Winter hadn’t affected the city too severely. There was a glaze of snow along the highway embankments, but the air was clear, with faint trails of wintery cirrus clouds running down to a powder blue horizon. But it was cold, the kind of cold that made the tires crackle against the blacktop.

She had written down John’s old address in her notebook. The neighborhood was a Levittown, a postwar bungalow suburb, treeless and bleak in the winter light. She located the street—a cul-de-sac—and then the house, a pastel pink box indistinguishable from any of these others. THE WOODWARDS was printed on the mailbox. A sign posted on the front lawn said FOR SALE and a smaller one beside it announced a CONTENTS SALE—SATURDAY FEBRUARY 16.

Today.

Susan allowed the car to drift to a stop.

She didn’t think she would have the courage, but she did: she got out of the car and walked up the driveway and knocked on the door, shivering. She was about to turn away when the door opened a crack and a grey-haired, chunky man peered out.

“Mr. Woodward?”

“Yes?”

She took a breath. “I, uh—I saw the sign—”

“Sale ended at four o’clock,” he said, swinging the door wider, “but you might as well come in. Hardly anybody else showed up.”

Susan stepped inside.

The house had obviously been stripped down for moving. There were blank spaces where there should have been furniture, and curtain rods empty over the windows. It seemed to Susan that James Woodward had been similarly stripped down. He was not as big as she had pictured him; not nearly as imposing. He was a small, barrel-chested man with a fringe of grey hair and big, callused hands. He was friendly but distant, and Susan was careful to pretend an interest in this item or that as he conducted her in and out of these small rooms. What she really wanted was to find some ghost of John or even Benjamin lingering here; but there was nothing like that … only these mute, empty spaces. Coming down the stairs she said, “Is your wife home?” He shook his head. “She died. That’s why I’m moving. I tried looking after this place for a while, but it’s too big for one person.” He opened the basement door. “There’s a few things still stored down here—if you think it’s worth the look.”

“Please,” Susan said.

This was where his workshop had been, though most of the tools had been carried away. Not much left—a battered workbench with curls of pine and cedar still nesting under it; an ancient P.A. amplifier with its tubes pulled. In one shadowy corner, an acoustic guitar.

Susan went to it immediately.

“Oh, that,” Woodward said. “You don’t want that.”

“Maybe I do,” Susan said.

“You know, I sold some guitars earlier. I used to make ’em by hand. Like a hobby I guess you could say. But that one—see, the truss rod’s off true. You know guitars? Well, it means it’ll go off tune and be hard to fix. The action’s a little too high off the frets, too. It’s a bad instrument.”

“How much do you want for it?”

“Say, fifty bucks for the materials? If you’re serious. You play?”

“No,” Susan said. “But I have a friend who does.” She took the money out of her purse.

James Woodward accepted the payment; Susan picked up the guitar. It was heavier than she expected. The strings rang faintly under her fingers.

“I almost hate to sell the damn thing,” Woodward said. He looked past Susan, past these walls. “It’s funny,” he said. “It’s the broken things that stay on your mind. Broken, bent, half-made or bad-made. You take them to the grave with you.”

She climbed off the plane in Toronto weary and dazed, collected her suitcase and the guitar from the baggage carousel. Dr. Kyriakides was waiting in the crowded space beyond the customs checkpoint.

She understood by his hollow smile that something was wrong. She followed him up to the carpark and loaded her baggage into the trunk of the Honda, daunted by his silence.

“John is back,” he said finally.

“That’s good,” Susan responded.

Dr. Kyriakides opened the car door for her. Ever the European gentleman.

“But Amelie is missing,” he said.

It was a long drive back to the house. A snowstorm had settled in from the west and wasn’t leaving; the car radio warned people to stay off the roads. Susan was grateful that Dr. Kyriakides had been able to maneuver the Honda all the way to the airport; she was even more grateful that she was able to drive it back. Visibility had closed in and the road was blanked out north of the city; the headlights probed into a swirling wilderness. For the time, she was too preoccupied with driving to press for details about Amelie.

The weather grew steadily worse, but the tires were good and there wasn’t much traffic and they were back at the house before long. Kyriakides brushed the snow from the car while Susan headed for the kitchen and a hot cup of coffee.

John was there, waiting for her.

It was John—no doubt about it.

He looked up as she came through the door. His expression was somber and utterly focused.

“I need to do two things,” he said. “First, I need to talk to you. There are a lot of things I want to say while I still can.”

Susan nodded solemnly. She was too tired to be shocked by this sudden volley; she simply accepted it. “Second?”

He said, “I mean to find Amelie.”

Susan slept for five dreamless hours between three and eight o’clock in the morning.

She woke to find the window of her room laced with frost. She stood for a moment, touching the icy surface of the glass with one finger and wondering at the intensity of the cold. Outside, the world was a blurred grey-white wilderness. The snow had obscured the driveway. The highway was empty save for a plough inching southward under its strange blue safety light. The sky was dark and the snow was falling steadily. She dressed in the darkness of her room.

She carried her portable Sony tape recorder down the hall to John’s door, raised her hand to knock—and then paused.

John was playing the guitar. She had given him the instrument last night, had explained about the layover in Chicago and the sale at the Woodward house. He had taken the instrument wordlessly, his expression unreadable.

The music came softly through the closed door. He was good, Susan thought. She didn’t recognize the piece—something baroque. Not passionate music but subtle, a sad melody elaborated into a cathedral of notes. She waited until the last arpeggio had faded away.

He put down the guitar when she came through the door, looked questioningly at the tape recorder.

“It’s for me,” she said. “I don’t trust myself to remember.”

He nodded. She felt his sense of urgency: it was like something physical, a third presence in the room. Because of his impending neurological crisis, Susan thought, his “change”—or because of Amelie. Or both.

He’s changed. He’s different.

But she put the thought aside for now.

“Sit down,” John said.

She plugged a cassette into the recorder and switched it on.

All that morning he talked about his childhood.

They skipped breakfast. Twice, Susan paused to change tapes. She was afraid she would miss something. It was a fear John didn’t share, obviously. The words poured out of him like water from a broken jug. A cataract of words.

She understood what he was doing. He had explained it to her last night. These were things he had never said, small but vital fragments of his life, and he was afraid they would slip away uncommunicated. She was not expected to learn these things verbatim or play them back to him—the tape recorder was superfluous. It was the telling that mattered. “Nothing is permanent,” John said. “Everything is volatile. You, me, the world—everything. But it’s like throwing a stone into a pool of water. The stone disappears. But the ripples linger awhile.”