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antiseptic ER. His skin was the color of oolong tea, his long, tightly coiled hair was held back with a bright orange bandanna. His name tag read O. Smith.
    “Is he likely to regain consciousness, Mr. Smith?” I asked.
    “Not with all the painkillers I just gave him, darling. And if he does, he won’t be making much sense. You might as well get some rest.” He spoke as if he were used to people doing what he said, but I shook my head.
    “I’ll stay here,” I said. “I don’t want him waking up alone.”
    After an hour or so my father was admitted to a room. There was an empty bed that O. Smith said I was welcome to lie down in, but I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid that if I didn’t keep watch over my father, he might slip away. So I sat in the straight-backed chair between my father’s bed and a window that faced Seventh Avenue. The sky was dark over the buildings across the street, but their topmost windows reflected the pearl gray light of dawn in the east. Yesterday’s rain had finally stopped. The air looked clear and cold. Steam rose from the grates in the street in sinuous plumes. I had grown up thinking that every city was festooned with the floating white puffs until my father explained that New York had an unusual system of steam pipes beneath the streets that predated the use of electricity.
    “I thought the city was floating on a cloud the first time I sawit,” Roman had told me when he described sailing into New York Harbor in the late 1940s. “I thought I was dreaming.”
    I had felt as a child that the steam rising from the grates and manholes was proof that there was another world below the surface of this one. Perhaps it was the world my mother talked about when she told me bedtime stories—the Summer Country, she called it, or the Fair Land, a place where it was always high summer but every flower that bloomed from early spring to late fall bloomed there all year long. A place where pure springs bubbled up from deep within the earth and spread over the green meadows like white lace and then gathered in a pool on which swans glided. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of the Summer Country in the green shimmer at the end of a wooded path, she told me, or in the reflection of a mountain pool, or even, sometimes, through an open door on a city street where there had been no door before and nothing but smooth stone when you went back for a second look. Because the door to the Summer Country opened only in a glimpse, never in a second look. You could never look for it, but you might slip into it unawares. And then you might spend a day there only to come back and find a score of years had passed in this world and all your friends and family had aged while you remained unchanged.
    “Is that why you never seem to age a day?” my father would say when he heard her telling me this story.
    My mother would laugh, but I believed when I was young that she held the key to that magical place. And I believed that if you watched the shapes the steam made on early winter mornings, you might catch a glimpse of that world—of white-breasted swans gliding on crystal lakes and enchanted steeds stepping out of foamy waves. This morning, though, thewraithlike shapes massing in the shadows of the hospital did not suggest beneficent emissaries from a fairy-tale kingdom. They made me think instead of the shades of the damned rising up out of hell on Judgment Day. I don’t think I’d ever had that reaction to the steam before. It made me wonder if something had changed in the city overnight—or in me.
    “Miss James?” The voice startled me out of my gloomy fantasy. I turned and saw at the foot of my father’s bed the detective who had been at the town house. I hadn’t heard him come in and I wondered if he’d deliberately snuck up on me, but then I dismissed the idea as ridiculous. The man was a New York City police detective, not a Native American pathfinder.
    “Detective Joseph Kiernan, NYPD Art Crime