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gave up trying to persuade her aunt to walk the rest of the way to the school. She felt cruel that she had begged her to come to the ceremony at all. As Aunt Jane herself had said, Sarah had not understood the depth of her fear. But she understood it now.
    “We’ll take the next trolley home again,” Sarah said, sitting down on the bench, as close to her aunt as she could get.
    “No,” her mother said. “You go on to school, Sarah, or you’ll be late. Your father and I will take Jane home.”
    Sarah looked at her aunt’s pale face. She couldn’t leave her here, shivering and terrified, on the bench. “I’ll wait till you’re all safely on the trolley,” she said. “There should be another one in a few minutes.” She put her arm around her aunt’s shoulders. “You’ll have to go across the street to catch it, though.”
    Aunt Jane looked across the street, and it was as if her eyes registered a vast, deep ocean instead of a few yards of asphalt. She shook her head. “I can’t do it,” she said.
    “Jane,” Sarah’s father said, “act like a thirty-nine-year-old woman for once, will you?”
    Sarah shot her father an angry look. On an impulse, she ran into the street and waved down a passing car. “My aunt isn’t feeling well,” she told the driver, a man in a business suit. “Could you possibly give her and my parents a ride home? It’s over on Garrison Street.”
    The driver was agreeable, and somehow they managed to bodily lift Aunt Jane into the back seat. Sarah watched as the car containing her family disappeared around the corner before walking the few blocks to her school. By the time she took the stage for her commencement address, she was nearly too upset to speak. But she managed. Somehow, she managed.
    No one knew much about phobias in those days. And they knew less about depression. Two weeks after Sarah left home to attend nursing school in Trenton, Aunt Jane swallowed one hundred of her prescription nerve pills and died in her sleep at the age of forty. Sarah knew why she had done it. With her away at school, there was little holding her aunt to that cold house, and yet she was trapped there by her own tortured mind. Aunt Jane had held on long enough to help Sarah survive a difficult childhood, but now Sarah was on her own, a successful adult. And Jane was no longer needed.
    Sarah, deeply affected by her aunt’s death, decided to become a psychiatric nurse. She read all she could in psychology, trying to understand Aunt Jane, and in the process learning a great deal about other psychiatric illnesses as her interest in the subject grew.
    After getting her degree, she took a job in a psychiatric hospital in Haddonfield, New Jersey. At first, she was afraid that she would become too attached to the patients, that each of them would seem like Aunt Jane to her, and she would not be objective enough to help them. But she found she was able to separate her aunt from the others. Each patient was an individual. Each required a different sort of help from her. And each of them needed the sort of respect and compassion Sarah had learned from the aunt who would forever be a part of her life.

8
    L AURA SAT PROPPED AGAINST THE HEADBOARD OF E MMA ’ S bed, reading one of the little girl’s oldest books to her. In the past, Emma would have been able to recognize some of the words in the familiar story. She’d point to them proudly, saying them out loud. But if she knew them now, she was not letting on. Her body was curled against Laura’s, her thumb in her mouth, and she was nearly asleep. Good. Every night it was a battle getting Emma to sleep. There were the nightmares, the wet bed, the fear of the dark, and the general wakefulness that had plagued her since Ray’s death. But she must have worn herself out playing with Cory that afternoon, because her eyes were closed by the time Laura turned the last page.
    When Laura had arrived home from visiting Sarah Tolley in Leesburg, she’d found