JOHN D WAS STANDING at the window alone, watching the boats coming into the bay, their masts sharp against the darkening sky. He had no right to feel sad, he told himself. Deanie had made that clear in the car with her fierce “She’s my sister!” It was as if you weren’t allowed to feel grief unless you met certain family conditions.

Actually, he thought, I probably don’t qualify. I only knew Clara one week. She was scared of me. I looked down on her. The Animal. Only I still feel bad, terrible actually.

He could see in the window the reflection of the room behind him. Clara’s father was at the desk, still trying to put through a call to Clara’s mother.

In the past half hour Sam had changed from a neat, controlled man into the picture of despair. His thin hair stood up like wire; his clothes had come untucked; his eyes were red and swollen.

Delores sat on the sofa with one arm around Deanie, patting her shoulder. From time to time Deanie said things that needed no response.

“One time,” she said, “when we were real little, Clara and I got dolls alike for Christmas and I broke mine and I dressed it up in Clara’s doll’s clothes, and she thought her doll was broken. I never did tell anybody and I still have the doll. It’s perfect.”

“There, there,” Delores said. Deanie’s tears ran unnoticed onto Delores’s blouse, turning it a darker color.

“And one time we were going to play piano pieces for our grandmother, and Clara only knew one piece. It was ‘The Spinning Song,’ and I begged to go first and then I played her piece and she didn’t have anything to play! I don’t know why I did that.”

Deanie’s father was dialing. “Hilton? Has Frances Malcolm come back yet?”

On the sofa Deanie looked at her father and said, “I want to talk to her too.”

He nodded without glancing around. “Well, would you have her call this number when she gets in?”

There was a silence after he hung up the telephone, and then Deanie’s voice, saying, “And one time—this was when we were real little—I …”

John D let the picture of the room, and the words, fade away. He concentrated on the harbor. The boats were being tied up. Fishermen were clomping up the walkway with their catch. Shipowners were readying their ships for a possible storm.

Overhead the sky was empty of birds. Gulls and an occasional pelican sat on the pilings, still as statues, facing into the wind.

“… I don’t know why I did things like that.” Deanie’s voice rose. “Clara was just so easy to trick. I mean, she believed in people and she—”

John D watched a boat pull up to the dock. It was an old boat, and the bare wood showed through the peeling paint. John D could barely make out the name Seaswept on its side.

But there was something about the group on the deck that held John D’s attention. They weren’t just fishermen coming in after a long day. There was an urgency about their movements. Someone’s hurt, John D thought.

He watched as two men helped a girl onto the dock. She was wrapped in a blanket. Her legs were bare. There was a towel over her head. She was clutching it under her chin like a kerchief.

With the help of the men, the girl began to walk. She was unsteady, as if she had been at sea a long time.

John D pressed his face closer to the window. His nose touched the glass. He took off his thick eyeglasses and peered through the salt-sprayed window. He could see from a distance better that way.

He watched the girl’s slow difficult steps with increasing interest. He felt as if he had stopped breathing.

And then he felt his lungs fill with enough air to burst them. His hands pressed against the glass. The girl lifted her head, the wind caught the towel and blew it down to her shoulders.

Tears filled John D’s eyes and goose bumps rose on his thin arms.

“Here’s Clara!” he cried.