“I can’t talk about strength. What strength?”

“That’s what I saw and felt. You were the one in the tower but I was the berserk. Now, damn it, I don’t know.”

After a silence he said, “I don’t know either,” and they laughed.

“I used to watch you sleep. I know how strange that sounds. But it wasn’t strange. Just by being who you were, being alive and back here with us. I watched you. I felt I knew you in a way I’d never known you before. We were a family. That’s what it was. That’s how we did it.”

“Look, trust me.”

“All right.”

“I’m not set on doing anything permanent,” he said. “I go away a while, come back. I’m not about to disappear. Not about to do anything drastic. I’m here now and I’ll be back. You want me back. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Go away, come back. Simple as that.”

“There’s money coming,” she said. “The sale is almost complete.”

“Money coming.”

“Yes,” she said.

He’d helped work out details of the transaction concerning her mother’s apartment. He’d read contracts, made adjustments and e-mailed instructions from a casino on some Indian reservation where a tournament was in progress.

“Money coming,” he said again. “The kid’s education. Now through college, eleven or twelve years, criminal sums of money. But that’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying we can afford a major loss I might suffer in the card rooms. This won’t happen.”

“If you believe it, I believe it.”

“Hasn’t happened and it won’t,” he said.

“What about Paris? Will that happen?”

“It became Atlantic City. A month from now.”

“How does the warden feel about conjugal visits?”

“You don’t want to be there.”

“I don’t. You’re right,” she said. “Because thinking about it is one thing. Seeing it would put me in depression. People sitting around a table going shuffle shuffle. Week after week. I mean catching planes to go play cards. I mean aside from the absurdity, the total psychotic folly, isn’t there something very sad about this?”

“You said it yourself. Most lives make no sense.”

“But isn’t it demoralizing? Doesn’t it wear you down? It must eat away your spirit. I mean I was watching on TV last night. Like a séance in hell. Tick tock tick tock. What happens after months of this? Or years. Who do you become?”

He looked at her and nodded as if he agreed and then kept nodding, taking the gesture to another level, a kind of deep sleep, a narcolepsy, eyes open, mind shut down.

There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not.

When she received a summons for jury service some months earlier and reported to the United States District Court with five hundred other potential jurors and learned that the trial for which they’d been assembled concerned a lawyer accused of aiding the cause of terrorism, she filled out the forty-five-page questionnaire with truths, half-truths and heartfelt lies.

For some time before that day she’d been offered books to edit on terrorism and related subjects. Every subject seemed related. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so desperate to work on such books during the weeks and months when she could not sleep and there were songs of desert mystics in the hallway.

The trial was now in progress but she didn’t follow it in the newspaper. She’d been Juror Number 121, excused from serving on the basis of her written responses. She didn’t know whether it was the true answers or the lies that had made this happen.

She knew that the lawyer, an American woman, was associated with a radical Muslim cleric who was serving a life sentence for terrorist activity. She knew that the man was blind. This was common knowledge. He was the Blind Sheik. But she didn’t know the details of the charges made against the lawyer because she wasn’t reading the stories in the newspaper.

She was editing a book on early polar exploration and another on late Renaissance art and she was counting down from one hundred by sevens.

Died by his own hand.

For nineteen years, since he fired the shot that killed him, she’d said these words to herself periodically, in memoriam, beautiful words that had an archaic grain, Middle English, Old Norse. She imagined the words engraved on an old slant tombstone in a neglected churchyard somewhere in New England.

The grandparents hold sacred office. They’re the ones with the deepest memories. But the grandparents are nearly all gone. Justin has only one now, his father’s father, disinclined to travel, a man whose memories have settled into the tight circuit of his days, beyond easy radius of the child. The child is yet to grow into the deep shadow of his own memories. She herself, mother-daughter, is somewhere midway in the series, knowing that one memory at least is inescapably secure, the day that has marked her awareness of who she is and how she lives.

Her father wasn’t buried in a windy churchyard under bare trees. Jack was in a marble vault high on a wall in a mausoleum complex outside Boston with several hundred others, all chambered in tiers, floor to ceiling.

She came across the obituary late one night, looking at a newspaper that was six days old.

They die every day, Keith said once. There’s no news in that.

He was back in Las Vegas now and she was in bed, flipping the pages, reading the obits. The force of this obituary did not register at once. A man named David Janiak, 39. The account of his life and death was brief and sketchy, written in haste to make a deadline, she thought. She thought there would be a complete report in the paper of the following day. There was no photograph, not of the man and not of the acts that had made him, for a time, a notorious figure. These acts were noted in a single sentence, pointing out that he was the performance artist known as Falling Man.

She let the paper slip to the floor and turned off the light. She lay in bed, head propped on a couple of pillows. A car alarm began to sound down the street. She reached back for the pillow nearest her and dropped it on top of the newspaper and then lay back, breathing evenly, eyes still open. After a while she closed her eyes. Sleep was out there somewhere over the curve of the earth.

She waited for the car alarm to stop. When it stopped she turned on the light and got out of bed and went to the living room. There was a stack of old newspapers in a wicker basket. She looked for the five-day-old paper, which was the paper of the following day, but could not find it, whole or part, read or unread. She sat in the chair next to the basket waiting for something to happen or stop happening, a noise, a drone, an appliance, before she went to the computer in the next room.

The advanced search took no time. There he was, David Janiak, in pictures and print.

Dangling from the balcony of an apartment building on Central Park West.

Suspended from the roof of a loft building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Dangling from the flies at Carnegie Hall during a concert, string section scattered.

Dangling over the East River from the Queensboro Bridge.

Sitting in the back seat of a police car.

Standing on the rail of a terrace.

Dangling from the bell tower of a church in the Bronx.

Dead at 39, apparently of natural causes.

He’d been arrested at various times for criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct. He’d been beaten by a group of men outside a bar in Queens.

She clicked forward to the transcript of a panel discussion at the New School. Falling Man as Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror.

She read a few remarks, then stopped reading. She clicked forward to entries in Russian and other Slavic languages. She stared into the keyboard for a time.