Perkins is a professor of American and British literature and film. In the following essay, she examines the story’s focus on the transforming effects of compassion and support.

Marisa Silver’s “What I Saw from Where I Stood” opens with Charles’s announcement that his wife, Dulcie, is afraid of Los Angeles freeways. He soon discloses that freeways are only the first in a long list of things that frighten her—feelings that she has been able to express to Charles. Her greatest fear, however, is something that she cannot voice—that if they try to get pregnant again, the child may die just as the first one has. Charles recognizes how much losing their child has damaged Dulcie and has caused her withdrawal from the world and from him. In her sympathetic portrait of Charles’s struggle...