The announcements to his children, the move to an apartment in the slummy row houses across the river from the old mill, the interview with a jaded, non-judgmental Hartford divorce lawyer—these all had an underwater quality. He moved numbly through a thickness of others’ pain, scarcely recognizing himself. In this thicker element, he felt oddly light. There was a sensation that, in entering the drastic element—the fatality he confused with the vacant lot next to his first home, where his glasses in their dew-soaked case had been miraculously returned to him, convincing him that his life was charmed—Owen had begun his delayed adulthood. Leaving Phyllis in their mid-forties was the first adult action of his life. To be an adult is to be a killer. Pacifists and non-combatants are just fooling themselves, letting others do the dirty work.

Vanessa, meeting him downtown at noon, outside The Ugly Duckling, said simply, unsmiling, “Good for you, dear,” but kept walking. Alissa, crossing Branch Street to the elementary school with little Nina in tow, asked the child, “Want to show Mr. Mackenzie where your tooth came out?” Karen Jazinski had knocked once, that summer, on the door of Owen’s cell at E-O; since Julia was with him on the couch, looking with her decisive brunette coloring less like Manet’s Olympia than Goya’s Naked Maja, he couldn’t open the door, and Karen, perhaps sensing the pair of held breaths within, didn’t come knocking again. Trish Oglethorpe, for some odd reason, led the local forces of indignation, and passed by Julia in the supermarket as if she had been a wilting head of lettuce. Roscoe and Imogene Bisbee snubbed the new couple at the Silver Spoon, an overpriced candlelit restaurant in Upper Falls, where Owen and Julia had thought they were safe from recognition, among the faceless tract-dwellers.