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had closed the window to the wind, I turned back to her.
    “Okay, now what was it that you said?”
    “Hey,” she said quietly.
    She looked like she crawled out of a dream, wild girl in the white dress, bra-less and barefoot. I thought at any moment she’d detach herself from her limbs and metamorphose into a vine sticking straight out of my wall.
    I moved toward my door and locked it, slowly so that the latch didn’t click.
    “Why are you here?” I asked.
    “You stopped seeing me,” she said. She looked at the ground when she spoke this, and her hair fell over her eyes.
    “I thought you didn’t like me.”
    “I like you,” she said.
    I sat down on the edge of the bed. I spoke softly, afraid that any moment my mother or father would knock on my door.
    “I couldn’t tell,” I said.
    “You’re smart, and kind,” she said, “and you have eyes like an owl that once broke his wings in my backyard and died in my arms. And when you touch me it’s not like the other boys touch me. You touch me like, I don’t know, like good philosophy.”
    I continued to sit on the edge of the bed, unable to move. I opened my mouth to speak, but it was as if it was stuffed with leaves - I couldn’t speak. This was the most I’d ever heard June say.
    She crossed the room toward me and when she took my head in her hands her fingers shook as if I was an electric fence.
    “Don’t stop seeing me,” she said.
    She kissed me. Her white dress glowed with the ferocity of an atomic bomb.
    “I won’t,” I said. “Okay, I won’t.”
    Two years later I married her in the summer underneath the persimmon trees, and she wore the same white dress as the night she’d climbed through my window. We moved into a small house on the edge of the woods. Neither of us went to college; I took up an apprenticeship as an electrician, she became a sales associate at a small boutique in the center of town.
    Though her neurosis hadn’t yet begun, I still saw the seed of it. Even before we were married, she clung to my hips. She paced the house when she got home from work before I did, oftentimes calling my cell phone three or four times to ask if I was okay if I didn’t come home at the regular time. She often pressed her face against the window to check if I was walking up the drive way, and several times I saw her silhouette like a lost ghost, the flash of the curtain falling down.
    I thought perhaps she needed a distraction.
    “What did you want to be as a child?” I asked her one night at dinner.
    “I don’t know,” she said, always the hesitant introvert.
    In the distance, the neighbor’s dog barked.
    “Does he ever keep quiet?” she said.
    “There wasn’t anything you liked to do?” I asked. “And don’t worry about the dog.”
    “Well,” she said, and she set her fork down, as she always did when she spoke about something that was private and could only be extracted from her with precise words, “I used to draw a lot. And paint. I always liked doing that.”
    “Why did you stop?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, “why does anyone?”
    So I built her a small studio up in the attic, set up an easel, canvases, a box of oil paints, a desk with sketchpads and graphite pencil, a work lamp. I knocked out part of a wall and built her a window. It seemed to work for a little while. She still paced the floor, but at night instead of clinging to me until I finally collapsed to go to bed she’d stay up in the studio for a few hours drawing or painting. Nothing special, flowers or the red barn on the other side of the street, children with button eyes and disproportionate limbs. The important thing was that it kept her occupied for a while.
    But one day I came home and she was nowhere to be found - not standing by the window or pacing the floor or upstairs in the studio. I went down into the kitchen and called her cell phone. No response. I figured she had been caught up at work, so I crossed the kitchen about to open the