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antithetical as he could imagine: compassion. Hence his calling to psychiatry, the meeting place of matter and spirit. He had helped people, so many people, and what more can be said than that? I helped. Tell me what else there is to be said.
    Presently he stood and said, “I meant it. I didn’t want this to happen. This was—”
    “Spiteful,” she said.
    “Weak,” he said.
    “We’ll agree to agree,” she said.
    She held out the butt of her cigarette. He took it into the bathroom and dropped it in the toilet, then stood in front of the mirror and smoothed his hair. Olivia rested her face in her hands.
    “Frightful business,” she said. “This Penrose girl.”
    “Your daughter thinks it was a werewolf.”
    “My daughter has an impressive imagination.” She rolled onto her back into a full-body stretch. “Still … it does hold a terribly erotic sort of appeal. Being hunted down and devoured by some savage brute. It’s enough to give one the shivers.”
    He shut off the bathroom light and went to the door. She made no move to cover herself.
    “I meant it, Olivia,” he said.
    She smiled wistfully. “What makes you think I don’t know that?”
    *   *   *
    On the third Saturday of October Roman gave Letha and a few friends a ride home from the movies. By now the agitation over Brooke Bluebell had settled. There was no target to which blame could be nailed, no face to the outrage, nothing to be done except the handful of hunters who attempted to track the creature that had left a ghostly lack of trace, nothing to be said except how senseless, utterly senseless it was, and how it just went to show you. Leaving unspoken what was nonetheless agreed: at least she wasn’t from here.
    Once it was just the two of them left in the car Roman produced from his blazer the flask of vodka from which he had been taking slugs during the movie and helped himself to another, then held it decisively in Letha’s face. She’d been waving it away all evening with what he considered an appalling lapse in manners. She made no move to take it so he gave it a shake in case it had somehow escaped her attention.
    She held up her arms in an X and told him to get over it.
    “Since when?” he said.
    “Since get over it,” she said.
    Growing up, Roman and Letha had seen almost nothing of each other; there had been no formal meeting between the branches of their family since the death of Roman’s father and the two of them did not have regular contact before high school. Letha had gone up till then to a private Episcopalian academy but had found that the elitism made her bones ache: Roman did not seriously consider any of the prep schools it would have been logical for someone like him to attend for the simple and unthinkable reason it would have required living away from home. So when they did finally indulge their mutual curiosity it was with the bond of blood but none of the familiarity. Letha was a small and sandy blond girl with distinctively idiosyncratic features that were as far from pretty in the conventional sense as they were from homely, and where Roman was mercurial, Letha was mystical. She possessed a kind of half-step-removed sense of discovery as though she passed through life having just woken from a successful nap. Naturally this polarity drew them only closer—a fact that filled her father with no small disquiet.
    Roman made a wounded face. “Have a drink like a civilized person,” he said.
    “Watch the road,” she said.
    Roman merged left onto 443. They entered the mouth of a wooded passage between two hills, and dark branches from either side made a trellis overhead.
    “Don’t be uncivilized,” he said.
    “Can we drop it?” she said.
    “We can drop it when you stop being a See You Next Tuesday and have a drink.”
    “Roman, drop it.”
    “What, are you pregnant or something?” he said.
    She said nothing. He looked at her.
    “Shut up,” he said.
    She nervously smoothed her hair.
    “Shut your