Chick was both our triumph and our downfall. We didn’t really name her Chick, of course. Her name was Emily Helen, after Janet’s mother and mine — the name picked out even before her conception. She would have been Bryant William, after my father and Janet’s — in that order — had she been a boy. But Janet had an amnio, so we knew early on that this child, our one child, planned, yearned for, and finally gifted to us, would be Emily Helen. We thought we knew what to expect. Saw our futures with our daughter-to-be spreading out before us like a comfortable road, well marked by signs and well appointed with all of life’s necessities and a plentiful share of its luxuries.

But the surprises started early. Emily was born with a head full of scruffy blonde hair, and when the nurse dried her off and handed her to us there in the birthing room, that hair stood up in all directions like the down on a chick. We had planned to call our daughter Em, but that plan never made it off the ground. Chick she was, ever after. She didn’t go along with our other neat plans, either — she neither slept during the night nor during the day. She talked early, walked early, and graduated immediately from crawling to mountain climbing up the front of the refrigerator and caving in the cabinets. She figured out the childproof locks, the childproof bottles, the childproof plug guards. Things childproof were not Chick-proof, and we learned early and well that the only guarantee that our feral offspring would survive from one day to the next came from our constant, unblinking supervision.

“She’s just like you,” Janet’s mother told her one afternoon when she was visiting us, and I’ll never forget either the smugness in her smile or the inescapable gleam of vindication in her eye.

We were infatuated with Chick. She became the center of our universe, our gravity and the air we breathed. Her laughter pealed like bells, her face was the sunshine, her

He stopped typing. Glare from the brilliant sun outside found its way through his window to the bottom left-hand corner of his monitor, making a few of his words and part of his page disappear into the yellow haze. Alan reached up and to his left without looking, pulled the cord that closed the vertical blinds, and then the chain that rotated them. For the next few hours, he could work in relative gloom.

The air conditioner kicked off, and Alan became conscious of the sound of his own breathing, the hum of the computer fan, the low drone of someone cutting hedges outside. The dry fronds of the palm tree that grew up against his window rattled on the window glass. He leaned back in his chair and shoved the nearest panels of the verticals back so that he could look outside. The sky was pale and clear, with the hard tropical brightness that still surprised him — the brownish greens of winter had given way to the jungle greens of Fort Lauderdale’s summer, but the intensity of the sun still made the sky look almost white. The palm fronds twitched beneath a light breeze, but the breeze didn’t look like it was strong enough to offer any reprieve from the heat.

He turned away from the window, which was entirely too seductive; he’d never get through the book if he didn’t force himself to write it. He found that the distraction had cost him the end of his sentence — he didn’t remember what he’d planned to write next. He tapped on the space bar. Then the backspace key. Then the space bar again. Then the backspace key. The cursor slid right, then left, then right, then left, over and over.

Downstairs, he heard the thump again. He waited for the air conditioner to come back to life, but it didn’t. Instead something tickled across the nape of his neck, as light and gentle as the brush of a cat’s whisker. He reached back with one hand to see if a thread had worked loose from his collar, and his fingers caught in a fold of thin, crisp cloth that blew against his skin. He felt a breeze, and smelled rain and wet earth and the peculiar heavy smell of ozone and dust washed out of the air. The impossible scents and textures flashed into his brain in a fraction of a second.

He yelled and jumped, moving so quickly the chair he’d been sitting in toppled backwards to the floor. He grabbed for the baseball bat that leaned against the corner of his desk and spun to face the intruders with it gripped firmly in both hands.

No one else was in the room. What he found, however, was worse. The window he had just looked out of was changed. The vertical cloth blinds were gone, replaced by pale, translucent yellow curtains that billowed in the breeze. A steady, heavy rain streaked down the glass and blew in through the open lower half of the window, wetting the carpet, and the dull roar of the water and the scents of dust and greenery tickled at his memory. Something about the smell... about the rain itself...

Who had opened the window? He needed to shut it; something inside of him said if he could shut it, he could shut down whatever was happening. He could make it go away, make it not happen. Gut instinct assured him the open window was the culprit. Closed, nothing could come through it to threaten him. He edged towards it brandishing the baseball bat against any intruders who might materialize. But nothing entered through the round-bellied curtains except for the alien, sweet-scented breeze. Spring breeze. Jesus, it was a spring breeze. Spring scents in the air — but spring up north. Kentucky spring.

He rested a hand on the windowsill to shove the window shut, and realized it was wood instead of metal, and that his office window slid from side to side instead of up and down as this window did. And then he looked outside, at a girl who stood in the rain, soaked to the skin, staring up at the window and at him, and for a moment she looked like a stranger, and then she didn’t. Then he realized that she was Chick — Chick who had died, Chick who had vanished from his life in a hell of twisted metal and shattered glass and who had not been able to emerge — until this very moment. He would have known his daughter if he had been blind and deaf and underwater. And the child standing in the rain watching him was undeniably, inescapably Chick.

She didn’t look like a ghost — he couldn’t see through her. She looked solid. Completely real.

He tried to breathe. Said, “Oh, Christ, oh, Jesus.” Screamed, “Chick, sweetheart, stay right there! I’ll be right down!” And said, “Jesus, please, please, please don’t go anywhere please.” And he thought for one insane moment about climbing out the second-story window and jumping to the ground so that Chick wouldn’t have time to go back to wherever she’d been.

She smiled at him, and he could see her yell, “Daddy!” but for some strange reason he couldn’t hear her.

He started to back away from the window, wanting to run down the stairs, out into the rain beside her, but afraid to let her out of his sight. But that single step backwards broke the spell. The curtains disappeared, and suddenly the window was covered by the thick cloth vertical blinds that were supposed to be there, blinds that blocked his view of his daughter. The sweet wet-earth-scented air became once again dry and air-conditioned.

Alan screamed a second time, just “NO!” and clawed through the blinds and blinked at the harsh sunlight outside and fumbled with the lock on the window.

But she was gone, of course. No sign of her remained, and no sign of the rain that had brought her to him. Heat shimmered off the bone-dry walk, and the cloudless sky offered no hint of moisture, and after staring into the midday sun with tear-blurred eyes, he finally let the blinds fall back into place.

Causes of hallucinations, he thought: mourning and stress, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, epilepsy, brain tumors, central-parietal foci. Tumors, if he remembered his DSM-IV, gave the best hallucinations — full scenes, the presence of voices, complete sensory input while they lasted.

He forced himself to breathe slower and deeper. That had been a very... complete... hallucination.

He sagged, hands pressed against the wall, and folded down to the floor in one long, slow movement, weeping for his loss and for the pain from that single moment of hope.

And the rainwater in the carpet beneath the window soaked into the knees of his pants.

He ran the palm of his hand over the spot and pushed his face down to smell it. Sweet — the scent of rainwater, ozone, and spring.

Alan shuddered.