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absence but their loss.

    And not even bald, fat little Dr. Henry was fey or fussy enough to suggest that Sue Young’s “innocence” might have been the first and most influential loss of her life, the one by which all other losses would be measured. But the idea had still sat there unspoken between them, session after session, staring at them like a lab rat chewing on a legal pad. Until the day that Sue walked in and handed his receptionist an envelope containing a letter that said, in essence, she was going to find another way to spend the hour from two to three on Thursday afternoons.

    The sign up ahead reads:GRAY HAVEN —6.

    Sue floors it.

    9:06P.M.

    GRAY HAVEN,the white sign says.ESTABLISHED 1802.

    It is, as she remembers it, a muttered curse of a town. It has little to recommend it except that whatever else life has in store for you will be an improvement.

    Sue hasn’t been back here in almost fifteen years, since her mother died. The truth is she misses it like acne and braces.

    Townsend Street, meanwhile, has not changed noticeably. The corner bar, the Blue Parrot Lounge, is still here with its single neon Budweiser sign sputtering in the window. There is a video store and a nail salon and the Exxon station. The textile mill where her dad put in thirty-two years is still down to her left, a series of boxlike buildings sloped awkwardly against one another’s shoulders like a group of men who can’t remember what they had in common except the mutual inability to stand without assistance. The streets and sidewalks are empty. The snow tumbles down, looped crosswise through the intersection in front of her. Narrow row houses with broken porch lights. Somebody’s idea of the future, once upon a time.

    Sue drives straight through. If she wanted to go back to the old place she would take a right on Crill Avenue and follow it three blocks east. There would be the yellow one-story house where her unemployed dad sat with the Boston Herald and his oxygen tank for the last six years of his life, hunting through the classified section with a ballpoint pen. When a “business opportunity” caught his eye he would draw boxes around the listing, over and over, until the ad would lift right out, to be deposited in a neatly stacked pile of similar gray rectangles to his right. Every night her mother threw the pile away. Every morning her father started a new stack.

    Coming up on the right is Sheckard Park. The wind whips harder here, ramming its way down the hillside, blasting snow hard against the side of the Expedition. The swings and slide where she played as a child are still there, their steel framework submerged in drifts like the masts of some doomed polar expedition. In the middle of it stands a statue of a bald man in muttonchops and a long doctor’s coat, holding a Bible and a bone-saw, gazing stoically off to the west. Sue knows the plaque underneath the statue identifies the man as Isaac Hamilton, but it doesn’t say what he did to deserve to be immortalized for decades, maybe centuries, of having pigeons shit on his head. There’s a fair amount of writing on the plaque, some kind of poem, she recalls vaguely, but she’s not sure. Although she grew up less than a mile from here, Sue’s never bothered to look it up.

    Past the park the lights of town diminish to a dull, pale haze in her rearview mirror and in front of her are occasional farmhouses, bankrupt auto body shops with state inspection signs dangling by one corner, and miles of nearly uninterrupted darkness.

    Two miles down the road she turns right onto Old Gorham Road. It is a long, dithering country lane whose sole defining characteristic seems to be its determination to continue sloping steadily downward. It forks twice, and both times Sue bears left, the second time onto a one-lane gravel road with no posted name. Here the pines are close enough that their needles hiss against her windows. The gravel is covered with half a foot of snow but