The last real time she spent in California was in a log cabin in the Big Bear mountains outside of Los Angeles. Mike Eagle had, he said, been told by his wife that he looked like hell and ought to go away for a few days’ rest. It was January in the mountains, almost a true January. There were patches of snow on the ground, the air was blue with cold, the small lake frozen, and Annie glimpsed the white flanks of mule-tailed deer among the pines.

They slept beneath layers of cotton blankets and woke to a cold clear light, their breath making vapour in the small cabin. Mike made a fire in the potbellied stove and they ate bacon and drank coffee looking out across the lake at the black tamaracks on the other side. It was hard to leave the warmth of the bed; there was such timeless, mindless pleasure in that warmth, and in the contrasting pine-scented chill air which would soon be obliterated by the wood smoke of the stove.

Annie kept one of the blankets around herself as they ate. Remembering Joe, she wondered if she’d ever be able to look at such a blanket again without its reminding her. She told Mike about him. He listened with his face prepared to smile, as always when she unfolded her “stories,” and she grew resentful at the smugness of his anticipatory amusement. She told him more than she’d intended.

“He had no insight,” Mike said. “It’s clear he was a homosexual. That fact may explain his sister’s promiscuity too, or vice versa.”

“Fact, vice versa?”

“Lots of people commit suicide.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It looms large for you because you knew him. It’s a perfectly commonplace happening, especially among younger people.”

“Commonplace!”

“Don’t get sore. Here, have a cigar.”

She dressed, averting her face from him.

Later, walking through the forest, they came to a narrow valley where the remains of an old movie set looked, from their vantage point on the hill above it, like a small frontier village. They walked down and among the façades where snow had caught along the ridges of the wood. In the silence and the cold, they stood huddled together looking up at the saloon, the houses that were only rough-painted wood drawings against the hillside. She wondered if mountain lions walked down the main street. They had heard something cry out the night before, and Mike had said it must be a mountain lion hunting.

On their last morning, she said she had another commonplace story to tell him. He listened impassively to the tale of Lucy Griggs and Cletus, and the two Gorgon women.

“There’s a victim theory,” he said. “I believe it, too. That little girl was a natural for a rape attack. Listen, some of my patients live in places dangerous to walk in at ten in the morning. No one’s ever bothered me. It’s partly because I don’t expect to be bothered.”