out in his sleep and his small son shakes him awake. Lane saw it in me. He saw the violence, the violence my father wanted to walk off but couldn’t. The road isn’t long enough. A Japanese officer falls over in the long grass. Sarah jumps, falls. Eggy falls. Sonia watches from the window. People are jumping, falling. They’re on fire. The buildings fall. Wo ist mein Schade Star. The dead are speaking and Mr. T. is listening. We hear voices. I hear my father saying my mother’s name. He says Marit. He says it again. I see him as he leans over his coat in a narrow room in Oslo, methodically picking the pale fluff from the dark material. “If I could have one memory . . .” I stand and watch the snow, and it is all happening at once. It cannot last, I say, this feeling cannot last, but it doesn’t matter. It is here now. In the drawing the little girl has wings. The coma is lightening. My sister is lying in the grass. Kiss me, kiss me, so I can wake up. And then I see Ms. W. at the end of our last session. She is smiling at me, and she uses the word again: reincarnation. “Not after death, but here when we’re alive.” She puts out her hand and I take it. She says, “I will miss you.”