I waited outside the school for most of the rest of the day. There was a pretty little park, with a brick terrace, green benches and rows of ginkgo trees with their frail silverish branches bare. Some of them had been decorated with tinsel and red balls.

It was Christmas, the Christmas season rather. On my approach I had managed not to notice it. As I withdrew, awareness forced itself upon me. The school hallways were full of cardboard elves and Santas. And flummery decorations filled the windows of most of the shops. Groups of gay men strolled by, chattering urgently, tricked out in scarlet and hunter’s green. Women passed, with clutches of bright shiny shopping bags, like inverted bouquets of balloons.

At three, the students came out boiling, gleeful. Their winter holiday must have begun.

I waited, motionless in the deep cold. Now and then I cheered myself with a quick shallow slash of the box-cutter blade across my palm or the inside of my forearm. It was twilight by the time Laurel emerged. She hesitated on the white steps of her building, turned back to the doorway above, where another woman leaned over her, murmuring some words of concern. Laurel tossed her head, flashed her old insouciant smile. She snuggled a bloodred scarf around her neck as she came toward the park where I was sitting, pinning it in place with a little enamel Christmas tree. Her smile had lost its brilliance by the time she was near, and as she passed, without seeing me, it looked rather a sad little smile.

Or if she saw me, she gave no sign. But it was very dark by that time. I drifted in her wake, like a bit of blown ash. She didn’t look back. The cinnamon hair flowed over the scarf as the heels of her soft brown ankle boots clopped along over brick and concrete.

Laurel lived one avenue over, on one of the charming little side streets of the Village. A four-story brick building, its windows warm with yellowish light. She already had her keys in her hand and went in quickly, with a hint of stumble and recovery on the sill, under a lintel featuring a stylized cement lion’s head, festooned with the ivy that climbed the brick wall.

I could have pictured her apartment, well-appointed, cozy, and snug.

Instead I began to walk downtown. I didn’t know the city so well but all roads led to the same place really, like water running toward a drain.

Below Canal Street there began to be obstructions. Some areas were barricaded, meant to be sealed off. But enforcement was thin, the barricades permeable.

Hey, lady, some uniform called to me once. Hey, lady, you can’t—but I went on my way without turning once to look at him, and he was wise enough not to follow.

I knew I must be near from the smell. And in this region the buildings were deserted, temporarily sealed with plywood, draped with cautionary banners. The city’s dead core. Three months after the event it seemed impossible that smoke should still be rising from the center of the ruins, and still I seemed to see it, breathe it in.

Again, again, I felt my heart rising. Singing like a blade slashed through the wind.

What stopped me were the relics left by mortals. They began to appear everywhere, dropped on the sidewalk, wired into storm fences, taped crooked to the plywood sheets that sealed the shattered doorways of this zone. Mortals had arranged these things in tribute to their lost ones: photographs and talismans, flowers and strings of beads.

Beneath these wayside shrines, small scented candles burned. I saw a shrouded woman come and light one and remain there crouched on the sidewalk for a moment, lowering her head. I thought of Laurel but it wasn’t Laurel. Her head was completely wrapped in a fringed shawl.

When she departed, I approached—above the candle she had lit, a photo of a husky youth, strong jaw, white smiling teeth framed by a U-shaped mustache. Both his eyes and his nose were shining. He might have been a little drunk when the picture was taken. There was a note that said I love you. Many notes, strung along the fence wire with the photos. I love you I will never forget you. You are forever alive in my heart. Notes and medals and keepsakes and bunches of flowers withering in the winter wind.

I am your love, we had been told. And then—

O——’s love for Eerie brought her out of death, the first time, as my love for Laurel drove her deeper in. The way that O—— loved Eerie made it rain down water, and I loved Laurel so the rain was blood.

It was not unknown for a goddess to surrender immortality, reduce herself to the world of mere living, to share with a mortal lover everything—down to death and dissolution. But I couldn’t recall, that night on the street, the name of a single one who had done so. And Laurel’s mortal lover was long dead.

To weaken. To weaken oneself so.

Now and then a child’s toy hung there among the other mementos. That put me in mind, somehow, of the plastic trike in what had been my brother’s yard in Chillicothe. I drew the box-cutter blade across my palm to scrape that thought away.