Goodman is up by six. He showers, shaves, and dresses, downs a cup of instant coffee with nondairy creamer and a strawberry Pop-Tart. He’s at his mother-in-law’s apartment a few minutes after eight.

“You’re early,” she tells him.

Kelly comes into the room, still in pajamas. She drags Larus with one hand, rubs her eyes with the other. To Goodman, who hasn’t seen her for a week, she looks tiny and frail.

“Hi, angel,” he says softly. He feels his back twinge when he squats down to be her size, but he deals with it.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says, folding herself into his arms.

It turns out the MRS test is really an MRI. Goodman is allowed to stand off to the corner of the room as they slide his daughter into a tremendous machine that reminds him of a photograph he once saw of something called an iron lung, which they used to put polio victims in. She cries the entire time, not (it seems to Goodman) because she’s afraid of the machine, but because they won’t let Larus into it with her.

Afterward, they tell him the film the MRI machine has made of Kelly’s head will be delivered to her doctor. They’re pleasant enough, but they won’t tell him how it looks, and that worries him.

At the cashier’s station (and Goodman realizes he must have missed that point at which doctors’ offices started having cashier stations), Kelly dries her tears against Goodman’s shirt while Goodman signs a form promising to pay the $1,100 himself if it turns out his insurance doesn’t cover it. He figures that ought to buy him about three weeks.

From there, he takes his daughter for lunch at McDonald’s, where he eats his own Big Mac and finishes most of her Happy Meal. He wonders how long she can survive on french fries and Coke. She looks so pale and thin to him.

He presents her with the plastic dolphin he bought her at the Fort Lauderdale Airport. She seems to like it, but asks him if he can carry it for her. She explains to him that she has to carry Larus, and Larus is very big.

They go to Carl Schurz Park and watch the boats that go up and down the East River. They find a bench to sit on, and Kelly curls up in his arms.

“I’m ready for the story,” she announces.

“Are you certain you’re not too tired?” The truth is, he’s never been a very good storyteller, and he has no particular idea for one in mind.

“I’m certain,” she assures him.

So he does his best.

The Little Princess

Once upon a time, in a far-off kingdom, there lived a little princess-

“Was she a ballerina?”

“Of course she was a ballerina.”

The Ballerina Princess

Once upon a time, in a far-off kingdom, there lived a Ballerina Princess. The name of the kingdom was Yew Nork. It was a kingdom much like the city where we live, except that instead of having tall buildings all around, it had hundreds and hundreds of tall castles. And instead of being surrounded by rivers, it was surrounded by a wide moat. And one other thing: It was a magical kingdom. It was magical because it was a place where things could come true if you wished for them hard enough, and if you tried hard enough to make them come true.

Now the Ballerina Princess was six years old. She had been born to a beautiful mother and a loving father. But there came a time when her mother had to go away, and of course that made the Ballerina Princess very, very sad.

“Did her mother go to heaven?”

Her mother went to heaven, yes. And that meant that her grandmother had to look after the Ballerina Princess for a while, because her father was so busy with work. But she also had someone else to help look after her. And that was the brave and loyal Prince Larus. So, in a way, the Ballerina Princess was luckier than most little girls, because instead of having just two people to protect her, she had three. And that’s an awful lot, especially when one of them is the brave and loyal Prince Larus.

Even with his eyes closed, he can tell from her rhythmic breathing that his ballerina princess has fallen asleep in his arms. As he looks down at her little face, her tiny mouth slightly open, Goodman aches with worry. The worst part about flying down to Florida was leaving his daughter behind, even for a couple of days. The thought that he might lose her, that she could actually die, is simply too much to imagine.

“Please let my angel be okay,” he says softly. He has always believed, for some reason, that if you give thanks or say prayers out loud, even in just a whisper, it counts more than if you just think the words to yourself.

“Please,” he repeats.

That evening, Goodman drops Kelly back at his mother-in-law’s. She cries when he leaves, and he promises her that it won’t be long before she can come and live with him. His own eyes water as he walks home to his own apartment.

For some reason, Goodman’s key won’t fit into the lock of his door, and he’s forced to ring Tony the Super’s bell on the first floor. Together they trudge up the four flights, where Tony finds he can’t get the master key to work, either. He bends down to inspect the lock.

“Aha!” he announces as he extracts a broken piece of toothpick from the lock. “Here’s the problem.”

But it turns out the toothpick is only a symptom of the problem. As soon as Tony opens the door, Goodman sees that the place has been trashed.

“They put the toothpick in the lock to jam it, in case you get home while they’re still inside,” Tony explains. “You go to get help, that gives them time to split.”

It takes Goodman two hours to clean up the mess. Every drawer has been dumped onto the floor, every item of clothing thrown from the closet. The cushions of his sofa have been cut open, the sofa itself tipped forward onto his wooden coffee table, which has buckled under the weight.

It is only later, almost as an afterthought that comes to him while he lies exhausted on his ruined sofa, that it occurs to Goodman that absolutely nothing is missing as a consequence of the break-in.

The thought sends a chill through him. Until this very moment, he has not once considered the possibility that this was anything other than a routine burglary. He’s read or heard that when burglars can’t find anything worth stealing - which would certainly have been the case with whoever broke into his apartment - they often get annoyed and vandalize the place.

But they haven’t even taken his TV set, or the coins he’d left on top of his coffee table. Everything - right down to his postage stamps - can be accounted for. Thrown around, ripped up, or whatever - but accounted for nonetheless.

So sometime after midnight, Goodman finds a flashlight, tiptoes down to the basement, and checks his storage locker. To his relief, he sees the duffel bag still safely inside. As an extra security measure, he decides to reset the combination lock, figuring maybe 0-0-0 is a bit too obvious. He’s afraid that if he picks some random number, he won’t be able to remember it. He thinks of his birth date, then remembers reading once that crooks think like that, too. So he chooses his magic number, setting the lock at 5-6-2. He’s so pleased with himself for being clever that he neglects to move the cylinder off the new numbers before heading back upstairs.