As a child, Leigh had seen apparitions. She thought they were visitors, no less real than the people she saw during the daytime, but different. When she chattered about things her visitors had done or said the night before, her mother told her those were dreams--Leigh obligingly incorporated the word, although she knew these "dreams" were different from the stories that went on in her head while she slept.

Late one night Leigh's mother had come to the doorway, wrapped loosely in her old dressing-gown, and stared at her daughter, who stood in the closet, her head hidden among the dresses, and talked and laughed animatedly.

Sensing another presence, Leigh had turned around to discover her mother watching her with a queer, almost frightened, expression on her face.

"What are you doing in the closet, Leigh?"

"I'm talking to my dreams," Leigh said happily.

She went to a doctor after that, a doctor who seemed more like a teacher. All he ever wanted to do was talk and play games with her. He encouraged Leigh to tell him about her dreams--both kinds. It didn't take Leigh long to figure out that her visitors upset her parents very much, that they were wrong. She began to fear their visits, and at night, after her mother tucked her in and kissed her, Leigh would lie stiffly, eyes closed, and refuse to acknowledge them when they came. She did not respond to the soft voices, the provocative questions, nor react to the light caress of their fingertips against her face.

She learned to stop believing in them, and, saddened by her rejection, her visitors stopped coming. It was not long after that that she stopped seeing the special doctor, and her parents stopped treating her with such caution.

Leigh did not go back to bed. Instead, she closed the bedroom door and began to get dressed. She shouldn't have yelled at Sammy, of course he was telling her the truth--he never lied to her.

She clawed through a jumble of cotton and nylon, searching for a pair of hose without snags or runs. She could call the hospital. If Elizabeth had a brother, stillborn, half-formed or whatever, it must be on record.

Suddenly she paused, still bent over the dresser drawer. She didn't hear anything, but she knew he had come back. She turned slowly, half-dreading, half-eager.

And there he was, where the Modigliani print with its rust and fire reds should have been, and his white, alien space blotted out the pale green wall. He was floating, his hands dangling uselessly below him, the tears leaving his eyes in perfect globules, like mercury from a broken thermometer, then orbiting his head. No sound, this time. Leigh turned her head, but there was no escape from the sight of him. Now he floated where the window should have been, his blond hair waving like seaweed, his eyes puffy with crying.

Then he was gone. Leigh could see the window, chopped by the vertical lines of Venetian blinds, with the green and yellow blur of morning beyond, framed by still, white curtains.

Leigh let out her breath in a long sigh. What had she been thinking? This boy was six or seven years old--far too old to be Elizabeth's unseen twin, and old enough to be her first child, the baby who was conceived but never born.

Would that child have been a boy? Leigh did not know at what age the sex of a foetus could be determined, but in any case, surely an abortionist would not notice such a distinction--would take care not to notice such a distinction. And in those days--three years before the legalization of abortion--no records would be kept or statistics noted.

Leigh tried to remember the abortion, to discover if there were some clue in that portion of an hour spent in some doctor's office, and realized with a little shock that there was nothing to remember.

It had gone completely out of her head: the doctor's name, his face, his nurse, the color of the ceiling she must surely have stared at, fixed by fear. Everything, trivial or momentous, about that most unforgettable day had been forgotten.

She sank down onto the bed, still half-dressed, hands clutching a wad of nylon, her face strained with concentration. She tried to think of the doctor's name, tried to remember the act of writing it down, as she must have done nearly eight years ago.

She remembered. She had written it in a safe place, not on a scrap of paper to be tossed away or lost.

Leigh went to the living room bookcase and to the bottom shelf where her art books were neatly racked. She'd written the address in one of her first-year texts, in that big, bulky Arts and Ideas, on one of the index pages with red ball-point pen. And there it still was, in her small, precise hand: Dr. Cray, Sherwood Professional Building, Englewood, New Jersey. And then a phone number, She stared at it, proof that it had happened.

She was alert, all that day, for the boy's presence. She was haunted, hearing footsteps in another room, feeling the breath of words just spoken hanging in the air, but never finding anyone there.

In the evening, slicing onions in the kitchen to go with the liver already sizzling in a skillet, Leigh heard a thin, distant cry. She paused, mind trying to sift fantasy from reality. The cry came again, and Sammy, who was slouching against the refrigerator to keep Leigh company while she cooked, turned his head slightly--so he had heard it, and it was real.

"Shall I go?" Sammy asked.

"No. Just stick these in the pan and watch it doesn't burn."

Elizabeth stopped crying as soon as Leigh picked her up. She felt someone watching her and turned, expecting Sammy; instead, framed by the doorway, obliterating the hall beyond, was the boy. He was staring at her; reproachfully, she thought. She turned hastily to set the baby down, but when she turned back the boy had vanished and Elizabeth was crying again.

"Boy," Leigh whispered. "Boy, come back."

He had seen her that time; she was sure of it. He had looked at her, wanting her to mother him and not Elizabeth.