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out of the house without permission?”
    He stood and watched. He had pale hair, his father’s, and a certain somberness of body, a restraint, his own, that gave him an uncanny discipline in games, in physical play.
    “Did your father give you permission?”
    He stood and watched.
    “What’s so interesting about the view from that room? You can tell me that, can’t you?”
    She leaned against the door, prepared to remain for three, four, five days, in the context of parental body language, or until he answered.
    He moved one hand away from his body, slightly, the hand without the pencil, palm up, and executed the faintest change in facial expression, causing an arched indentation between the chin and lower lip, like an old man’s mute version of the young boy’s opening remark, which was “What?”
     
     
     
    He sat alongside the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge, curled into a gentle fist. He raised the hand without lifting his forearm and kept it in the air for five seconds. He did this ten times.
    It was their term, gentle fist, the rehab center’s term, used in the instruction sheet.
    He found these sessions restorative, four times a day, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations. These were the true countermeasures to the damage he’d suffered in the tower, in the descending chaos. It was not the MRI and not the surgery that brought him closer to well-being. It was this modest home program, the counting of seconds, the counting of repetitions, the times of day he reserved for the exercises, the ice he applied following each set of exercises.
    There were the dead and maimed. His injury was slight but it wasn’t the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke. He sat in deep concentration, working on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling, the forearm flat on the table, the thumb-up configuration in certain setups, the use of the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand. He washed his splint in warm soapy water. He did not adjust his splint without consulting the therapist. He read the instruction sheet. He curled the hand into a gentle fist.
     
     
     
    Jack Glenn, her father, did not want to submit to the long course of senile dementia. He made a couple of phone calls from his cabin in northern New Hampshire and then used an old sporting rifle to kill himself. She did not know the details. She was twenty-two when this happened and did not ask the local police for details. What detail might there be that was not unbearable? But she had to wonder if it was the rifle she knew, the one he’d let her grip and aim, but not fire, the time she’d joined him in the woods, as a fourteen-year-old, in a halfhearted hunt for varmints. She was a city girl and not completely sure what a varmint was but clearly recalled something he’d said to her that day. He liked to talk about the anatomy of racecars, motorcycles, hunting rifles, how things work, and she liked to listen. It was a mark of the distance between them that she listened so eagerly, the perennial miles, the weeks and months.
    He’d hefted the weapon and said to her, “The shorter the barrel, the stronger the muzzle blast.”
    The force of that term, muzzle blast, carried through the years. The news of his death seemed to ride on the arc of those two words. They were awful words but she tried to tell herself he’d done a brave thing. It was way too soon. There was time before the disease took solid hold but Jack was always respectful of nature’s little fuckups and figured the deal was sealed. She wanted to believe that the rifle that killed him was the one he’d braced against her shoulder among the stands of tamarack and spruce in the plunging light of that northern day.
     
     
     
    Martin embraced her in the doorway, gravely. He’d