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to me it was the treasure of his presence. It was the look of my hero.
    And then I glanced to my mother, and her gaze was fixed upon me, lost and wondering, as if she was trying to place a stranger.
    An hour? I wonder absently to myself, trying to gauge how long I have stood where my sister rests. When I finally rose from the blacktop in the hospital’s parking lot and slid behind the wheel of my car, this is where I came. Without plan or design, or even purpose. I was drawn here, and have stood without word to Katie since arriving. If there is something to say to her I do not know what it is. What can I share with her that, in the place of peace and knowing where she now dwells, she does not already know? Mystery does not vex the dead. Only the living.
    My being here, I suddenly realize, is not about her. It is about me.
    “I’m sorry.” The voice comes from behind me, feminine and abrupt. I turn toward it and see a form wrapped in gray, long coat bundling the stranger against the cold, knit hat pulled low to warm her ears. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”
    It is a moment so unexpected, at this hour, after the events just passed, that I find no words to offer in reply. And in the silence that follows, as my gaze plays over the stranger, I begin to think that this woman is not a stranger at all. This realization rises not because the shape of her face or the timbre of her voice is somehow familiar, but because of the covering upon her head, brownish locks spilling from beneath its multicolored weave. I do not know why this simple article of clothing stands out to me, but it does.
    “You don’t remember me,” she says, her voice edging toward something at that realization. Not sadness. Disappointment, maybe.
    I shake my head, confirming her suspicion.
    She approaches and slips a gloved hand from her coat, eases it toward me. “Christine.”
    That one word, that name, drags me back in time. In that glimpse of the past held in memory I see Katie, and I see this woman with her. Girls then. Teenagers. Friends.
    “Chris Wheeler?”
    She nods, and I put my bare hand in hers and hold it for a moment.
    “No one’s called me Chris in years,” she says in an almost wistful way.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, the exchange, as nascent as it is, seeming to have existed between us for more than the few seconds which it has. It might be the flood of recollection, the familiarity with a relationship from my sister’s past rising once more. Or it might be that the appearance here of one who was close to Katie has put an exclamation point on the impossible happenings spun out over the previous hours.
    “No, there’s no reason to…” She hesitates, her gaze shifting to Katie’s headstone. Lingering on the etched slab of granite for a moment before returning to me. “I’m the one who should apologize. I didn’t think you…” She does a quick verbal backtrack. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”
    “It’s all right,” I tell her, my words bland. Even cold.
    She absorbs my tepid assurance. I feel her hand withdraw from mine. It disappears back into her coat pocket as her gaze narrows down on me. A near grimace of awkward uncertainty. “How are you, Michael?”
    My reply does not come freely or instantly. I can imagine her watching as the words do come, twisting as they rise from somewhere within me. Not lie, not truth. An obliging dismissal of the query. Transparent and fumbling. “Busy. Keeping busy. I just stopped by on my way…”
    There my reply trails off, whatever manufactured meaning I had attempted lost, nothing left to sustain it. My mouth hangs open for a moment, whitish breath jetting silently in the freezing air. I stare at Chris, her own gaze reflected back, puzzled. Concerned.
    “Are you all right?” she asks.
    “I’m okay,” I tell her, discarding outright my attempt at finding some half-truth. “I just came by for some time with my sister.”
    Chris nods. The gesture almost