A woman--who is both my sister and my lover--and I have been living together for a long while but realize that our relationship is in serious trouble and that we need help. We have heard of a woman who specializes in family repair work. She uses her own version of a psychodrama that sounds somewhat like street theater, somewhat like television's People's Court--unconventional but reputedly effective.

We have tried other therapy without much success and are desperate. We decide to try her. From the outside, her place looks like a shabby delicatessen in a seedy neighborhood. We are reminded of a storefront church or a fortune-teller's den. The room we enter is full of neighborhood types who appear at home in this setting but are not at all "our kind of people." We are nervous, not sure we belong or how well this approach is likely to work for us.

Another couple is called on soon after we arrive. Everyone else, including us, sits and watches. Their work feels real and also productive. We are somewhat reassured (though we are puzzled by some half-heard mumbling about what good actors they are). The therapist is a middle-aged gypsy-like woman.

We discover that one of the men sitting in the audience with us is her husband. He is much older than she, a friendly, old-fashioned tobacco-chewing fellow. He chats with everyone in a way that provides a kind of running commentary on the therapy and seems to be responsible for keeping some kind of loose order among the observers. His presence, too, stimulates confidence.

Then it is our turn. My sister is called into the back room and soon appears on stage. I recognize the scene she is reenacting immediately. The setting is the East coast beach of our childhood summers. The scenery is stunningly convincing, as are the actors with whom she is playing in the sand. I am flooded with nostalgia, with memories of youthful happiness.

Suddenly I realize that my sister is no longer visible. I do not see her on the beach or in the water.

Her disappearance is frightfully familiar. I feel compelled to jump into what I know is just a stage scene. The old man and the other spectators sit unconcernedly in the shabby room, but I am very scared. I push my way onto the stage and discover how tawdry and ramshackle the setting really is. But my sister has truly disappeared.

There is a now-locked trapdoor on the stage floor into some dark and fearsome basement. Desolate, afraid, horrified, I turn around to protest, but everyone has vanished, though the room and its furnishings are still intact.

I head for home, preparing to undertake the arduous, complicated task of recovering her. I am aware of feeling deeply betrayed because I now realize that the gypsy woman is really the uptown psychologist we have been going to for a long while who knows all our secrets. And the old man is her husband whom we often see just before or after our session and of whom we have become quite fond. He, too, knows a lot about us-funny, casual little details about our growing up, not important enough ever to have been brought up in therapy. All that we both know is being used against us.

My sister, disappearing in the particular way that she has, seems all the more eerie because once long ago she and I had on the same night both dreamt of losing each other in just this way. Though we had never imagined it might actually happen, there is a strange fatedness about the use of so primal a fantasy to effect our separation.

Yet despite everything, there is nothing hopeless about our situation; it is simply a difficult, deeply testing challenge. I somehow know that I will recover her, my sister, my lover--when I really understand it all.