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The next morning Dr. Lennox’s gray-speckled head appeared from behind Katherine’s office door without warning. “Kate,” he
said brusquely. “A minute?” His smile was painted on, it seemed.

Katherine looked up. “Come in, Greg. Please, sit down.”

The doctor didn’t enter, but stood in the doorway rocking from side to side on his heels. “I just wanted to go over your patient
list quickly and tell you that I’ll be seeing Pilot Airie today, as per your request for more medication.”

“Thank you,” Katherine said.

At this moment I was studying the television. If I could see inside it, I was thinking, perhaps it could see inside me.

“You mentioned that he still has symptoms?”

She cleared her throat. “Yes, paranoid delusions, among other things,” Katherine said. “He thinks his mother has a brain tumor
and that his brother is out to kill him.”

“That qualifies.” The doctor’s smile widened. “Did you speak to his family about this?”

Katherine nodded. “There is some basis in fact, at least. The mother has an optical-nerve problem of some sort, and the brother,
well, you know Eric Airie, don’t you?”

“A very well respected physician.” Dr. Lennox chuckled. “I’m sure he’s not out to kill anyone.” He looked at Katherine squarely.
“I’ll speak to Pilot myself, and if he tells me the same things, I’ll give him a higher dosage of Clozaril. All right?” His
smile was more insincere than usual, she thought.

“Thanks, Greg.”

Dr. Lennox started to turn away from the door, then he hung back, saying, “Out of curiosity,” his whole face a question mark,
“is Pilot talking about his sister at all?”

Katherine was surprised. “You know about that?”

He exhaled through his teeth. “Well, you don’t forget that kind of thing.”

Katherine touched her face. “Pilot thinks Eric killed his sister. It’s another one of his delusions.”

Dr. Lennox entered the room. “Really?”

She nodded. Then she asked, “What really happened with that, anyway?”

“As I remember it,” he said, sitting down on the brown couch, “—and it was a long, long time ago, so I could be misremembering—they
had accused someone, a man they had known, I think, of taking the little girl, but of course they never found her, never found
her body, that is, and eventually they were forced to let the whole thing drop.”

“Awful.”

Dr. Lennox touched his chin. “I have two daughters.”

“I have a sister.”

He shuddered. “I can only imagine what that must have been like.” He got up and started to leave the office, still smiling.

“Could that have contributed to Pilot’s illness?”

“I don’t think so.” Dr. Lennox stood in the doorway again, ready to leave.

“Is it possible at all,” Katherine asked, “that Pilot
isn’t
schizophrenic?”

“How do you mean?”

“Eric said he became unstable after his sister was abducted, but that he was more or less manageable for years after that.
I keep thinking there must have been some kind of trigger for this particular episode. Do you know what I mean? If the first
one was due to his sister disappearing, then
this
one must be—”

“
Maybe
.” Dr. Lennox shrugged. “The trauma of losing his sister could have caused a psychotic episode in childhood, and it may be
connected even now. Or something else entirely.
It doesn’t matter. I would imagine that Pilot had a predisposition to schizophrenia beforehand, and that he’s just extremely
unfortunate. Maybe something else, if it hadn’t been his sister—maybe something else would have set him off.”

“Extremely unfortunate,” Katherine repeated.

“We’ll see how his symptoms change,” Dr. Lennox said dismissively. “Maybe he’ll be fine. Maybe he won’t.”

“I can’t wait to see you.”

Katherine smiled into the car phone. “You’re being ridiculous.” Could he hear it? Could he tell she was smiling?

“Seven?”

She was driving down Sky Highway toward the
enclosure
. “Seven-thirty.”

“At your apartment?”

“That would be fine.”

Expectantly, he said, “Bye.”

“Good-bye,” Katherine said.

And Eric waited for her to hang up.

“Good-bye,” she said again, ashamed of herself, but still smiling. And to Katherine this meant something. That he waited,
it meant something important.

When the nurse came with my medication I was like a goldfish rising up for food. Then I would sink back down to the bottom
of my tank, eyes bulging, gills flexing. When I moved, it was through thick water, my motions slow, inhibited. I found I could
sit in front of the blue Caribbean mural in the lobby and spend more than an hour forming a single thought. At other times
I felt like I had been scooped up in a net, and now I was twitching and flopping on a countertop.

The lights in my room brightened and dimmed unnaturally,
irregularly. In my room there was a finger tapping on the glass, a bright eye looking in.

She had worn her black sleeveless dress—too summery but the only nice thing she had—and fake Jackie Kennedy pearls, and now
Katherine’s arms and shoulders were prickled with goose bumps. This restaurant was far too cold, and Eric seemed far away
across the cream-colored expanse of linen, glimmering candles, and glass. She felt the need to shout, but the hush of this
restaurant, its thick carpeted floors and dim light, compelled her to speak in whispers.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Eric was whispering, too. “You’re thinking this place is too fancy.”

Katherine shrugged.

“I had no idea it was this uptight,” he apologized. “Someone recommended it to me.” A black-jacketed waiter hovered annoyingly,
intrusively nearby. A sentimental aria by Puccini played at low volume over the sound system. Silverware clinked and scraped.
Few people here were under sixty. He started to laugh. “Someone I’ll never take restaurant advice from again.”

Katherine raised her eyebrows. “Who was that?”

“Greg Lennox.”

“Did you tell him you were taking
me
here?”

“No.”

Katherine sighed in relief.

“It’s hard to talk, isn’t it?” Eric said.

“You do seem kind of distant.”

“That’s what my last girlfriend said,” my brother dead-panned.

Katherine laughed.

“She didn’t understand me.”

“What did she do?”

“She was—well, she
is
a dance instructor.”

“A dance instructor.” Katherine put her glass of wine down. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She got up from the table and
walked to the other side, leaning toward Eric. “And when I come back,” she whispered, “I don’t want to talk anymore about
your dance instructor girlfriend or how distant she thought you were.”

“Got it,” my brother said.

She walked briskly away.

In the ladies’ room she immediately looked at herself in the mirror. She looked good, she thought. Her black sleeveless dress
revealed as much cleavage as she was comfortable with, dignified by the fake pearls Michele had bought for her years ago.
Her messy hair was somewhat under control, for once, pulled away from her face in a silly twist. Still, she thought, her nose
was too long and too pointy. Her jaw was just a bit too strong. Her bottom row of teeth wasn’t perfectly straight. Her breasts
uneven, shoulders too wide.

My brother, on the other hand, was so fucking handsome it was like being out with a
GQ
cover model. His blue suit must have cost a million dollars. His watch appeared to be an heirloom from the Rockefellers.
Were those diamond cuff links? He was far, far too handsome for her. The black hair, the blue eyes, the high-school-football-star
face. He was a fucking brain surgeon, Katherine thought to herself. What was he doing with her?

It was a good question. And what was she doing with him was an even better one.

She went into the nearest stall and sat down on the toilet. Someone had written something on the back of the door, but it
had been rubbed off, and Katherine couldn’t make out what it was. She tried to imagine a woman, all dressed up in this elegant
restaurant, coming into the bathroom and writing something profane in the toilet stall. Katherine tried to
imagine the rebellious state of mind this woman must have been in. Squinting, Katherine still couldn’t piece together what
it said.

Back at the mirror, she asked herself if she should reapply her lipstick. No. She’d be eating in a few minutes, anyway. She
looked at her eyes, burning green, and at her skin, veiled in makeup. She had cover-up on, a thin coating over her face, but
beneath it she could still see the fine, tiny wrinkles forming at the corners of her mouth and the edges of her eyes. She
squinted too much, probably, and smiled too much, too, like Dr. Lennox, and she always forgot to apply lotion before she went
to bed.

It didn’t matter to her, but she knew it mattered to other people. It mattered to men, anyway. Especially men like Eric.

When she returned, their plates were on the table.

“Was I gone long?”

“Of course not,” my brother said. “But your food’s here. Don’t let it get cold.”

She had ordered the duck in raspberry. It came with carrots cut into tiny slivers and small, round, peeled potatoes. “Do you
visit the city often?” she asked.

Eric cut into his steak au poivre. “Not as often as I’d like,” he said. “I have symphony tickets, and I try to make it to
at least four or five football games every year. Otherwise, I’m mostly working.”

“Giants or—”

“Jets,” Eric finished.

“Do you like it?”

“The city?”

Katherine cut a small piece of the duck and placed it gently in her mouth. It was undercooked. She had to force herself to
swallow.

“I guess I do,” Eric said. “I really like it out here, though.
I mean, I’m close to my family, what’s left of it, anyway, and I like having access to the country. I have a beach house.”

“And do you like your work?” Katherine asked. “I mean, do you like being a neurosurgeon?” She tried a potato. At least that
was all right.

“I love it.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you love your job?”

Katherine sighed. “I love my field,” she said. “I love psychology. I love to read about it. I love the human mind. My job,
I mean, the actual working, the enormous amount of failures, the sadness, I don’t always love so much.”