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So I got out of bed. I showered in her bathroom, carefully leaving everything in it exactly as I’d found it. I put on the clothes little Emily had procured for me the day before, the shoes and the corduroy pants and the floppy green sweater. I crept out of her room and shut the door. I listened: heard nothing. In a hallway closet I found a black coat, a flannel scarf, and a hat—a black snap-brim felt fedora with a silk hatband. I put them on. In the dressing mirror on the back of the closet door I turned the brim of the hat low over my eyes, wound the scarf over my chin and cheeks, knotted and stuffed it into the breast of the coat and flipped up the collar. The coat was also too big for me. It came down to my ankles. With my chimp features thus hidden beneath collar, coat, hat, and scarf, I set out. The little dog downstairs lunged into a fresh fit of yapping as I descended the stairs, and I ignored it, though it growled and scampered circles around my feet as I headed to the door. I stood on a chair to unlatch the dead bolt, opened the front door, and squeezed myself through it, trying not to let the dog escape. I crammed my hands into the pockets of the coat for warmth, and my fingers found a few crinkled twenty-dollar bills—another boon. The new snow sparkled, clean and radiant on the ground, the sun high and pale in the sky. Birds twittered in the dead trees. My stubby legs waddled my coated and hatted form down the walkway leading from the front door to the street and the sidewalk, where I made a left turn that took me down a narrow road lined with houses, trees, bushes, driveways, mailboxes. I walked on, hoping to encounter something that would suggest a direction, something that would take me somewhere. That was all I had in me to call a plan. I was fortunate enough to have what I had: the stolen clothes on my body and a precious bit of money in my pockets, and I hoped these alone would tide me over until I managed to get somewhere. I do not believe I had an immediate plan to return to Chicago. That was my distant plan, not my immediate one. My first plan was to figure out where exactly I was. Then decide what to do. In a certain way I was enjoying my new freedom and independence, however unasked for it was. There was a streak of adventure in my misfortune.

Though I did not know it then, I was in the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York: a smallish town nestled on the side of a steep hill on the Hudson River, north of New York City. I walked a way through this upscale and quiet residential area until I came to a thicker and more heavily trafficked road, which I walked alongside, downhill, coming to a place where the buildings were closer together, where there were shops and restaurants flanking the streets and people moving here and there up and down the sidewalks. The people passing me on the street flicked their eyes down at me in mild surprise or curiosity as I waddled past them, and then politely, or disinterestedly, they looked away. I came to the top of a hill, which sloped steeply downward and ended in a wide river: across the river was a long wall of tall flat gray cliffs, and very far away but visible in the distance a massive blue bridge, built like a metal spiderweb, connected one bank of the wide black river to the next. I did not know it then, but the river was the Hudson, the cliffs across it were the Palisades, and the bridge in the distance was the George Washington. Seagulls reeled overhead. I saw railroad tracks running along the bank of the river. There was a train station where the town sloped downhill and came to an end at the water. I headed for the station.

I climbed the stairs to the station platform, my stubby legs by necessity taking each of the metal steps one at a time, and found myself standing on a long flat slab of concrete. It was a sheer accident that I decided that day to climb the stairs to the southbound train station platform, rather than the northbound platform on the other side of