In the days afterward, I couldn’t get in to them. The area had been cordoned off and most of it evacuated, but somehow the police never arrived at 40 White Street to tell its residents to leave. The first weekend, Inga and Sonia managed to travel to Brooklyn, and I cooked for the two of them. We talked a little. Inga told me about the ruined cars piled up on Church Street, the smoking pit a few blocks south, the pale dust that had covered everything like a toxic snowfall, her worry about poisons in the air. And then they slept. They slept and slept and slept, the sleep of exhaustion and perhaps relief to be away from there, the place where it had happened. But on Sunday, when Inga asked Sonia what she had seen from the classroom window that morning, the girl just shook her head, her eyes blank and her mouth tight.

FOUR DAYS AFTER the United States invaded Iraq, Eggy slipped a drawing under my door. In the foreground two people held hands, a large person and a smaller one. The hands resembled overlapping balls and were attached to skinny arms. Because the shorter figure had a mass of scribbles on its head, I guessed it was a self-portrait. The other figure with a straight line for a mouth was probably Miranda. In her free hand the child held what at first looked like a kite, but when I examined it more closely, I noticed that attached to the long curving line was a tiny airborne man at the very top of the picture. When I looked down at Eggy’s rendering of herself and her mother, I couldn’t help wonder what children might witness or suffer in this new military nightmare.

And yet, my grim thoughts of war didn’t prevent other thoughts. Sometime after Miranda uttered the sentence, If I did, why should I tell you? I had tried to avoid taking a mental image of her to bed with me. I substituted other women, Laura Capelli, for one, with her voluptuous body and broad smile, and I perused pornography: always effective, but the tawdry pictures left me depressed. I was dreaming of companionship, too, of dialogues and walks and dinners as well as sex. Miranda and I had hardly spoken to each other, and I had to admit that my attraction might be killed by a conversation that revealed a pedestrian mind behind those bewitching eyes. I rationalized that what had happened was just another rejection among many, and I should accept it, but there were three images that had now taken hold of me: Miranda’s drawing of a monster, her portrait of Eggy, and Eggy’s own picture—a girl’s rendering of her family, perhaps? Was the floating man an image of her missing father? Perhaps Eggy wanted to tell the worry doctor what her mother didn’t want to tell me. Miranda’s words had made me think that she knew the identity of the mysterious messenger. Further, I guessed that the connection between the two of them probably had something to do with photography and art, and that it was plausible other pictures had arrived without my knowledge of them. I wrote Eggy a note and pushed it under the door.