They were visiting more frequently, the little girl who was almost my daughter, and her mother who was not quite my wife. Their voices were growing more insistent, the memory of them in this life becoming increasingly polluted by the forms that they had taken in the next. In the beginning, when first they came, I could not tell what they were. I thought them phantasms of grief, a product of my troubled, guilty mind, but gradually they assumed a kind of reality. I did not grow used to their presence, but I learned to accept it. Whether real or imagined, they still symbolized a love that I once felt, and continued to feel. But now they were becoming something different, and their love was whispered through bared teeth.

We will not be forgotten.

All was coming apart around me, and I did not know what to do, so I sat instead among snow and ice on a rotted tree trunk, and willed clocks to stop.

It was warmer than it had been in many days. Rachel was standing outside the church, holding Sam in her arms. Her mother, Joan, was beside her. Our daughter was wrapped in white, her eyes tightly closed, as though she were troubled in her sleep. The sky was clear blue, and the winter sunlight shone coldly upon Black Point. Our friends and neighbors were scattered before us, some talking, smoking. Most had dressed up for the occasion, happy for an excuse to break out some colorful clothes in winter. I nodded greetings to a few people, then joined Rachel and Joan.

As I approached, Sam woke and waved her arms. She yawned, looked blearily about, then decided there was nothing important enough to keep her from another nap. Joan tucked the white shawl under Sam’s chin to keep out the cold. She was a small, stout woman who wore minimal makeup and kept her silver hair cut short against her skull. After meeting her for the first time that morning, Louis had suggested that she was trying to get in touch with her inner lesbian. I advised him to keep those opinions to himself, or else Joan Wolfe would try to get in touch with Louis’s inner gay man by reaching into his chest and tearing his heart out. She and I got on okay, most of the time, but I knew that she worried about the safety of her daughter and her new grandchild, and this translated into a distance between us. For me it was like being within sight of a warm, friendly place that could be reached only by traversing a frozen lake. I accepted that Joan had cause to feel concerned because of things that had happened in the past, but that didn’t make her implicit disapproval of me any easier to bear. Still, compared to my relations with Rachel’s father, Joan and I were bosom buddies. Frank Wolfe, once he had a couple of drinks inside him, felt compelled to end most of our encounters with the words “You know, if anything ever happens to my daughter…”

Rachel was wearing a light blue dress, plain and unadorned. There were wrinkles on the back of the dress, and a thread hung loose from the seam. She looked tired and distracted.

“I can take her, if you like,” I said.

“No, she’s fine.”

The words came out too quickly. I felt like I’d been pushed hard in the chest and forced to take a step back. I looked at Joan. After a couple of seconds, she moved away and went to join Rachel’s younger sister, Pam, who was smoking a cigarette and flirting with a group of admiring locals.

“I know she is,” I said quietly. “It’s you I’m concerned about.”

Rachel leaned against me for a moment, then, almost as if she were counting the seconds until she could put space between us once more, broke the contact.

“I just want this to be done,” she said. “I want all of these people to be gone.”

We hadn’t invited very many people to the christening. Angel and Louis were present, of course, and Walter and Lee Cole had come up from New York. Apart from them, the bulk of the little group was made up of Rachel’s immediate family and some of our friends from Portland and Scarborough. All told, there were twenty-five or thirty people present, no more, and most would come back to our house after the ceremony. Usually, Rachel would have reveled in such company, but since Sam’s birth she had grown increasingly insular, withdrawing even from me. I tried to recall the early days of Jennifer’s life, before she and her mother were taken from me, and although Jennifer had been as raucous as Sam was quiet, I could not remember encountering the kind of difficulties that now troubled Rachel and me. True, it was natural that Sam should be the focus of Rachel’s energy and attention. I tried to help her in every way that I could, and had cut back on my work so that I could take on some of the burden of caring for her and give Rachel a little time to herself, if she chose. Instead, she seemed almost to resent my presence, and with the arrival of Angel and Louis that morning it appeared that the tension between us had increased exponentially.

“I can tell them you’re feeling ill,” I said. “You could just take Sam upstairs to our room later and get away from everyone. They’ll understand.”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. I want them gone. Do you understand?”

And in truth, I did not, not then.

The woman arrived at the auto shop early that morning. It stood on the verge of an area that, if it was not quite gentrified, then at least was no longer mugging the gentry. She had taken the subway to Queens and been forced to change trains twice, having mistaken the number of the subway line. The streets were quieter today, although she still could see little beauty in this place. There was bruising to her face, and her left eye hurt every time she blinked.

After the young man had struck her, she had taken a moment to recover her composure against the wall of an alleyway. It was not the first time that a man had raised his hand to her, but never before had she endured a blow from a stranger, and one half her age. The experience left her humiliated and angry, and in the minutes that followed she wished, perhaps for the first time ever, that Louis were near at that moment, that she could reach out and tell him what had occurred and watch as he humiliated the pimp in turn. In the darkness of the alleyway, she placed her hands on her knees and lowered her head. She felt like she was about to vomit. Her hands were shaking, and there was a sheen of sweat upon her face. She closed her eyes and began to pray until the feelings of rage went away, and as they departed her hands grew still, and her skin became cool once again.

She heard a woman moan close by, and a man spoke harsh words to her. She looked to her right and saw shapes moving rhythmically beside some discarded trash bags. Cars drifted slowly by, their windows lowered, the drivers’ faces rendered cruel and hungry by streetlights and headlamps. A tall white girl teetered on pink heels, her body barely concealed by white lingerie. Beside her, a black woman leaned against the hood of a car, her hands splayed upon the metal, her buttocks raised to attract the attention of passing men. Close by, the rhythmic thrusting grew faster, and the woman’s moans increased in pitch, false and empty, before finally fading entirely. Seconds later, she heard footsteps. The man emerged from the shadows first. He was young and white, and well dressed. His tie was askew, and he was running his hands through his hair to tidy it after his exertions. She smelled alcohol and a trace of cheap perfume. He barely glanced at the woman against the wall as he turned onto the street.

He was followed, after a time, by a little white girl. She looked barely old enough to drive a car, yet here she was, dressed in a black miniskirt and a cutoff top, her heels adding two inches to her diminutive stature, her dark hair cut in a bob, and her delicate features obscured by crudely applied cosmetics. She seemed to be having trouble walking, as though she were in some pain. She had almost passed the black woman by when a hand reached out, not touching her, merely imploring her to stop.