They got off at my station, leaning out over the platform as the train slowed down, so that I automatically reached over and took the smaller one by the shoulders. She ignored me and began screaming: “There he is! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” As we got off, I heard the older one whisper to her mother, “Mommy, what’s the matter with that lady?”

By the time the cab dropped me off in front of the church I had regained my composure. Standing at the back of the chapel, I spotted Mel in a pew toward the back. When I slid in beside him he smiled, took my hand, and gave it a squeeze. He was wearing a pale gray linen suit—I hadn’t known he owned a suit—and the sapphire stud in his ear. The white cuffs of his shirt looked so soft and spotless I wanted to stroke them. Unlike me, he seemed perfectly at home in church. His parents were strict Roman Catholics. He’d told me once that he still felt guilty using condoms.

I didn’t recognize the woman on his other side until she leaned and mouthed “Hi” and I realized with a shock that it was Lillith. She had gained at least twenty-five pounds, had her hair up in a tortoiseshell clip, and was wearing gold shell earrings, all of which gave her an almost matronly look. But her wrists and ankles and those tiny feet in their navy pumps were just as breakably delicate as I’d remembered.

My main feeling about the service was that it had little to do with the Douglas I had known. The old Episcopal chapel, chilly enough to make you shiver although it was over eighty degrees outside, the friends and relatives with their long faces that seemed designed for mourning, the dark burnished coffin with brass handles like furniture, covered with sprays of white lilies, like Easter. Subdued, conservative, in the best of taste—everything Douglas would have loathed. I tried to remember if my father’s coffin had had flowers. Somehow I thought so, but I, who had such an eye for detail, couldn’t conjure the scene up in my mind.

The minister kept calling Douglas “this young man,” which made me wonder if the guy had even known him. “Let not this young man’s sufferings have been in vain.” I thought about that night in the hallway when Douglas had dragged me into the phone booth, the smell and feel of him, which was not so different from other boys after all. Then I remembered my last session with Valeric, when I’d told her about Fran and my irrational disappointment that it was not me she had fallen in love with. My shrink had said very gently: “Sally, there is caring and attention in this world that is not sexual.”

I looked for family members and finally recognized Douglas’s Jack Lemmon look-alike father in front, dressed in banker’s dark blue. He seemed terribly pious, hunching down low for the prayers and staring blankly ahead the rest of the time. There were two dark-complected women in the same pew who matched the description of his mother, elegant, he’d sneered to us in group, so fucking elegant you could eat whipped cream off her asshole.

Family was fatal but they created you after all. Who would I be if it hadn’t been for Monkey King, if I didn’t have his breadth and bones and blood, if he hadn’t made his mark on me? It was useless to try to imagine how things would have turned out had I been born to another family, not only useless but impossible. I was what I had come from. When I had tried to leave I’d ended up in other families that would define me in different ways—my friends at boarding school, Carey, my group at Willowridge, Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard. I was destined to leave them all and at the same time never to leave. There was no escape, except for that one I had tried to take, that Douglas had succeeded in taking.

I imagined him planning this, giving his father’s credit card number to reserve the cabin, packing the bear rifle into a duffel, his only luggage. On the bus down, sitting alone because no one dared take the seat beside him, not caring that people shunned him, because he was aiming so precisely now, aiming past them to the end.

One of the dark women got up to read the Twenty-third Psalm.

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil

I was thinking of a painting in progress, red with violet in it, the strokes as sinuous as the cold flames of hell, if I believed in such a place. But I didn’t, and not in heaven either.

The minister said: “Let us say a silent prayer for the soul of Douglas Abercrombie and for all those dearly departed.”

Although I could not pray for Monkey King, I could pray for my father. And while I was sitting there I thought of the others to whom I’d never had a chance to say good-bye: Nai-nai, Darcy, soon Uncle Richard, and of course, as Hopkins said, myself. Sealy. It is Margaret you mourn for.

Douglas’s mother turned out to be the woman who’d read the psalm. She stood beside his father in the back of the church as we filed past to offer our condolences. “A tragedy,” I kept hearing. I supposed there were a limited number of things to say in a situation like this, and Douglas’s life, after all, had been so short. I tried hard to think of a correct remark. Had any of the mourners at Daddy’s funeral been as ill at ease as me?

When our turn came Mel spoke for all three of us. “We knew your son at Willowridge. We’re all so sorry.” For all the father knew we could have been staff. I could see that Mel, as well as being comfortable in church, was familiar with the rituals of death. That was one of the advantages of coming from a large family.

Douglas’s father extended his hand to each of us in turn, his grip firm but clammy. His mother’s hand was limp and warm and lotiony and she barely looked at us. I could smell her perfume.

“Cold bitch,” Mel said when we were outside.

“What do we want to do now?” I asked. It was so strange, the three of us standing there in the sunlight of this lovely woodsy town, stranger than it had been first seeing Mel in Florida.

Lillith shaded her hand over her eyes and said, “I’ve got to be getting back. I only have a two-hour pass.” I still couldn’t get over her plumpness. It was as if she were a different person.

“We’ll drop you off at the train station,” Mel said. The teal Oldsmobile was around the back, in the church parking lot. “Sorry about this old heap,” he said to me, as if I’d never seen it before, as if we hadn’t logged hours in it together. “Someday I’ll get a silver Triumph.”

“Don’t,” I said.

Because she was getting out first Lillith insisted that I take the front seat, and I had to crane my head around to look at her.

“Well,” Lillith said. “He made it.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. I knew what she meant. Douglas had made it where we had failed. I had tried only once, she had tried at least once a year since she’d hit puberty.

“That was bizarre,” I said. “The ceremony, I mean. Meeting his family.”

Lillith said: “It’s always bizarre to meet the family.”

“Was there any warning?” I asked. “Did anyone know?”

“He was pretty incommunicado,” said Mel. “You should have seen him after you guys left. He looked like those people you see in pictures of death row, who don’t give a shit anymore, don’t exercise or anything.”

“How come they discharged him?”

“Why else? His insurance ran out.”

“They shouldn’t have let him go.”

“What could they do? His family isn’t poor, but you know Willowridge costs an arm and a leg.”

No one said anything for a while, and then I asked Lillith how she was doing.

“Same old same old,” she said. “I’m a fucking walking chemical factory. There’s this new drug, I can get it for free if I’m in the FDA trial, so they’re giving me that plus lithium. It kind of spaces me out.”

“Sorry.”

She yawned. “Oh, and I have a part-time job. They make you, at this place. I tutor math at an elementary school.”