Blood Acre

She has a shadow, Claire sees. The snow is holding. The neighborhood is quiet, even the boats in the harbor. The moon, making an appearance, moves swiftly against a current of clouds, recasting the frontage street as a blue field, where the sidewalks and the approaches to the brownstones and tenement walk-ups and the jetties across the street end without warning and begin the harbor.

She takes off her coat and hangs it on her arm, half believing half wishing to feel the cold. But she doesn't, she can't, feel a thing. It's there somewhere, but the liquor, thank god, is warding it off, bracing her with a strange disaffection. But she is alive, she has an effect-nearing her street she sends dogs behind some darkened window barking, and the barking follows her up that street and around the corner and the rest of the way home.

Inside she tries to walk the hall quietly, but the floorboards are old and her care only prolongs the creaking. With the sleeve of her coat she loosens the bulb in the hallway fixture so that it will not be the light to wake the baby, should he still need waking. Through the door she hears a loud silence, the silence of someone there but not saying anything, maybe someone asleep. The door is unlocked. Some smell has set in, seeped into the floor, the walls, the drapery, slightly acrid, slightly smoky.

She swears the moonlight bends over him in luminous strips, defining the child-for he would have been a child by now, wouldn't he, not a mere infant?-spread across the mattress, not stillborn, too late for that, but still nonetheless. How odd that at birth he already had Nathan's blocky nose and eyes the color car salesmen call sea foam. The baby's hands tangled in his wispy sprigs of hair, his mouth hung open, those eyes all frozen pupil. She in her gauzy nightie had taken him on her shoulder and walked him around to get the air up, or in, but poor thing he was so floppy and limp, his boneless limbs no help at all, he couldn't hold on.

With her coat still on her arm she watches the corner beside her bed where he used to breathe. On the counter, darker shapes rise out of the darkness, a glass, an arranged plate. The window rattles. It has begun to squall again. The lamplight brings it all in: the various darknesses, the breadth of her bed, the snowshadows raining silently through the blinds, the slow tapping of a water drip, the knocking of the radiator. And here the smallest of the boy's ancient rises and collapses. Claire feels the riot of it all in her head and through her veins; she feels it leap from her heart and she wants to leap after it, bound onto the bed with her little boy in her arms to tell him how glorious it all is-how joyful, how glorious!

The door closes. Claire slumps against it, barring the way. The taste of seawater in her mouth rides her throat where the rage is so thick she needs her palm flat against her chest to catch her breath. Tears sting her blind eyes as she swims her way chair to chair to table to bed. Outside a car door slams, an engine coughs to life, and Nathan, she is certain, is pulling from the curb, untethered now, floating away downriver. She traces the fading hiss of tires until it is a single grain of noise in a night teeming with life, and Nathan is washed away, absorbed by the hordes. And still, after all this time, it is not her fault. The bastard. She didn't hear the baby go upright, or gurgle, or choke for that matter. He was clutching the blankets to his throat for warmth, his little shrunken shoulders bare. Claire had seen in his staring, beaded eyes two windows letting out on their future, the future something irrecoverable, lost along the way, or never found-

The blue snow-light moves across her, across her face in the mirror. She primps at her hair, fixing a smile of courage so she will not cringe, mouthing something while she put the baby's mouth to her breast, still sore and leaking with milk. But he didn't take, poor thing he couldn't grip the nipple, so she opened his mouth and dropped it in, whitening his tongue, the watery milk running sideways and down into the crevices underneath and gooing up the back of his throat, pooling in the little ditch between lip and gum. The throat didn't budge, the windpipe surprisingly tough but infuriatingly still. Drink, baby. She lay with him again on the bed, her nightie rolled to her waist like a life preserver, keeping her afloat while she tried one breast, then the other. The sky that early morning had been a gray, empty radiance, no kind of dawn. She turned the knob on the radio but when she found something she liked she clutched her face with her free hand and immediately began to cry, her tears running between her fingers. She didn't bother staying quiet because she didn't mind waking somebody, the faceless neighbors above her and below, their damn footsteps and the thudding bass of their music, damn Nathan, where was he while she pressed the baby to her lap, between her legs, maybe to get him back up there, start it all over again. Still sore from stitches, the delivery not the easiest, and the baby stone still in the leaching light-drink, baby, drink-already blue, already dead of everything and of nothing in particular. As if there was simply no room in this region for one more life, even this one innocent piece of Nathan in all this world.

Claire looks at her watch. Damn you, Errol, where are you?

All at once the dark gives, and the shadows belong to the false streetlamp dawn. Off the back of a chair hangs a white brassiere, her blue jeans. Claire collapses on her bed and reaches. On the bed stand a light clicks on. A half-gone glass of water. A book that will help her last perhaps until two or three.

As Santos lets himself in the front door of his mother's apartment he thinks he hears his name called somewhere by one of those headless voices that announce his fears. The windows are open. The curtains flutter like flags.

His mother waits at the kitchen table, seated among votive candles. She fingers a pewter picture frame, another gift from the Steins. Though he can see only the felt back, Santos knows whose face it contains.

"I can't help wondering what she was thinking about," she says. "Was she terrified, did she know? Did she feel the animal's claws around her neck? Did she fight?" Her spectacles wink in the light as she lifts her head. "Where have you been?"

Past supplying answers, Santos listens for evidence of others in the apartment but hears nothing and is grateful for their absence. Who knows what he knows? Who would have believed it could be true? He draws a deep breath. A kink has formed in his stomach and now takes the form of nausea. He feels as if he has just this night stumbled upon the misfortune of being a grown man who has in his life understood too little and trusted too much. Breathe, breathe: he feels more than ever as if his lungs are not deep enough. "Where are they?" he asks.

"Sonia is in her old room, the boys in yours. The others I sent away."

"You don't want company."

"There is nothing to talk about, unless you are here now to tell me they know who it was. Do they know?"

Santos sits. The teeth of flame shift and steady in their columns of glass.

"Go to Claire," she says. "You are more her husband than my son."

"We're not married, Momma."

"You should be."

"Did Claire come? Did she call?"

"And to be with her you divorced that poor girl, ruined her, a good Catholic. Claire was Nathan's, Milton's son's girl."

"I wasn't good enough?"

"She was never meant for you."

"She was no one's."

His mother lifts her chin with indignation, her mouth firm. "Isabel will always be more my daughter than your sister."

She says other things, old, bitter things, swinging at the countering claims of enemy apparitions.

"I saw Nathan," he says finally.

"He will miss Isabel," she says. "More than you."

"I'm sure. Maybe he has more reason to."

She turns her face on her son and he returns her stare.

"He told me," he says.

A flickering look of impatience in her face, then her mouth makes a move very like a smile.

Santos can feel the pressure behind his own face, something welling in back of his eyes, words, beliefs, memories. He says, "I want to know, is it true."

His mother rests the picture face down and drapes a hand across it.

He nods at the picture frame. "Did Daddy know?" his voice suddenly sounding to him too small for a man.

"He knew."

Whispering, "How did he stay? How did he stand him, Nathan, and his stories, and me, me and my trying so hard to be him?"

"Life is not clear, Errol," she says. "He of all people understood that."

"He. What do you know about clear? I've seen brothers decapitate brothers, mothers stab daughters, boys run over their fathers. It is not our instinct to avoid misery, but if you survive it's because that's what you've done. Let me tell you what was clear-Isabel's body wrapped in seaweed and shit, naked on a beach in front of bums and whores and strangers."

She looks up, hands trembling on the frame.

"You've dipped us in shit. Tell me after Isabel you stopped."

"How can I explain this to you? We had nothing. He gave us-"

"He gave you!" Santos roars, and here it is, the source of his own envy-what the Santoses had, what the Steins had-what they gave them. "Look at the shithole you live in, this crap neighborhood. The trinkets Milton Stein has given you over the years have only made this place more pitiful. It’s payoff. What he gave you, Momma? He gave it to you in his office, on the floor-“

“Errol-“

“I know him, I know what and I know where and I know how. He’s a legend, in case you didn’t know. Though of course you had to. You probably set up the rendezvous, his loyal private secretary. I always knew. I just didn’t, obviously, always know who.”

“My god."

"And I don't care. just say you stopped," he says. "After she was born. Can you say that?"

She says nothing.

"Then how many years? From when to when?" Santos cries. His fear has chased him down, cornered him. This too.

She is crying.

"What year to what year?" The knot in his stomach flying undone, the little pulse of air rising to his throat, "Please god tell me I'm not his."

She manages to motion no.

He reaches across the table and clutches her wrist. He raises it, her hand flopping like a puppet's. "Swear it," he whispers.

"I swear."

Dropping her hand, he considers her. "Can I believe you?"

She says, "What do you want to believe?"

"How do you know for sure?"

Fearful, her face awash, she raises a quivering finger. "Look at you."

He grabs for the picture frame and slides it out from under his mother's hands and sandwiches it protectively between his palms. "Look at me," he says. He turns the picture. His own face superimposed on his father's, feature for feature. He cannot conclude. Maybe. Christ, maybe. He can't be sure.

He knows now the meaning of his father's last plea. A father warning off his son. To have gone to work for the Steins would have been to be pulled under, dragged into that dark constellation. Whether or not there was a genetic tie wouldn't have mattered. Blood would have passed: Milton's son, Nathan's brother.

"And Sonia?"

Her unfocused eyes watch his hands. They slowly close, then open. "Your father's."

"You don't even know," he says. "What makes you think Isabel didn't take your job completely? Bred for his pleasure. Look where she worked. Look what she was surrounded by day after day. Like you said, more your daughter than my sister-"

She slaps the table. "He was her father."

Santos feels the cruel smile on his mouth. His mother clasps both hands over her face. The past is drowned in the bitterest mistakes, and the future, in one clear moment, is upon him. He can see Isabel's funeral, he can see his mother's, Nathan's, Claire's, Milton's, he can see his own. He sees the whole cast, who will be there and how they will be situated, sitting, then standing and, crying, riding to the cemetery. And he knows who will be buried, will lie wooden, varnished, a blanched powdery sack on a bed of bleached satin cushions. The terror so great it feels already like nostalgia, like something lived and over with, memorized in an old and distant sorrow.

What has begun is already over. And here now is how the dead are beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. The living ferry the consequences but the dead do not remember, and nothingness, Santos sees, is not a curse. Far from it.

Nathan leans into the cold wind, his arms at his side, his briefcase in one hand. Behind him the Rikers Island waiting room like an airport's, plastic eggcup seats and columns of cigarette sand and dingy light and a large window letting out onto a blank expanse. The shuttle bus's headlights appear across the stretch of empty tarmac, the snow before it coiling and whorling. Beyond shine patches of yellow light. Glinting billows of concertina wire.

The virtues of prison are not lost on him. He's considered the ease of a morning meal, an afternoon meal, an evening meal, an hour of exercise, a menial job. In the last months he's weighed the pleasures he could take in boundaries against the jail of his current boundlessness and found that, quarantine or full exposure, it could go either way. A thousand hours he's spent already inside this prison, nodding at the declarations of virginal innocence, the lies, the crudely fashioned alibis. He mentally calculates his clients' worth, constructing a plea bargain in his head. Then he sells them. He puts them on the block like highboys at an auction, and the young A.D.A.'s, overloaded, begging for pleas, will give what he wants, as long as it's something. But Nathan gets paid either way. In fact, he gets more for a guilty, more for the appeal, still more for the parole hearings, and then a last retainer for the inevitable parole. And then, of course, they'll be back. Out and back in through the revolving door. And then there are the friends his clients make in the clink. The calls Nathan gets in the middle of the night. They need his fluent Spanish, his sharp wit, his way with the lady judges. Always everyone is worth more in jail than out.

When was the last time Nathan threw a curveball at a jury with an actual innocent man? His first two years out of law school, before he joined up with his father, Milton called in a favor and got his now-famous friend Sidney Frankel to take his son on. Frankel let Nathan watch him serve up witnesses through cross-examination and pound them over the net until, flinching, they were something less than their former selves. That booming voice, that six-foot-six-inch frame bearing down on you. He knew everything, he knew when you were lying and when you were telling the truth. And even the truth, Frankel had always said: Truth was just a better lie. You pick one and you dress it up with evidence and motivation and hope. You build a world around it, you found a country, identify it by what it's not: it's not a murderer, it's not a rapist, it's not a dealer. It's bad but not that bad. Who among us is as pure as the driven snow? A simple case of wrong place at the wrong time. There but by the grace of God. Otherwise it looks just like you and me. You and me. judge not lest ye be judged. And hopefully after all that a sun will rise and set and the world you have built will spin. This is how we construct our lives. There's no difference. Life is a trial. We spend our days making our case before a jury of our peers, Frankel always said. Are you innocent, Nathan? Even you, the lawyer. Are you pure, are you chaste? The juries of our lives never can know. In the end, only you are certain that you're not. But still, I'll let you convince me that you are.

Then that was gone, lost. Frankel sent him away. Now Nathan sells off his clients at market value, usually three-to-life. Who's to say no? After all, as Frankel always said, they're all guilty of something, if not this crime then another. Nathan deposits their money then gives them away. The crestfallen parents, babbling on in their Dominican Spanish, weeping in the corridors.

Headlights stab through the snow, speeding forward, a tail of exhaust, just as he sees again his last act as Frankel's proxy. Frankel had handed him the controls for a sentencing. A mere formality. A three-time loser with legal bills a year overdue. The atmosphere in the courtroom was unexpectant. There was no suspense. Frankel himself couldn't have cared less. Nathan can't remember now what the charge was, attempted murder, aiding and abetting, it didn't matter, there was nothing to discuss. It was going to be life at Greenhaven without parole. They were all waiting for the bailiff to bring him out of the bullpen. Nathan was chatting with the A.D.A., the judge with his clerk, the court officers amongst themselves. The stenographer was filing her nails. The bailiff swung open the door. The stenographer screamed and threw up her hands. The officers dropped to their knees and drew their revolvers. The judge ducked under the bench. Then everyone slowly stood. The officers bolstered their guns. Nathan rose off the floor. A pair of sneakers swung in the doorway, halfway up, a pair of limp, blueing hands. A bench lay on its side. Nathan didn't even know the name. He looked down at his notes: there swung one Raoul Gomez, father, husband, son, someone's brother-there's so much to be-formerly residing at 67-54 Fordham Road, the Bronx, twenty-one years old forever.

Frankel said word had gotten around Centre Street. Everyone was talking about the young attorney who couldn't get his client to prison alive. Nathan wasn't doing enough, and there was too much reputation to lose. The next day Milton gave Nathan a set of office keys.

The headlights swing wide then stop. They stab into the dark, run through with large flakes of snow. An old school bus, windows fitted with steel mesh. The doors fold open. The driver, seated in a cage peers down at him. His eyes wet-is it the snow? Nathan steps aboard.

In the ward the guard leads him into a space partitioned by glass into three cubicles. A back door swings open. Two women file in. Gray flannel uniforms that look homemade. Both are young, Latina. The first, a teenager, is pregnant. She is blank, anonymous; on the streets she would be invisible. The other enters like a force that strikes him. Carefully groomed, heavily made-up, her long jet-black hair pulled off her wide forehead, her eyes chips of coal. A beauty that is at once an advantage and an impairment. Even in her uniform she seems ready for a party as yet unannounced or unplanned.

She pinches Nathan's arm as she goes by.

"Buenas noches, Amparo." He smiles.

She takes in Nathan's face, apparently with pleasure. "You said six o'clock."

"Buenas noches," Nathan says to the other, trying to summon the salesman's charm he saves for prospective clients.

The girl ducks; her lips attempt a smile but fail.

A guard comes up behind them, shooing them on. The women sit in the far cubicle, Nathan in the middle, the guard nearest the door. Nathan rests a legal pad on his knees. He nods at the guard. She stands and goes out.

When the door closes, Amparo peers over the edge of the partition into the hallway. The guard there has left her desk. The others in the booth have turned their backs. Amparo prods the pregnant girl to her feet and leads her into the next partition with Nathan. The girl's face is cut, he sees, her bottom lip swollen. Amparo and the girl sit.

Amparo takes out cigarettes and lights one. The girl reaches for the pack but Amparo pulls it back and holds it over her head as if away from a small child or dog. She blows smoke in the girl's face.

"Don't you know you can't smoke when you're pregnant?" The girl looks blank-faced and Amparo rolls her eyes at Nathan. "A peasant, my cousin. She's never left America but there she sits unable to speak the language."

"She's your cousin?" Nathan asks.

"Sorry to say." As though struck by a sudden thought, a longforgotten memory, Amparo whirls on the girl. "Jibara! Nunca tu iras de este pais, y sin embargo nunca aprenderas su lengua."

The girl slouches in her chair, her face fixed in an expression of deep dismay.

Crossing her legs Amparo bounces the top one as though testing the knee. "The peasant needs you. Tell Mr. Stein what happened."

The girl speaks at the level of whisper. Her fingers flutter. "Hoy me acuchillaron por buena, al paracer no les gusta la gente feliz, hay que estar realmente loco. Fue la chica que supuestamente me iba a cuidar, ella fue la que me jodio. Era la chica que estaba supuesta ayudarme, fue la que me contuvo."

Amparo leans forward conspiratorially. "She got cut today for being too nice. They don't like happy people here. You have to be mad, she said. She said it was the girl who was supposed to help her, she was the one who held her down. Her boss in the law library." She smokes thoughtfully, then leans and stubs out the cigarette in an aluminum ashtray and gestures vaguely in the air with one hand. "My cousin is a retarded Snow White. She didn't do nothing wrong. And her baby's coming. When, darling? Cuando nacera el bebe?"

The girl, crying, turns away.

Amparo shrugs. "I think next week maybe."

"Of course," Nathan says, and taps the pencil eraser repeatedly on the paper. "Who was your lawyer at the arraignment?"

The girl begins to speak, but Amparo interrupts her: "Herbert Harvey," she says. "Or Harvey Herbert. Siempre me olvido. Idiot. He wants her to plea to save himself the trouble, but I'm telling you she didn't know nothing about what was in that box. She was sitting in that apartment waiting for her man Arelis, who was delivering. So it's smack. So what? So it's none of her business. She's sitting filing her nails like a good girlfriend, keeping her feet up on the whatchucallit, el marco de la ventana."

"Windowsill," Nathan suggests.

"Windowsill. Minding her own business. A beautiful day, you know? She's listening to the radio, doing a little cha-cha out the window, rubbing her belly, talking to her baby, making it feel better about coming out into this piece of shit world. Then there's a knock on the door and it's the mailman with a box. She's expecting a box of baby stuff from the hospital so she signs for it then sits back down to make her nails nice. Then the next thing she knows her door is broken down and six cops are running around the apartment with guns."

Half rising out of her chair, Amparo aims her fingers with thumbs cocked.

"They got dogs. The dogs are tearing everything up. They make her lie down on the bed with her hands over her head while they empty her closets. One of them sits on the bed with her and plays with her tits, for as you see, she has very nice tits. Then they make her open the box in front of them. She thought it was baby stuff."

"From the hospital," Nathan says.

Amparo turns to the girl. "Que habia en la caja?"

"Formula, panales y otras cosas."

"Formula and diapers," Amparo explains. "It’s a free program they got."

"What was the return address on the box?"

Amparo waves Nathan away. "So it's Bogota." She shrugs. "The peasant doesn't read."

"Baby supplies from Bogota," Nathan says aloud, just to hear how it will sound to the judge, maybe jury. He sighs. He puts pencil to paper. "When?"

"Three months ago."

Nathan looks up. "Why not bail?"

"She can't make it," Amparo says.

Nathan taps the pencil tip against the pad. "How much?"

"Five hundred," Amparo says.

"Cinco," the girl spits, thrusting five fingers at the air as if against an invisible wall.

Nathan looks back and forth between the girl and Amparo. "She couldn't make five hundred dollars? You?"

Amparo shrugs, as if to say, Why should I help?

"Is Arelis the father?" Nathan asks. "Arelis es el padre del nino?"

"Si," the girl says.

But Amparo shrugs. "You think she knows?"

Nathan looks at the girl a long time, as if trying to decide, or deciding whether to decide, or if any of this warrants a decision. He writes, because he thinks he should, on a random line in the middle of the legal pad: Arelis.

Amparo leans back and the girl leans back with her. They conference quietly and Nathan drifts down a strain of music floating by in the wake of a ribbon of thought: Johnny Hartman crooning, "My One and Only Love"-

"She don't know anything else about anybody else," Amparo says. "But someone has been here."

The girl hands across a business card. Nathan holds it with both hands and looks at it a long time. It is Claire's. He pockets it and puts down his pencil. "Forget about this," he says. His pad of paper is blank, save Arelis, a name that floats in the middle of the yellow pad without context and without identification. The entire case. He'll sell.

"So how is my case progressing, Mr. Stein?" Amparo says coolly.

"I talked with Roberto tonight. He said-"

She slumps forward on her elbows. "Is it safe?"

"I talked with him tonight."

She taps her chin. "Did you."

"That's what I said. It's safe."

"Who says? You or Roberto?" Nathan doesn't answer and she pulls hard on another cigarette and cocks a wary eye across the table at Nathan. "Because Manny thinks Roberto's out of town. So I wonder how you could have called him."

Nathan scratches his arm. The wounds there have begun to itch in the warmth.

"I suppose you'd tell me if this isn't true," she says.

"Of course."

Amparo leans back, fragile and exposed. She seems to hold this news close to her breast. "Because if you are wrong Roberto will kill me as sure as I am sitting here before you. And if I am killed I will leave orders. You will not live five minutes." She smiles broadly.

"I talked to him," Nathan says.

"Why don't I believe you?" Her fingers shakily turn the burning stub of her cigarette on herself. She ignites a fresh one, which leads into her mouth like a fuse, and waves it in exasperation. "You still have the money I gave you?"

"Of course."

Amparo pushes her hands at the air between them. "That I don't believe, but I have no choice. Tomorrow then. You make the payment tomorrow by noon and then it's all safe and you take me to a beautiful lunch. Then we go lie down in East Hampton."

Nathan nods. "Of course. But it's cold. It's winter."

"Winter. Of course. In here one forgets these things." Amparo smiles and leans over the table, playful now. "Now this matter of my payment. My payment to you. For your services. It's good. It's beautiful." She lifts her arms, indicating the space behind him, as though offering a tropical beach, white sand, paradise. "A Land Cruiser," she says. "Forest green. Leather everywhere I am told. It sits in your garage.

Nathan stiffens. "My-?"

"East Hampton. They had to move the motorcycle. Manny says it's a very nice motorcycle. He says it rides real nice. He said you have nice toys inside the house, a very nice kitchen. And the bedrooms, he said, magnifico. That bed of yours he warned me was as big as the lawn, but you need to clean the pool."

Nathan looks at her. He pictures the house, at the end of a cul-de-sac, hidden behind a stand of thick trees and brush. "How did they know the house?"

Amparo laughs pleasantly. "How many times do I have to tell you that I know everything? I know you don't believe me, but I do. All of us, we all know where you live."

Then as if to prove it Nathan's telephone chirps in his jacket pocket and Amparo points and rolls her eyes like a wife who's seen too much, who knows it is too late so who chooses not to see. "Aren't you going to answer your telephone call from your little friend?”

“Friend?”

Amparo taps her temple.

The chirping ceases, the beeper vibrates. The weight of the girl's gaze blankets him, with comfort, or suffocation, with some malignant combination of the two. He unclips his beeper and holding it up to the light fingers the controls and once more brings out of its memory Serena's latest bulletin.

"I know you went home to see her," Amparo says. Nathan looks up. "See who?"

"Not the one who calls you."

"Then who?"

"The burro perra. Mujerzuela. The cunt." She smiles. "You went to that apartment where you leave her and that poor boy. This child that you have. That you keep in that small, dark place all the time alone. How kind of you, Mr. Stein. To me you should be so kind." Amparo's eyes flare with self-congratulation. "So," she says, "how is she?"

Nathan smiles woodenly. His hand comes to rest upturned on the table, releasing what is alrea y gone.

"She is fine."

Amparo shakes her head, smiling meanly. She puffs her lips with spite: "She is dead." She plucks at the cuff of Nathan's sleeve. It is the arm without the cuts but Nathan gets her point. "And this," she says, "was not even your big mistake."

The door swings open and the guard points at Amparo. "Phone call.”

"Maybe it is Roberto," she says, and stands. But before she goes out she whispers something to the girl that Nathan cannot make out, then locks eyes with her and nods, something decided or sealed. By the time Amparo is gone the girl's eyes have located the bulge in Nathan's jacket pocket. Tears dried, instantly expert, she sweeps her head back and forth, toward the closed door, over the empty supervisor's seat, the abandoned control booth in the hallway.

"Manana te saco de la carcel," Nathan says.

But news of her imminent release does not change her expression for the better. He says, "The five hundred dollars." He has decided to give it to her himself. But she is still looking at him coldly. She is concerned with matters more pressing, more immediate. He withdraws the packet wrapped in butcher's paper and drops it on the table and stands up and away. In one motion, a plastic card appears in the girl's hand, a straw. The lines are drawn, then done, and she sits back. The paper bag lies unpeeled on the table. The girl's eyes, glazed, lock on a point halfway between Nathan's neck and his belt. Her nose runs and she prods it with her knuckle. Nathan leans forward and slips the straw into a nostril. His eyes slowly close. A thin line of blood draws its way from inside his nose to his lip and pools there on the ridge. He reaches for it with his tongue and tries to forget about his body, thinking instead about the atmosphere, the various hums; the low one, like distant traffic, of the prison's air circulation; the high whine of the fluorescent lights. He sits waiting for the plane to land. For Claire to come to him with a key in her hand, maneuvering like a ghost of mercy down the roadless beach-

But a finger, not his, draws along the rim of his lips, spreading the blood, and with one eye open Nathan sees the girl hold up her pinky, red-stained. And what does he do as she kneels before him, as she tugs at the belt and withdraws the spindle and unloops the polished leather, running it out through her fingers as if measuring it for some later purpose? As he is taken out into the air he considers Amparo's letter, a threat being made good, a promise actually kept. He lets this happen. He is always letting it happen. As he is letting it all happen now. Briefly he opens his eyes, like a man asleep who wakes from a dream of misery to an even greater affliction.

The girl stands. She wipes her mouth, where there is a small smile. "Bueno," she says.

Amparo, who has been waiting and watching on the other side of the glass, gives him a little nod.

Across the prison causeway, he sees the red car parked beside the gate. There is a second car parked behind it. Two of the secret agents, or whoever they are-there are three now-are patrolling the shoulder. One is shorter than the other, and thicker, older; they are like father and son. The third is chatting with the guard. They all stop when they see Nathan's beaten 4x4, and when he passes they get in their cars and follow one behind the other.

He retrieves his cell phone and he calls her now. "No, Serena, I'm not being paranoid. No, I don't think everyone is out to get me."

She is cynical. She tells him that the men following him are just out for a drive. She says she is certain of it. She then hangs up. How, Nathan wonders, can she be so certain?

The car rocks side to side, the broadside wind ripping like cloth. Street salt and debris ping the glass. In the well in back Baron snorts and waves through his dreams. In the rear-view mirror, a pair of headlights maintains his pace exactly. He slows, and they gain a little, then drop back. He looks ahead, up, at the same old factory along the expressway stamped BARCLAY BARCLITE FURNITURE CO. in erratic red neon, dark, out of business for years now, the sign left on by some mistake. It is crowned now with a sedan import, its caption WHY STRIVE FOR PERFECTION WHEN YOU CAN DRIVE IT? as long as a city block, subtitled by a digital readout, 21'F… 12:54 A.M… -6'C… 12:55 A.m. The whole thing seems to him a cryptic message that our possessions are really negations of our actual selves that remain more primitive than we think. The numerical readout merely the meter of our lack of control, a high-concept call for religion.

"I don't believe it." He pulls abruptly onto the breakdown lane and peers up through the windshield. Ropes and scaffolding breach the Barclay Barclite walls, partially hiding a half-finished billboard draping across the entire width and height of three floors. The message beneath a remnant of a campaign by the NYPD, splashed across the back of buses all over town:

1-800-COP-SHOT

$10,000 REWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO

now overridden by

BUS ACCIDENT? SLIP AND FALL?

HOSPITAL MALPRACTICE? POLICE ABUSE?

SEXUAL HARASSMENT?

WHY HURT?

YOU ARE ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION

YOU ARE ENTITLED TO MONEY

EARLY RETIREMENT PLANS AVAILABLE

CALL NOW

PAY NOTHING UNLESS SUCCESSFUL

SCHRECK & STEIN ASSOCIATES

1-800-PAY-BACK

Primitive pictographs-stick figure falling, stick figure in head wrap and sling, stick figure fending off stick-figure assailant-bullet the possibilities.

Nathan crosses the Harlem River, he crosses town. A horsedrawn carriage emerges from the park, pausing at a traffic light and moving on past cars pebbled with snow and mud and road grease, its robed and bowler-hatted driver and an old, distinguished couple blanketed to the knees, their heads and shoulders finely powdered, and the stiffly prancing horse smoking from the flanks. So much of another time that Nathan grips harder on the steering wheel and casually clears his throat to convince himself that here he sits and here he breathes. A taxicab sits at an oblique angle to the curb, its nose buried in a snowbank. A white rag hangs from its cracked windows, no signal for help from the cold but a sign of surrender in hope of a general amnesty.

Book open on her chest, unread, water untouched, Claire looks through the window to the simple pity she'd once felt for Nathan's mother. Not daughterly empathy and not sorrow, but pity laced with contempt. To Milton flaunting his women, and she and Nathan actually having drinks with some, dinners with others. All that time wondering at Nathan's mother's blindness. How could she not know? Though of course she did. And of course that blindness returned to Claire as a kind of thin strength, the sort that comes with mere survival.

She has seen Milton on the news now. She has seen him in the papers. Battered now, bloated, everything about him coarse and puffed, Milton still has shards of Nathan's old beauty and all of his presence, more than all his charm. Years ago, during family gatherings, when she was more daughter than anything else, Claire sat on Milton's expensive chairs, looked out Milton's expensive views, watched his wife tracking the great man around the room the way she herself tracked Nathan at parties and clubs: she knew where Nathan was, whom he was talking to, the level and quality of his effort. Always measuring the angle at which he leaned toward the women peering up at him, the intent of his smile. And he, running the two middle fingers of his right hand along the rim of his lower lip. And she, not wanting to know, not wanting to be caught watching; unable to stop. As Nathan's mother had not been able to stop.

Then, before she'd made her first discoveries, before spotting then denying evidence of the first woman, the third, the others – the faceless crowds of women-she understood the lie had exhausted itself. And for such ridiculous reasons-for the sight of his wrist, a white shirt cuff folded back, the tan leather of his watch strap against his tawny hairs; the way his back looked as he crossed the floor of her room, naked, and adjusted the blinds; the feel of his hands spreading on her pelvis; his eyes, thighs, smell, taste, his heat-he was always warm, always burning, always she held on to him like she was holding fire. By the streetlight leaking through the blinds she stared at him as he slept. In her office, across the desk from a client, he floated in front of her eyes until, humiliatingly, she blushed. It was all humiliating. That in a crowd he and not she would draw everyone's eyes; that she was just one of the great flock of women wanting him.

Then, toward the end, as her blindness broke down, there was her attraction to Nathan's mother. Pain, fury, longing, desire, Nathan's mother-not more foolish, just stronger-had endured it, as she was enduring it. After it was all over she sent that old woman flowers on her birthday. She still did. In one of the cards a few years ago she told her about Nathan's baby, and that it had died. Even her own mother did not know. Nathan's mother wrote back. It was a small card, and on it small words. It said, beautifully, accurately, that it was horrible and good that it was dead.

Nathan expects, for some reason, St. Luke's to be full to overflowing, the emergency room to be filled with accident and gunshot victims, but the lobby is empty, the wards quiet, and the regulated air everywhere is still but for the low hum of distant floor buffers. He walks the linoleum floors, between walls shimmering in the bluish light. Through open doors here and there the perfume of oxygen and iodine, machines announcing flutters in pulse and heartbeat. He stops before the elevator he's ridden a dozen-two dozen-times and stands staring at the dark line between the doors. A bubble of light floats up and the doors open and hold apart while an orderly inside waits. Get in. Go up. The orderly looks at Nathan, then releases the doors and they close again and the line goes dark. Nathan turns and walks on down the stairs to the basement cafeteria. He expects to hear the woman with the washerwoman's face behind the register say, It's about time, she needs you, where have you been? But she says nothing at all.

Scattered about the long plastic tables are insomniac patients in paper slippers and the relatives of patients already long established in endless stretches of wait and wonder. Paper cups, half-eaten bowls of canned fruit, sandwiches wrapped in plastic. A doctor in her white coat, hunched over her coffee, her eyes closed. A pair of men sit against the back wall, whispering together, one old enough to be the other's father. The younger one kneads his hands together and nods as the other offers counsel.

Nathan chooses a middle-aged man with a coat slung over his shoulders, tapping a plastic spoon.

"You have someone upstairs?" he asks, lowering himself diagonally across from him.

The man looks up. "You?"

Nathan nods. "I've been up there already today. Now I'm just, I don't know, hanging around, I guess."

"I know what you mean."

"To be nearby."

"I understand."

"I tried, but I can't go up."

The man slides a box of Wheat Thins across the table. The little square crackers inside seem somehow wafers of repentance, and Nathan accepts. He is happy just to hold them in his palm. He hasn't eaten them in years; Claire used to keep them around the house.

The man is chewing slowly, and they don't have much to say to each other, and that's going to be fine. Nathan strains his ears now to hear anything in the hushed hospital basement. The click of plastic chairs against the linoleum. Sometimes he thinks he hears a new baby crying, shoving its way out of its mother's bloom; a doctor laughs; a taxi honks in the street outside the high mesh window. These sounds are enough to remind him of life. He would not expect Maria in her death to make a human noise.

Nathan, clearing his throat, relents. "Who's upstairs?"

"My wife."

"She going to be all right?"

"They say so."

"She having a baby?"

The man shakes his head. "No. We're done with all that. We have three at home. My sister's over, taking care."

"Three children. That's wonderful. I'm sure everything will be fine.

"She's going to pull out of it."

Nathan nods. "That's the way to think."

"I'm going to sit here all night," the man says.

Nathan slips off his jacket. "I'll stay with you a while."

The man looks at him. "Maybe you should go up? You look like maybe you want to. It'll make you feel better to, you know, just pop in, say hello." When Nathan doesn't reply the man shrugs. "Whatever makes you comfortable," he says, then stands and heads for the coffee urn at the front of the cafeteria and Nathan watches him as he goes. The man's shoulders are low slung, his gait slow, his hands thick, his knuckles like gnarled knots of wood. He works, this man, he's in a union and he scratches and scrapes and leaves tooth-fairy coins under his kids' pillows. Nathan sees in him signs of old Joe, his grandfather, Milton's father, sweet Joe the plumber. Maybe that is why he chose this man to sit by. Joe's pillowed hands veined with grime – he'd left school at fourteen, he and his encyclopedic mind. His stacks of opera recordings and shelves of Dickens and Proust, gibberish to a household of immigrant brothers, all but him willing to throw away their days calling down through the windows to their friends, taking positions on the street as though awaiting the enemy. He kept vocabulary lists on old napkins, envelopes, telephone books, and finally diaries, scrawling over the day and date, leaving them scattered around the apartment, fingering them with his beefy fingers like an actor rehearsing all day the script of what follow. Trying out for a different part. Meanwhile, he was to sweated pipes and ran iron snakes through waste lines beneath Brooklyn and groped through the shit of countless babies and ingrates and dreamers, squirreling away the stray dollars to send Milton, his only child, to law school. Nathan knows little but enough to understand that from this man he could have learned everything. But he chose the wrong generation to copy, one son too late.

The man returns with two coffees and sits directly across from Nathan. "They save your life and send you on home and then kill You there with the damn bill."

Nathan blows across the top of his cup. "Insurance?"

The man shakes his head. "Nothing at all. I have a pension, but they'll take that and more. What about you? Who do you have?"

Nathan looks at the man. "It's hard to say," he says.

"Parent?"

"No."

"She's not your wife."

"Not my wife, no. My girlfriend."

The man raises his palm. "None of my business, I apologize.”

"We live together," Nathan explains.

The Man nods. "That's okay. I'm sorry I asked. Didn't mean to be nosy. She'll be fine, I'm sure."

"I don't think she will."

The man blows on his coffee.

There is a distant chirp, another, insistent. "Your phone?"

Nathan asks.

"Me? I don't have one of them things."

Nathan warily eyes his jacket then picks through the pocket.

"Yeah, it's me. Where am I? It doesn't matter-" He toes at the floor. He blinks, blinks again. Feeling the man peering at him from across the table, he turns aside and faces the wall. He lifts a finger to one eye and then the other.

"When did it happen?" Looking at his watch, dropping it, wrist and hand, against his thigh. He looks to the door of the cafeteria through the little square window to the hall outside, through the hall to the elevator and up the shaft to the sixth floor, where in room 614 there is no sound and no breath and the machines have stopped and Maria's mouth has frozen shapeless. "I see. I understand. No, she would have never wanted that. All those tubes and wires, they made her feel like a marionette… They need me to ID the body tomorrow?… Yes, I'll come in. No, he's at the apartment. Don't go over there. I'm going. I'm going home. I'll tell him myself."

When Nathan refolds the phone the man across from him is nodding over and over. "Well, you were right here," he says. "You were right with her."

Nathan is looking at the sugar dispenser in his hand. He blows on it and shakes his head, the distorted image of his face in the dispenser's metal top misting away and returning.

"Can I get you something? I'll get you some water," the man says. He quickly stands and walks off.

Nathan exhales and lifts his jacket off the seat next to him, feels for the envelope of cash in the pocket and fans what must be ten or fifteen thousand and tugs it out and slides the bills between two napkins and leaves it next to the man's coffee. He sips at his cup then sets it down and looks up at the little window leading to the street. There is a small pool of spilled coffee on the plastic tabletop at his elbow and a fly, fellow traveler through this hermetic monastery, is crouched at the edge, wading in. Nathan turns in his seat and sees the man standing next to the woman at the register, both of them staring at him. He gets up and goes out.

Santos stands in the doorway, his hair dark with damp, as though dripping with blood. He has rehearsed on his tongue lines that will be warm and appropriate but it strikes him that there aren't any words to say. Claire reaches up and leads him down to the bed by hand. Santos puts his arm around her shoulders, leaning his wet head against her hair like a child, and for a moment it is as if a cloud of timeless tenderness closes around them, guarding, watching. Even here in this bedroom where nothing has changed since Nathan left it. Wallpaper of eagles and bells. Clothed, shod, Santos sinks into the bed where days after Nathan moved out, he and Claire first made love with teenage shamelessness.

Claire sits up. "I tried to wait, but I was so tired."

"I'm sorry."

"She was beautiful, Errol. I loved her."

But he presses a finger to her lips and paws her hair. Smell of soap and mint. Once he envisioned for them a month of Christmas days blue with permanent twilight, rooftops crusted with moonlit snow, tire chains clinking as cocktail glasses would, the living room windows up and down a safe and neighborly street beacons of warmth and privacy. This hope that has kept them together.

She whispers: "I needed you to call. Where have you been?"

"Claire, it was terrible."

"I'm so sorry."

The long sweeps of hair and squared bangs frame her face. Her pale eyes. Her grim endurance practiced in making irrelevancies of the things they've spent their lives waiting for.

They sit close, hands clasped, and he tells her about the beach, giving all the details-not Krivit, not Nathan, only Isabel. She nods, as if agreeing quickly, and he talks on like a furloughed prisoner whose clock is running down, steadily losing time.

When he is done talking she drags her fingertips across his face, sending him back into the pillows, toward sleep. He drifts through rooms of dreams-barren, unpeopled-he can't see in the light. He smells the rooms smoldering. It feels hours later-probably it is only minutes-when her lips bring him up, the strange cold compresses on his shoulders, on the nape of his neck, unwanted, but he doesn't stop her. She blows lightly on his eyes, as if to open them, and when he does the streetlight has partitioned her, revealing the facts of her, stern, lurid, one who calls bluffs. He obeys wordlessly as she feels for his underwear and slips it off. For months she had seemed completely beyond arousal. Now, tonight, tonight especially, she moves him across the bed like a nurse, with a firmness that excludes options.

Words are pointless. How to explain any of this, where there was purpose but no reason? Her eyes open and glassed, the straight line of her mouth blue. Santos reaches to touch her face. His lips part to speak, but she puts a finger over them. Her rhythm is slow and exact, calm, her eyes turned inward, mute eyes that seem to be looking at him from the bottom of a pool. As though this lovemaking is more an ambition than it is desire, to right a wrong or at least smooth a way. Claire's thighs tighten and her stomach heaves and she gulps air and she shudders, then she caves into a cloud of their mingled breath. He clutches to her as to a life preserver. Maybe saving him, no matter the consequences, is her ambition. Burying his face in her red hair enormous and everywhere.

Hours later his eyes startle open. He turns his head to his reflection in the window and takes Claire's hand-she is asleep-and places it, like a living mask, over his face. But from beyond the bars her fingers make, Isabel returns his stare. Her eyes are flecked with grains of sand, and they are making demands.

2 A.M.

In an overheated lobby filled with weak and twitchy light, Nathan shoulders open another door and steps into a little apartment where there is no sign of movement, plant life, air. Through the curtains, up in the clouds, lightning, continuous, splits the sky in fiery convulsions, illuminating like signal flares the surrounding apartment towers. A blank grid of wide boulevards named for plants and trees. From behind the walls at the development's edge, trees rise coated in glass, like the hands of drowned giants.

He stands in the opening between living room and kitchen, breathing heavily. Clothes are strewn across the carpet, the door to a highboy unhinged, a shattered bowl, its chocolate-covered candies scattered like birdseed. Against the far wall, the long shelf of opera records that belonged to his grandfather, Joe the plumber, has been rifled through, the old vacuum-tube phonograph below it, long ago burned out, torn from its perch and made off with.

The spotted legs of an old woman surface out of a corner shadow. In a leather easy chair, a gift from Nathan years before, she leans forward, closing her robe at her throat. Her tangled cloud of hair crinkles electrically.

"It's me, Rose," Nathan said.

She reaches, loose and frail, and the hand that clenches at him trembles like a bird.

"What are you doing up?" he asks.

"It's late."

"Surprised I'm here?"

"I didn't say that."

Nathan looks around. "What happened?"

"They were here to fix the pipes."

Nathan looks back at the kitchen table. Her pocketbook has been upended, lipstick, billfold, candies, pennies, three prescription vials spread over the table. A low, continuous murmur of Yiddish pours out the radio.

"Were the pipes broken?" he asks.

"I don't know."

"Did they have tools?"

"I don't know."

"How many of them were there?"

She turns her head toward the kitchen, toward the front door, toward the short hallway to the bedroom, as though sending her memory to rewalk the route. "I don't know."

"Two? Three?"

In the darkness she wrings her hands.

A leak of indignation has sprung in him, but he doesn't know where from, or in what receptacle to catch it. The thieves could well have been his clients. He has fought for and won acquittal for men who have done far worse.

"They take all of Joe's things?"

She says nothing.

"When?" he asks.

She turns her head.

"Two days? Three?"

She nods, little bobbles of her chin.

"You've been sitting here for three days? Why didn't you call Milton?

She shrugs.

"You sure you're all right?" No reply. "How much did they get

Nothing still.

"What was in the purse, Rose?"

She holds out her hand. Her lip is quivering now. Her voice like the cry of a cat. "Maybe five dollars."

He walks back toward the bedroom. His name is called behind him. "Are you hungry?"-an old routine: she hasn't cooked in years.

"I already ate."

"I can heat up some eggs."

He stops along a wall and is confronted with his genealogy, everything aslant, a gallery of faces glowing darkly out from behind picture glass dulled with grease. Everyone dead or ceased breathing in that form. Their various guises: ballplayer, graduate, attorney. Milton in his first days as a T-man, turned to display the contents of his shoulder holster. The child he sees beside him, in the Silver Shadow, heading to school, watches the man's massive shoulders and arms jerkily spinning the wheel. Up the boy goes to his knees and, kneeling high, takes measurements with his hand between the man's head and his own, shifting as necessary and craning his neck if need be to make their heights exactly, precisely the same. It is all the boy can be sure of passing off: from the back and at a distance two heads in silhouette are two heads in silhouette, anything the boy desires, a pair of friends, a couple of cops, two grown men and not the father and his little boy that they are. And this man, this boy's mate, pays no attention to the pesky hand hovering around his head.

She clears her throat in the room behind him. "Which one are you looking at?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're looking at the pictures."

"No.”

"I can hear you."

A baby in his mother's arms. "Third from the right."

"That's you."

"That's not me."

"Yes that is. That's you."

Watery eyes stare out at him. At seven years old a wisp of golden hair. He'd forgotten he started out blond. All night he has tried to raise that child's face in his mind, but all he can remember is an old summer in which the huge hand clamps to his as he is led to the Coney Island carnival and the passing image of his own eyes open to the Wonderwheel toppling, its passengers spinning in place. The tattooed girls writhing. Invisible rockets shooting aloft and scattering in colored spiders and dripping, like the caps of gargantuan fools, into the countless eyes, the faceless sea of upturned heads, heads like his. Upturned to his grandfather, Milton's father, Joe, sweet man.

One night early that winter at seven, during the first impressive snow of a winter of impressive snows, Joe and Rose came to stay the night and were given the master bedroom. This was in Queens, before Milton's big cases, before Central Park West. Their modest row-house on a street of row-houses. Nathan's mother moved to Nathan's room and Milton and Nathan moved downstairs to the convertible couch. The actual incidents of the visit are gone from his memory, but Nathan assumes them, as one can: the moments spent passing a fragile coexistence, a faint hostility; ice clinking in glasses, a shiny and crowded dinner, a fire.

Then a blundered moment. A little after midnight, Nathan woke beside his father on the pullout couch and opened his eyes to a succession of threatening sounds. He checked his body with the body at his side, unconsciously mimicked it, calculating the required adjustments. But Milton was sitting bolt upright, yards, hundreds of feet, above him, as still and as silent as though this was the position in which he'd fallen asleep.

The boy, Nathan, reached up. Hands clenched in rage, Milton warded off the touch. There was something deeply wrong. The room gyrated with snow shadows, rained with the blue streetlight. Tree branches and ice chips slid in sinister silence along the walls. Table and chairs turned and danced and all the storm was silent, as though mimed, its fierce howls chained somewhere safely outside. Camouflaged, wrapped by the arms of light, Nathan could not escape if he tried. So he turned, as Milton had turned, toward french doors where beyond there was groaning, whistlng, snorting, and a soliloquy in a strange language. Through the spinning trees and snow in the next room moved the faint image of Joe with an overcoat wrapped perilously around his shoulders. His head bowed, he stuttered, stopped, gestured wildly, then stumbled forward, dragging his feet across the living room floor, and again stopped in a deliberate sort of hesitancy. Milton, no longer immense but merely unwieldy, clumsy, did not scoop and cradle the boy in safety. He did not save him. Instead, the boy watched his father's watching and his grandfather's confused slog into the interpretation of old dreams. In a month the old man was dead.

In the bedroom doorway Nathan finds himself shoulder to a column of pencil markings in the wood, random dates beside each in his grandfather's scrawl, the last just below shoulder level: Mr. Nathan, nine-years-old.

His grandmother's bed is made but the cover is askew, the pillows fluffed and misaligned. The bureau drawers lie overturned on the floor, underwire brassieres and stockings and pennies crushed beneath them. A coffee tin, her secret stash for phantom grandchildren and rainy days, lies empty on its side, its top flung away. Nathan stands looking at it.

"Good thing they didn't get to the coffee can," he calls down the hall.

"They'll never find that."

He squats over it. "How much do you have in here?"

"I'll never tell."

Nathan straightens his leg to get at his billfold and what change he has. He peels off a few bills and restuffs the can.

He returns to the living room and when he grabs her her shoulder seems to come apart in his hands. "You mind if I put on a light?" He tries one lamp then the other. He bends to peer under the lampshades. There are no bulbs.

"When was the last time you had bulbs in these lamps?"

"When was the last time you were here?"

Nathan can't remember. "Hasn't Milton been to visit?"

She says nothing.

"He says he comes every few days to see you." Nathan waits but still no response. Then he didn't tell you about the new case.”

"New case?

"He's a bastard," Nathan says.

"He's my son."

“He's my father."

“You don't talk that way about a father."

"Well."

Nathan sits across from her and stretches his feet before him. He reaches for the back of his head and holds it steady and yawns.

His grandmother cocks her ear toward the hissing drone in the radio.

“You like that," he says.

"Stories for old women. Can't I get you something to eat?"

"I'm all right."

"Here, let me."

“I will. I'll do it. You sit."

In the kitchen he stands before the refrigerator he has known all his days. It once bloomed with life, leaves and fruits and wrapped y meats and eggs with candies and bottles of sugary drinks. Blood sacs of golden yolk. Tonight, a brown banana sits on a wire shelf, kinked and shriveled like a link of old sausage. Nathan rattles around, makes noises.

"Thank you," he says.

"Good?"

"You sure I can't get you something?"

He eyes the phone, considers the call, the money.

“I couldn't eat a thing, honey," she says.

Ashamed, Nathan leaves the phone, walks on.

He takes from his jacket an envelope. He takes out a half dozen sheets of paper and holds them up to the window. Maria Rosa, Last Will and Testament.

His grandmother cocks her head, her eyes blankly attentive.

"What do you have there?"

"Just something I want you to sign for me."

At her side he kneels and sets her fingers around the fountain pen and leads it to the line at the bottom below a signature already there, his. The pen droops, and he sets it upright again and kneads her fingers back into place. Her other hand he takes and straightens, pressing her fingertips to the space she is to fill, guiding her to guide herself.

"What is this?" she asks.

"You're my witness."

"To what?"

Nathan opens his mouth to answer, then shuts it.

"Is it a will?" she asks.

He smooths the papers on his grandmother's knee. "For my corporation.”

"Your corporation."

"Yes.”

"I can't see it," she says.

"You don't need to see it. Here it is."

"But I don't know what it says."

"It says just what you'd expect."

A pulse of sight surfacing one last time through her dead pupils holds him where he kneels, as though to assess and decide. For months after she insisted she could no longer see she gave directions from the backseat of cars and never failed to distinguish the denominations of her money. But now her eyes, drifting, are off by a degree, as though she is searching for something in the next room, for something, an answer, written on the ceiling, to make itself known.

He bears down on her hand, guiding it toward the page.

Meekly: "Who is in your corporation?"

“Me.”

"Just you?"

"Just me."

"Can you have a corporation with just one person?”

"Yes, you can."

"Why would you want that?"

Nathan breathes. "To protect me. They can get to the corporation but they can't get to me."

She reaches out for him and misses. "Who wants to get to you?”

"I wouldn't bother you with it."

They sit for a time in silence. In her presence, an ease of routine gestures and automatic rhythms. The dark and dry heat of this old apartment like a dreamroad in which everything that has gone wrong has not yet begun and everything that will be right is yet to come. The window, he knows, faces east, and beyond the landfill and the harbor lie open water and the horizon. They sit a long time facing that direction. The night, lightning-struck, cracks like glass and is mended back again.

"It will be light soon," Nathan says. He looks nervously at his watch. "Just a few hours."

After she signs she does not pull away, and Nathan does not let her go. Her hand is cool and slack, and they sit holding each other, waiting. He watches the window, she the cei'ling, as if they are bracing for the thunder.

Sometime later she pats his knee. "You're a good boy," she says. "It's a good day when you visit. It's going to be a good day."