She looked under the “Recordings” category. Annie was sure that she and Graham had CDs of at least two of the pieces in the quartet’s repertoire. She went downstairs and found a bottle of white wine in the refrigerator. She opened it with Graham’s fancy corkscrew and poured herself a glass. Then, carrying the wine, she went into the living room. She opened the CD cupboard.

Graham had separated the small plastic cases into categories—jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll, classical. Within these categories the CDs were arranged alphabetically, the classical ones by composer, the others by performer. A bookstore man to his core, Annie thought. She felt a pulse of urgent, sorrowful affection for him.

They did have one of the pieces—a quartet by Schumann, in this case performed by members of the Emerson String Quartet with Menahem Pressler on the piano. Annie put it on, conscious as she did this that she hadn’t listened to music since before Graham died. She turned off the lamp.

She sat in the dark room in Graham’s old chair and listened with great attentiveness for ten minutes or so. But then she found herself overtaken by memories. Memories of Sofie again, of her childhood with Sofie—of the large, gracious apartment, the vast green lake stretched to the horizon beyond the windows, the sense of admiration mingled with sadness on her part, something she was aware of feeling even now, listening—the retroactive wish for some parallel sense of beauty, of purpose, on her part. Even now, she thought. Sad indeed.

She and Sofie had drifted apart after elementary school. Sofie went to a private high school on the North Side that focused on the arts; Annie went to the Laboratory High School, connected to the university. They saw each other a few times, but there was less and less to talk about. Annie was busy anyway, and Sofie even more so, with practice and performances in addition to the heavy standard course load of the school.

But the residue of that friendship lingered for Annie, lingered especially in the newly sharp eye with which she regarded her own family—that gift that often comes in adolescence, when you’re suddenly old enough to be conscious of how another family works, of the possibility of other rules, other ways of living, from those you grew up with. The gift that can open a window, a door, into the world. Let air in.

Let you out.

As this gift was at work in Annie, she slowly came to understand that what she had been feeling in her family for a long time was I don’t belong here. That had helped to free her, to end her puzzlement about her family and her place in it. It had opened up her life, though she hadn’t known for years what that would mean for her.

It lingered too in the sense she had that she wanted a life that felt as impelled by beauty as Sofie’s was, as Sofie’s mother’s had apparently been. It lingered in the sense that she might be able to.

The same sense that her first husband, Alan, had specialized in mocking, but which had caused his parents to give her as a wedding present a camera. The camera with which she shot her first serious photographs, the camera that led her to the courses she took, to the growing ambition that did, indeed, push her out into the world.

When the achingly beautiful andante began now in the dark of the living room, Annie came back to the music and listened intently through to the ending, tears in her eyes, tears for Graham’s death, yes, and for her aloneness, but also for the beautiful yearning sound singing in the big room. In herself.

Music. Why hadn’t she thought of it earlier?

18

Week after week, the summer passed. Time itself felt thick to Annie, as if it were a fog she was living in. She would find herself standing someplace in the house—in front of the half-empty closet or in Graham’s study or facing the bathroom mirror or at the kitchen windows, looking out—and have no idea what impulse had brought her there, or how long before.

She saw Edith often, sitting with her in her large, airy front parlor on Avon Hill; and Frieda a bit less. She spent a day up in Newburyport with Natalie, walking up and down the dunes on Plum Island, Natalie pointing out the birds they saw. She talked on the phone to Sarah, to Lucas. Friends came by. She went once again to Vermont for a few days, but quickly grew restless there, too. Nothing seemed to matter, really. Even the news that the show had done well, that it had had a quick mention in the Globe, singled out in a summary of local shows, didn’t awaken her interest.

She waited for evening, when, after a minimal dinner, she allowed herself several glasses of wine while she sat listening to music. Often it was classical—she had bought one version or another of all of the music Sofie had listed on her website as being in her repertoire—but she listened also to the jazz she and Graham had assembled over the years. And to the box of CDs that Sarah had sent her when she told Sarah that listening to music was one of the few things she actually took pleasure in at this point. Then it would be nine thirty or so, and she’d let herself go to bed.

Bed, where, if she wasn’t swamped by memories of Graham—of the happy moments, of the shared sorrows, of the occasional argument, of the details (over and over) of the morning she found him dead—she fell into a leaden sleep.

One night, listening to a CD of Sofie’s, she was thinking again of the shape of their friendship, the elements she remembered of it—Sofie’s mother playing the piano in the afternoons, the lake behind the windows, Sofie herself, her eyes closed as she moved the bow over the cello, almost embarrassingly lost in what she was creating.

She remembered the differences—and the distance—between their two homes. The long walk in either direction.

She was tracing that walk in her mind—now I go into the tunnel under the train tracks, now I cross Stony Island to Jackson Park—when she was stopped by a sudden image, another memory. The memory of the bridle path in Jackson Park, the bridle path that was part of the shortcut through the park. And the man there. The man in the park, on the bridle path, when she was walking with Sofie.

Jackson Park was wild and lush at that time, so overgrown that when you stepped into it from the sidewalk, you entered an entirely different world, thick with green.

The bridle path cut through this thick growth perhaps only ten feet in from the sidewalk, but completely hidden from it. She had thought of it then as a glade—in her childhood, the word meant exactly that open, sunlit space to her, with the dense green pushing in from both sides. Annie and one or another of her older siblings often cut through the undergrowth and across that bridle path to get to The Museum of Science and Industry or to the lagoon behind the museum, where you could wade in the murky waters and catch pollywogs, or to the bridge over the Outer Drive that led to the Fifty-Seventh Street beach.

By the time Sarah went to college at the University of Chicago, the park had been completely cleared; Annie had noted that when she was driving around on her visits. They’d civilized it, they’d removed all the underbrush to make a kind of grassy plain between Stony Island Avenue and The Museum of Science and Industry. A plain, studded with large, isolated trees here and there, the lake rising beyond it.

But in her youth—and in Sofie’s youth—it was different. It was secret. Special.

And one day, when she was walking Sofie partway home, they met a man there. A man, a young man in blue jeans. He had stopped them and asked them to watch the path for a moment for him. He must have seen us on the sidewalk when we turned in, she thought, two delicious little girls. He must have followed us. He’d stepped a few yards away then, Annie remembered, and turned his back to them. They heard the splash of his urine on the undergrowth and looked at each other, trying to contain their laughter. It was naughty. It was funny.

When he came back, he squatted in front of them, talking steadily, asking questions— Where did they live? What were they doing on the bridle path? Had they been to the museum? What exhibits did they like there? They had both been answering at first, but Sofie had stopped, Annie realized. She was looking down, not at the man’s face. Annie had looked then too, she’d looked where Sofie was looking, and she saw that the man’s penis was out of his pants, that he had an erection.

Annie had seen penises before, because she had brothers. They were careless about their bodies, and there was only one bathroom on the bedroom floor of their house—you couldn’t help catching a glimpse every now and then. And one of the brothers—Glen, the older—used to like to startle his sisters when they were small by unzipping his pants and waving his penis around. The girls would run away, screaming.

But this was different, this strange, rubbery-looking thing.