Shooting yourself in the head was, I’d been told, a message suicide, but what kind of message had my father been leaving? I had scoured the house for a note afterward, looked in his drawers and under his pillow, and ended up washing down the stairwell with old rags, determined to erase the only marks he’d left.

I neared my mother’s neighborhood, and a hot wave of dread began to prickle across my spine and back, tiptoeing along my shoulder blades and turning into gooseflesh. I could not explain why, exactly, but I sensed I should not even pass through the place, much less stay the night. I was also tired. It was easier for me to attribute the strange shifts in my body to a forlorn exhaustion-the futility and ruin of the last twenty-four hours taking over my heart, my limbs, my mental firings-than to know I was merely a robot that had gone off the rails and that, after serving its master faithfully for years, had turned back predictably to the place where it was made.

A few of the houses were still dark, waiting for their owners, but most had one or two lights on. There were young couples with children in my mother’s neighborhood, but these were not the same sort of couples who bought the faux manses near Natalie’s house. These were couples who cleaned their own houses and fixed their own leaks. They set aside weekends to replace the rotting shingles or paint their chimneys, trim their trees, or wash their cars. The children helped and were rewarded with ice cream or special TV shows.

I drove by Mrs. Tolliver’s house as I rounded the bend toward my mother’s and Mrs. Leverton’s. There was no light on, and I wondered where Mrs. Tolliver had gone. It had been a summer night, I remembered, when Mr. Tolliver, screaming at her from his position on the lawn, suddenly clutched his chest.

“He fell over like a pillar of salt,” my mother said. “Blam! The sprinkler shifted before anyone had thought to shut it off. They drove him to the hospital sopping wet.”

I had seen Mrs. Tolliver six months later, when I was home visiting my parents with Emily and Jake. We were shopping in the Acme. She lit up at the sight of Emily.

“How wonderful!” she said. She was animated in a way I hadn’t remembered. Overwhelmed to see me in the deli aisle, she had gestured with a package of boneless chicken in her hand.

I asked after her, her house, how she was feeling.

“It’s too late for me,” she said at some point. “Not you. It’s not too late for you.” She looked at Jake and smiled, but the smile contained a wince, as if she were afraid of being hit.

I was lost in thoughts of Mrs. Tolliver when I saw him through his giant, still-uncurtained window. Mr. Forrest sat in his front room, as he always had, for all the world to see. I pulled the car over to the side of the road opposite him. I was not even aware of what was to my right-a house, a horizon, or the pope out for a stroll.

I lowered the window and let the night air of my old neighborhood flood in. I breathed. I smelled the scent of the lawns and the asphalt. And I heard faint music. It was coming from Mr. Forrest’s; he was listening to Bartók.

He and my mother had argued in the months following my father’s death. There had been no funeral, and Mr. Forrest found the omission unforgivable; he didn’t care whether she could leave the house or not. “And why, Helen,” he had asked me, “were those guns allowed to remain?”

Without reflection, I got out of my car and hurried across the road and up the sloped concrete walk. He had never favored vegetation, and decades on there was barely a bush or branch on his lawn. Two chubby untamed boxwoods were the exceptions. They stood on either side of his stoop.

But I did not make it there. Halfway up the path, I stopped to watch. There was something in Mr. Forrest’s lap-an animal-and he was petting it. I thought for a moment about all of his dogs, but then I realized that it was Bad Boy, the marmalade tom. He was upside down in Mr. Forrest’s lap, allowing himself to be scratched.

How smart Mr. Forrest had been, I thought, how incredibly smart to remain alone as he had.

My knees felt as if they were made from hollow glass, and I knew I might collapse, but I did not move.

I had no doubt why my father had liked him; Mr. Forrest had shared the burden of my mother. He had a way of revealing her beauty to her that she trusted. His conversation was like a sparkling cocktail held aloft. In his eyes, my mother had been the neglected Garbo still in her slip, forever young, unspent.

I wondered if he would look up and see me standing on the path. Over the fireplace, I saw the painting he had bought from Julia Fusk. Finished the same year she’d painted me, the portrait Mr. Forrest had chosen was of a clothed woman whose face you could see. With her eyes shut, she was leaning to the left and pointing down toward the mantel, where my glance now fell. Spaced along it were three almost-perfect wooden globes made by my father. He had become obsessed with how these anonymous globes represented the finest woodwork he had ever done. Sitting in his workshop in the last few years of his life, while I gave birth to children and went to wine-and-cheese parties as Jake’s wife, my father would sand these spheres for hours. He came in at night only after he saw the lights in the house go off. He would step quietly across the backyard and into the kitchen, climbing the steep wooden steps to his room, where the guns were kept.

I had blamed my mother. I had blamed her for everything. It was easy. She was crazy-“mentally ill,” Mr. Forrest had said.

For years I had done my penance for blaming someone who was essentially helpless. I had warmed baby food and fed it to her with long pink spoons pilfered from Baskin-Robbins. I had carted her to doctors’ appointments, first with blankets and then towels to hide the world from her. I had even stood and watched her drop my grandchild.

I would not disturb Mr. Forrest; I would not ask him for money or confess my sins to him. I would leave him with his portrait, with his spherical pieces of wood, and with Bad Boy, who had scratched my mother’s cheek.

I turned and regained the sidewalk, walked to the car in order to fetch my purse. I could not bring myself to get back in the car. I could not imagine the sound of the engine. It would destroy the music I heard and the hush of the dark, abandoned lawns. I took the keys out of the ignition and walked around to the other side. I would leave them in the glove box.

I reached my hand inside the open window on the passenger side and quickly opened and closed the glove box, tucking Hamish’s keys away. I grabbed my purse. From braid to bullets, I thought. How this would have satisfied my ill-fated therapist. He would delight in the alliteration until I would want to smack him silly. Perhaps I would give him a call sometime. A little ring-a-ling from hell.

I heard the Bartók go silent. I placed the purse firmly on my shoulder. I would walk to Mrs. Leverton’s, let myself in, and-was it possible?-calmly shoot myself.

As I stood, I noticed that Mr. Forrest had shut off his lights. I saw Bad Boy bounding across the lawn and heard the front door close. I turned and walked at what I considered a normal pace, down to the end of the block.

I did not look at my mother’s house-never my father’s, though it had been his earnings that had paid for it. His earnings that had set me up, allowed me to raise two daughters on live modeling and occasional secretarial work. I had moved, married, had children, my own home, a job, but just like my father, I had seen the yawning tide that was my mother’s need and fallen in. Jake would say I had dived in, that it had been my choice to return.

Mental illness had the unique ability to metastasize across the generations. Would it be Sarah? Would it be tiny Leo? Sarah seemed like the most obvious candidate, but that didn’t mean much. And always, always, it had been left undiscussed, as if the geographical cure that Emily had taken would be enough. But I had tried that myself. I thought Madison, Wisconsin, would mean escape, but it did not. Nor did marriage or motherhood. Or murder.