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playing activity that Thomas, a child prodigy, had invented when he was only two. It was a game the children felt might have disturbed adults, so they never discussed it in front of them.
    During the game Emily would sit quietly on the floor of her bedroom with the door shut, while Thomas sat in a similar position inside his own room. Each would write a question to the other on a sheet of paper. And, without speaking, each would answer the question asked by the other.
    Initially their questions had been simple. Emily might write, “What animal has stripes?” And Thomas, who could read and write at a fifth-grade level then, would scribble, “Zebra.” The accuracy of their answers did not astound either child. Not then. It was, after all, only a game.
    When their mother died, however, they searched their minds for the answers their father refused to give. That was when they played a new variation of Seek, one that frightened them into discontinuing the game. In their separate rooms each child asked what had happened to their mother, and then waited for an answer.
    A few minutes later they compared notes. Both pieces of paper held the same statement, in the identical handwriting: “Mother died in a car crash at the intersection of 10th and Pine.”
    “She’s not coming back,” said Thomas, and he began to cry.
    “I don’t want to play the game anymore,” Emily said. She placed her arms around her brother.
    Three years later came the wedding between her father and Victoria, another dreaded day in Emily’s life.
    Emily envied her brother’s carefree manner of looking at life, and sometimes she resented the good things that fell into his lap. Why hadn’t the caterer discussed Emily’s birthday? She would be fourteen in a month. Almost a woman.

    That evening, Emily lay in bed and thought about the visitor to her house, particularly about the way his eyes, luminous and strange, grated in their sockets. Real or imagined? She couldn’t tell.
    In the quiet of night she heard another sound, a faint buzzing similar to the insect noise shed heard earlier while eavesdropping from the hallway. Now the buzzing was much weaker, but it remained irritatingly present, as if deep within her ears and intransigent. She felt an eye-stinging, muscle-sapping fatigue, but her mind would not release its hold on her consciousness and permit sleep.
    Low light filtered into the room from the edges of the drawn window shade and through her open door. Thomas, in his bedroom across the hall, had begun the familiar, neatly rounded rumbling that tugged him in a somnolent chain deep into his own private dream world. Talking in his sleep, probably. Emily heard only edges of sound, not words.
    The buzzing faded.
    Thomas didn’t have nightmares, or at least he never spoke of any, and secretly Emily envied him. She thought again of the fancy catered party he would have. “Lucky Boy,” she called him frequently, but only in her thoughts. She didn’t wish him any ill will, didn’t even want him to feel guilty for his good fortune. But often she wished that she might have just a little luck of her own to even things out. Why did she have to struggle so hard for the good things that happened to her? All head winds, it seemed, and no tail winds.
    Something grated, like the stranger’s eyeballs in their sockets, and Emily’s heart went out of rhythm for a few seconds.
    Light filled the room from the hallway, and she saw her father’s silhouette in the doorway, identifiable in part from the way his long, curly hair puffed out at the temples.
    “Still awake, Em?” he whispered.
    “Yes, Daddy.”
    “I just got home. Had to work late tonight—open-heart surgery on an ex-baseball player. Rick Sewell. He was a pretty well-known pitcher in his day. Rifle Rick, they called him. He’ll be okay.”
    “I’m glad.”
    Her father moved close by her bed, bringing with him a familiar antiseptic hospital scent. Dr. Patrick Harvey was a surgeon who