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tears, and though Harper’s father had never earned anything but curses in this house, though Evelyn couldn’t have uttered his name more than a dozen times in all the years Harper had lived there, she nevertheless folded quietly beneath the weight of emotion.
    Harper rose to his feet. He felt the walls bending around him.
    ‘I don’t understand—’ he started, and then realized that there wasn’t a great deal
to
understand.
    ‘Your father . . . he’s seventy years old and he’s going to die, John.’ Evelyn lifted her hand to her face.
    John Harper took the still-smouldering cigarette from her other hand. He took a drag, inhaled the smoke and held it in his chest. There were tears in his eyes also, and though he could never have explained what emotion he felt he still felt it.
    ‘I have to go out,’ he said, and his voice was strained and unnatural. He sounded like someone else. Sounded like someone lost. ‘I have to go out for a little while Ev, okay? I just have to go out and take a walk . . . just take a walk around the block, you know? Just take a walk around and get some fresh air . . .’ He started to shake his head. ‘I don’t think I understand what’s happening here, Ev. I don’t understand . . .’ His voice trailed away into nothing.
    Evelyn didn’t speak. She was silent, her shoulders moving asshe fought whatever was inside herself. She raised her hand and waved him away.
    Harper felt like he should reach out, take her hand, pull her close, rest her head against his shoulder. He couldn’t, wasn’t able to. He took a step towards the kitchen door, hesitated, and then went through and down the hallway. He struggled to get his shoes on, leaning against the wall, dizzy, disoriented, and then he looked back towards the lighted kitchen, at the lower risers of the stairwell, remembered what he’d felt that night when the thing had happened with Garrett. He shuddered. He couldn’t believe what was taking place in his mind. He opened the front door and went down into the street. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk. He looked down at the cigarette in his hand and then flicked it out into the road. He looked right, and then turned one hundred and eighty degrees. The tears in his eyes were now large enough to break their own surface tension and roll lazily down his cheeks.
    John Michael Harper started walking; didn’t look back at all for a while. Eventually he glanced over his shoulder and, try as he might, he couldn’t stop that awful Wednesday coming right back at him like a tidal wave.
    That December evening in Greenwich Village, in and amongst its sights and sounds, its rhythms and recollections, John Harper paused at the junction of Carmine Street, no more than thirty yards from the steps of Evelyn Sawyer’s house. The house where he’d spent all of twelve years of his life, the house where Evelyn had wrenched every godforsaken bitter, twisted, awkward emotion out of herself and shared it with him. Where she had told him of his father, a man believed to be dead for the last thirty years or more. His mind felt like a balloon at bursting point.
    All of it was here; here in this place.
    Home is where the heart is.
    ‘Go,’ Walt Freiberg said.
    Cathy Hollander reached forward, turned on the ignition.
    ‘He’ll walk to the hospital,’ Freiberg said. ‘Follow him . . . don’t get too close. Let him walk there and we’ll go in after him.’
    Cathy Hollander nodded, pulled the car away from the edge of the sidewalk and started down the street.

FOUR
    Early evening Manhattan, south-west of Greenwich Village.
    Sky like washed-out watercolor smoke. Traffic still swollen and gridlocked, everyone pushing west along Beach and Vestry and Watts, trucks and taxicabs choking up the Holland Tunnel, leaning on their horns like such a thing would make a difference, like New Jersey was all-of-a-sudden the Promised Land and the gates closed at seven.
Make it through the Turnpike and you’re free forever