Commonwealth

5

An unfamiliar bicycle was parked in the hallway outside her apartment where people were not supposed to park their bikes but of course that did nothing to tip her off. Jeanette opened the door, the grocery bags cutting into her wrists, her coat and boots made heavy and hot by the four flights of stairs, and found her brother sitting on the couch with her son in his lap.

“Look! Look!” her husband said. In his excitement Fodé hugged her before thinking to free her from the plastic bags. Bintou, their babysitter, rushed to wrestle the bags from her other arm and then helped her out of her coat. They treated her like this, the two of them, like she was the queen of Williamsburg.

“Albie?” There was no question that this was her brother but it was the difference between seeing a boy and a man. Albie’s hair, which had been a sweet mess of dark curls, was now a thick braid long enough to make Jeanette wonder if he’d cut it even once since she’d seen him last. And where had the cheekbones come from? There were rumors of the Mattaponi tribe slivered into the DNA on their mother’s side. Maybe the Mattaponi had risen again in the youngest Cousins child. He looked like he was playing the part. “My wild Indian,” Teresa used to say when he would run through the house screaming. Now here he was, as thin and as quiet as a knife.

“Surprise,” Albie said, the word a flat statement of fact: I am surprised to be in your living room. You are surprised that I’m here. Then he added the thing that had been the most surprising to him, “You have a baby.” Dayo, the baby, was holding on to the rope of Albie’s hair. He gave his mother an enormous smile, both to say he was glad she had come back to him and also he was very pleased with their exotic guest.

“Scarf,” Bintou said, and unwound the damp wool from Jeanette’s neck. She plucked the hat from her head and shook off the melted snow. It was February.

Jeanette turned to her husband. “This is my brother,” she said, as if he were the one who had just walked through the door. It felt almost accidental seeing Albie in her living room, the way some other long-lost siblings might run into one another in an airport, at a funeral.

“I saw him on the street!” Fodé said. “He was walking a bicycle away from our building just as I was coming home from work.”

Albie nodded to confirm the implausible story. “He came running after me. I thought he was some crazy guy.”

“New York,” Bintou said.

The good news washed over Fodé, poured from him, the thrill of it still so fresh. “Except I was calling your name, Albie! Albie! The crazy guys don’t know your name.”

Jeanette wanted nothing but to step into the hallway for five minutes and pull her thoughts together. The room was too cramped: Albie and Dayo sat on the couch like guests while she and Fodé and Bintou remained standing. Had they just now come in the door or had they been waiting for her for a while? How much of their discussion had she missed?

“You were just walking down the street?” she said to Albie, My street, of all the streets in all the world?

“I was coming to see you,” he said. “I rang the bell.” He shrugged as if to say that was it, he’d tried.

“But he rang the wrong bell,” Bintou said. “It didn’t ring here.”

Then Jeanette turned to her husband. None of this made sense. “So how did you know it was my brother?” There were no pictures of Albie in their apartment, and certainly Fodé had never met him. Jeanette tried to think of the last time she’d seen her brother. He was getting on a bus in Los Angeles. He was eighteen. Years and years and years.

Fodé laughed, even Bintou covered her mouth with her hand. “Look at yourself,” he said.

She looked at her brother instead. He was an exaggeration of her: taller, thinner, darker. She wouldn’t have said they were too much alike except when compared to the West Africans in the living room. Funny to think of someone in the apartment looking like her when Dayo looked like no one but his father and babysitter. When Bintou met her at the door at night, Dayo bound to her chest ingeniously with yards of bright-yellow cloth, Jeanette couldn’t help but think, Really? This is my son?

“Do we look that much alike?” she asked her brother, but Albie didn’t answer. He was trying to unlace the tiny fingers from his hair.

“I wanted to wait and see you so happy,” Bintou said, squeezing Jeanette’s arm. “Now I’ll go. Family time.” She leaned over the baby and kissed the top of his head repeatedly. “Tomorrow, little man.” Then she added something else in Susu, a few swooping words of birdsong meant to connect him to Conakry and the motherland.

“I’ll walk her,” Fodé said. “Then you’ll have time.” He had to leave them. He could not possibly contain his good cheer another minute, his elation in the face of visiting family. He put on Jeanette’s coat and hat and scarf because they were there, because Fodé had very little sense of what was his and what was hers. “Goodbye, goodbye!” he said, waving and then waving again, as if he would be walking Bintou back to Guinea. There was pageantry in the smallest of Fodé’s departures.

“Explain this,” Albie said once the door was closed, the two sets of footsteps receding down the stairs, the animated elegance of French drifting behind them. Fodé and Bintou spoke French when they were alone. “They’re a couple?”

Jeanette hated to admit it but it was better once they’d gone, just having the extra space in the cramped room, the extra air. “Fodé’s my husband.”

“And he has two wives?”

“Bintou’s our babysitter. They’re both from Guinea, they both live in Brooklyn. It doesn’t make them a couple.”

“You believe that?”

Jeanette did believe that. “You don’t need to look for ways to make me crazy. Just seeing you is enough. Does Mom know where you are?”

He ignored her. “So this one’s really yours.” He held out his arms as far as his braid would allow and waggled Dayo back and forth while the baby laughed and pumped his legs up and down. “Can’t you just imagine what those old Cousinses would have to say about this? They’d make you give him to Ernestine.”

“Ernestine’s dead,” Jeanette said. It was the diabetes — first her foot, then she was blind. Her grandmother had tallied Ernestine’s losses in her annual Christmas letter until finally the news came of the housekeeper’s death. Jeanette hadn’t thought about Ernestine much since then, and in the clear picture of Ernestine’s face so suddenly returned she could see her own disloyalty. Ernestine had been the only person in her grandparents’ house Jeanette had ever liked.

Albie sat with this information for a minute. “Anybody else?”

Other people had died, of course they had, but she couldn’t think of any people who were Albie’s people. She shook her head. The baby began to stuff her brother’s braid in his mouth and so she took him, not sure that Albie would want the baby’s saliva in his hair, not sure she wanted that hair in the baby’s mouth. She offered Dayo her wrist and immediately he began to work it over with his sore gums, his few teeth cutting against her skin. He turned his eyes up to stare into her eyes as he sucked and chewed. There was something about the gnawing that settled her, brought her back to herself, to this room, this moment.

“If you were going to have an African baby, couldn’t you at least have named him something a little less African?”

Jeanette brushed her fingers along the plush density of her son’s hair. “To tell you the truth I named him Calvin, but it turns out I could never bring myself to call him that. For a long time we just called him ‘the baby.’ Fodé was the one who started calling him Dayo.”

Albie’s spine straightened involuntarily, then he leaned down to look into the baby’s eyes. “Cal?”

“Where have you been?” Jeanette said.

“California. It was time to go.”

“California all this time?”

Albie gave a small smile at such an impossible thought, and in that smile she saw something of the brother she had known. “Not even close,” he said. The sleeves of his black sweater were pushed up towards his elbows, showing off patterned bands of black tattoos that circled his wrists in wide bracelets. Everything was black: the tattoos, the sweater, the jeans, his work boots. Jeanette wondered if he had kohl around his eyes or if his lashes were just very dark.

“So do you live here now?” That wasn’t the question, but then there was no single question.

“I don’t know.” He reached out and touched his finger to Dayo’s chin, making the baby laugh again. “We’ll see how it goes.”

Then she saw the duffel bag in front of the couch, inches away from the toe of her winter boots. She had somehow overlooked it by looking so intently at him.

Albie shrugged as if none of it had been his idea. “Your husband said I could sleep on the couch until I find a place.”

It would have to be the couch, unless it was the coffee table or the single armchair where Fodé studied or their tiny kitchen table. The baby slept with them in the bedroom in a bassinet wedged in between the bed and the wall. If she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night she worked herself out of the blankets and crawled off the foot of the bed. Jeanette sat down on the couch, and the baby, who was just starting to crawl, stretched his arms away from her in an effort to get to the floor. She put him down.

“It’s not like I’ll ever be here,” Albie said.

It was the closest he could come to an apology and it startled her, because even though they didn’t have the room or the time or the money to keep him, even though she did not forgive him for disappearing for the last eight years with only the occasional postcard to let them know he wasn’t dead, the thought of his going made her want to get up and lock the door. How many nights must he have needed a place to go but never called her or Holly or their mother? If he was with her now it meant that something had changed. The baby had hold of the zipper on the duffel and was trying to figure it out. “You’ll be here,” she said.

* * *

Albie and Jeanette were not from Virginia. They had both been born in California and in that sense the two of them had been a team, albeit a team neither one of them wanted to be on. Jeanette had applied for her first passport when she was twenty-six, after she had gotten pregnant, after she and Fodé were married. He wanted to take her to Guinea to meet his family. The question that made her stop as she filled out the forms in the post office was Place of Birth. What she wanted to write was not Virginia. Not Virginia was where she was from. Cal had tortured Albie and Jeanette with the lesser state of their birth. “Take a good look around,” Cal had said once when they were driving to Arlington from Dulles, the passing landscape a multidimensional shade of green never witnessed in Southern California. “They only let you in now because you’re little. Dad got permission. Once you’re older they’ll stop you in the airport and put you back on the plane.”

“Cal,” their stepmother said. Just his name. She was driving and she didn’t want to get into it but she flashed her big Jackie Onassis sunglasses in the rearview mirror to show him she meant business.

“They’ll send you back too,” he said to her, his face turned to the window. “Sooner or later.”

After Cal died, there was never any mention of Jeanette and Holly and Albie going back to Virginia. Every now and then their father would fly out to Los Angeles and take them to SeaWorld and Knott’s Berry Farm, take them to that restaurant in West Hollywood where girls swam in the giant fish tank along the wall while you ate your dinner, but the endless unsupervised summers of the commonwealth were over. Albie, of course, moved back later for a single, disastrous school year after the fire, and Holly went back for two nights as an adult in an attempt to measure just how much peace and forgiveness she had mastered through the dharma, but Jeanette wrote off both the state and its residents, including, but not limited to, her father, both sets of grandparents, her uncles and aunts, a handful of first cousins, her stepmother, and her two stepsisters. Goodbye to all that. She hunkered down with what she considered to be her real family: Teresa, Holly, and Albie — the three people who were with her in the house in Torrance when she brushed her teeth at night. It was a funny thing but until that point she hadn’t fully understood the extent to which her father was gone, that he had left them years ago and would never come back unless it was to spend the day at an amusement park. Her mother slept alone in her room like Albie slept alone in his. Jeanette, thank God, had Holly. She would lie in her bed at night watching Holly breathe and make a promise to herself to hate Albie less. Even if he was simultaneously irritating and unknowable, he was also her brother, and she was down to just the one.

But those were lean years for emotional charity, and no matter how many nights Jeanette tightened down on her resolve to be kinder, kindness failed. Without her father, without Cal, the four remaining members of the Southern California Cousinses became more profoundly themselves, as if whatever social ability each had achieved in his or her life had been wiped away in the time it took a bee to sting a boy. The speed at which their mother ran from work to school to the grocery store to home had doubled. She was always arriving, always leaving, never there. She couldn’t find her purse, her car keys. She couldn’t make dinner. Holly found a box of cancelled checks in the desk drawer in the living room and practiced her mother’s signature, Teresa Cousins, Teresa Cousins, Teresa Cousins, until she could do it with exactly the right amount of pressure, the pen angled perfectly against the paper. Holly’s hard work at the art of forgery meant they could still go on field trips and turn their report cards back in. Holly, who believed in credit where credit was due, took her good work straight to her mother, and Teresa put Holly in charge of paying the bills without ever telling her if it was punishment or reward. Teresa’s inabilities in household accounting were legendary, going back to the time when she and Bert were happily married. Before Holly took over the checkbook, third notices and disconnection warnings arrived in the mailbox and were promptly misplaced, so that once or twice a year the house snapped into darkness. The electricity wasn’t such a loss if you didn’t count the television, and candles flickering in the middle of the table while they ate cereal for dinner made them think of the very rich and the very much in love. But when the toilets stopped flushing and the showers went dry, well, that was intolerable. Everyone agreed the water bill had to be paid on time. Holly, who at almost fourteen was good at pretty much everything, was good at math. She started balancing the checkbook the way she’d been taught in home economics (a class that had also enabled her to do emergency mending and make inventive casserole suppers). When she was able to identify the disaster that was their financial state, she taped a rudimentary budget to the refrigerator every week just like her teacher Mrs. Shepherd had told the girls they would need to do later on in their married lives. The last line Holly wrote in red Magic Marker: This is what we have to spend: $___. Even Albie paid attention to that.

For her part, Jeanette dragged the kitchen stepladder out to the backyard and pulled the low-hanging oranges off the trees, then carried them back to the kitchen in a bucket to make juice with the old metal juicer. It was a lot of work but she did it because orange juice was the way it used to be in their family. At night their mother took the pitcher out of the refrigerator and made herself a screwdriver. She never asked which one of them had been so thoughtful as to make orange juice, and Jeanette, unlike her sister, couldn’t bring herself to say. Their mother was still capable of responding to a situation — had she spilled the pitcher of juice she would have mopped it up — but she exhibited zero curiosity. She never wondered about anything except Cal.

For the most part she didn’t talk about Cal, but there were little things that gave her away, like the fact that they used to get stacks of Tombstone frozen pizzas from the grocery store and now their mother visibly flinched if they so much as walked by them in the freezer aisle. Was it because Cal had eaten so many Tombstone pizzas with sausage and pepperoni, or was it really just the name she couldn’t stand? Not discussed. Now they called for delivery and the pizzas came to the door.

But then one night when they were all eating pizza and watching television, their mother came right out and said what was always on her mind. “Tell me about Cal.” They had been watching an old Jacques Cousteau program. It had nothing to do with anything.

“What about him?” Holly asked. They really didn’t know what she meant. It had been more than six months since he’d died.

“What happened that day,” Teresa said, and then added, in case they didn’t understand what she was talking about, “At your grandparents’ house.”

Had no one ever told her? Hadn’t their father explained things? It wasn’t fair that everything fell to Holly but it did. Jeanette kept her eyes on her plate, and Albie, well, Albie didn’t know the story either. That was when Holly was grateful to Caroline for having given her a script to follow. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known what to say. She told her mother the girls had left the house after Cal because Franny decided she wanted to go back and change into long pants because of the ticks, and how there were two ways you could go to the barn from the Cousinses’ kitchen door, how Cal and the girls had taken different routes because they found him when they were coming back. Her mother knew the Cousins house, of course. She and Bert had been married on the front porch and danced in front of two hundred guests beneath a tent on the lawn. There was still a cream-colored leather album of wedding pictures in the hall closet. Their father was handsome. Their mother, freckled and pale, with her tiny waist and dark hair, had been like a bride in a fairy story, a child bride.

“Why would you wait for her to change her pants?” their mother asked. “Why wouldn’t her sister have waited with her?”

“Caroline did wait,” Holly said. “We all did. The girls stayed together.” She told her they saw him lying in the grass, and how at first they thought he was playing a joke. The other girls ran back to the house but Franny stayed with Cal just in case.

“Just in case what?” Teresa didn’t like the fact that it was Franny who stayed.

It was hard for Holly to say the words because they came from a time in her life when she still believed in the possibility of a different outcome. “In case he woke up,” she said.

“I saw it,” Albie said, still looking at the television screen. It was a commercial, a pretty woman spreading peanut butter onto a slice of bread.

“You didn’t see anything,” Holly said. Albie hadn’t been with the girls and he hadn’t been with Cal either. Albie had been asleep. On this point everyone was clear.

“I left before you got there. I saw everything that happened before you came.”

“Albie,” their mother said. Her voice was sympathetic because she thought she understood the way he felt. She too had been shut out of the story.

“You were asleep,” Holly said.

Albie spun around and threw his fork at his sister, threw it like a javelin in hopes of piercing her chest but it bounced off her shoulder without incident. Albie was ten and his gestures tended to be sloppy. “He got shot and I’m the only one who saw it.”

“Albie, stop that,” their mother said. She pushed her hands through her hair. She was regretting having asked them, the children could see that.

“It’s fine,” Holly said, cool and dismissive in a way that made Albie’s head burst into flames.

“It was Ned from the barn!” he screamed. “He shot Cal with dad’s gun. The one from the car, the gun that Caroline got out of the car! I saw it and you didn’t see it because I was the one who was there. They didn’t even know I was there.”

Jeanette and Holly were both crying then. Their mother was crying. Albie was screaming that he hated them, hated them, and that they were liars. That was how it ended.

On that worst of all August days in Virginia, Caroline had already decided to become a lawyer, and so she told the other girls — Holly and Franny and Jeanette — exactly what had happened even though they’d been right there. This was after they had run fast as horses to the house and Ernestine had called the ambulance, after they had taken Ernestine back to Cal. Ernestine, fifty pounds too heavy and in ill-fitting shoes, was running with the girls through the back field while Mrs. Cousins waited at the house to direct the ambulance. Somewhere in all of that Caroline had worked out the story in her head. When did she find time? While they were all still running? Once they were back in the house? Cal was in the ambulance speeding away with the lights spinning and the siren wailing for no reason (oh, but he would have loved it though), and the Cousinses were in their car following Cal’s ambulance to the hospital. Ernestine was trying to find Albie who somehow, in all the confusion, was missing. Their father was running through the parking lot of his law office in Arlington to jump in his car and race to Charlottesville to see his son for the last time. No one knew where Beverly was. That was when Caroline rounded the three other girls into the upstairs hall bathroom of the Cousinses’ house, pushed them in and locked the door behind them. Only Franny was crying, presumably because she had spent those extra fifteen minutes with Cal while the other girls had run to the house and then run back again. Franny alone understood that Cal was dead. Even the people from the ambulance wouldn’t say the word dead when all they had to do was look at him. Caroline told her sister to shut up.

“Listen to me,” Caroline said, as if they didn’t always listen to Caroline. She was fourteen that summer. Her voice was sharp, rushed. Flecks of cut grass were stuck to her legs and tennis shoes. “We weren’t with him, do you understand me? Cal went to the barn by himself. We came up later and we found him in the grass right where he was, and when we found him we ran straight back to the house to tell. That’s all we know. When anyone asks us, that’s what we say.”

“Why do we have to lie?” Franny said. What was there to lie about when they weren’t supposed to lie anyway? Weren’t the facts of the day bad enough without compounding them? Caroline, with the full force of her frustration at both the circumstances and Franny’s stupidity, slapped her sister hard across the face. Franny hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t braced herself, and the blow spun her sideways and knocked her head into the door of the linen closet. The knot on her left temple began to inflate before their eyes. It would be one more thing to explain.

Caroline was irritated by the crack her sister’s head had made against the door when she was working to keep them quiet. She turned back to Holly and Jeanette, the more reliable two. “We can be as upset as we want. They’ll expect us to be upset. But we’re upset because we found him, we’re upset because it happened, that’s all, not because we were there.” At that moment she could have told them that their only way out was to grow tails and swing through the trees and they would have done it. Caroline was thinking of their culpability, and maybe, because she was Caroline, how it might affect her own college admission. She would be in high school in the fall.

“Tell me again what happened,” Teresa said one evening to Jeanette. By this point it had been well over a year since Cal died. As a rule the people in her family didn’t ask Jeanette anything. Holly was studying at a friend’s house down the street, and Albie was riding his bike with the pack of boys he had recently assembled. Jeanette and her mother were for the moment alone together even though they were pretty much never alone. Her mother said it so casually, like it was just another thing she’d forgotten. Where is my lipstick? Who was that on the phone?

Jeanette could still see Caroline in the bathroom, hear the barking clarity of her directions. She could see how sweat had dampened Caroline’s hair at the temples and soaked through the collar of her yellow T-shirt. But she couldn’t see Cal anymore. In just a year his face had slipped away from her. “I wasn’t there,” Jeanette said.

“But you were there,” her mother said, as if Jeanette had forgotten.

“If you want to find the person who did it, you have to ask the same questions over and over again,” Franny had told Jeanette one summer when they were in Virginia. It was years ago, before Cal died. It was one of the police skills Franny was trying to teach her, along with breaking into cars and taking apart the phone receiver so that you could listen in on other people’s calls without their knowing. “Sooner or later someone always slips up,” Franny had said.

Jeanette wondered if her mother was trying to slip her up.

“He got tired of waiting for us,” she said. “He was going to go see the horses and we were going to catch up.”

“You caught up,” her mother said.

Jeanette shrugged, an awful gesture given the circumstances, disrespectful. “It was too late.” It was after Cal died that her mother finally lost her freckles, as if even they had abandoned her. Jeanette was looking at the bridge of her mother’s nose, trying to stay focused, trying to remember what she had looked like before all this happened.

“So who gave the pills to Albie?” their mother asked.

“Cal,” Jeanette said, surprised by how good it felt to tell the truth about something. “He always did that.”

With all that had happened that day, no one cared that Albie was missing except Ernestine. After checking in the attic and the cellar, she said he must have gone with Beverly. No one knew where Beverly was. She’d taken one of their grandparents’ cars and hadn’t told anyone she was leaving. If she’d gone into town she must have taken Albie with her. If it had been any other day the very thought of Beverly taking Albie with her anywhere, ANYWHERE, would have cracked the girls up.

* * *

The Goddamn Boys on Bikes is what the neighbors in Torrance called them, and later it was what they called themselves. They heard the words yelled after them as they cut over lawns, flashed between cars to the high-pitched skid of slamming brakes, swooped across grocery-store parking lots in fast, tight circles for the pleasure of terrorizing the mothers with loaded carts. People simultaneously wanted to kill them, believed that they had almost killed them, and were afraid of being killed by them. Albie, a member of the Mattaponi tribe, Raul, El Salvadoran born on this side to parents born on that side, and two black kids, the smaller, handsomer, sleepier-looking one called Lenny and the other, the tallest of the four, Edison. They had all started riding together when they were eleven and ten, when they were still just irritating boys whose mothers wanted them out of the house in the afternoon. They were dangerous right from the start, forcing the cars they cut in front of to swing hard into people’s lawns. One car jumped the curb and went straight into a phone pole while the boys sailed on, whooping the way they imagined the Indians would. The summer they were mostly twelve a car door opened unexpectedly and sent Lenny straight up in the air. The other three slammed on their brakes in time to see their young friend tumble gymnastically across the backdrop of blue sky. It should have killed him, would have killed him had he landed anywhere near his head, but instead he reached out his right hand to catch himself and snapped his wrist so that the bone came through the skin. Albie crashed not two weeks later, a sudden downpour pulling up the oil embedded in the pavement and sending his bike spinning out from under him. Albie broke his shoulder and tore back one ear, which required thirty-seven stitches to reattach. Edison and Raul pedaled carefully around the bike paths in the park for the rest of the summer, scaring no one, not even themselves. Edison came to Albie’s house to visit and stood beside the recliner in the darkened living room. Albie had to stay in the recliner pretty much all of the time because of his shoulder.

“Everybody has a bad summer sometimes,” Edison said, and Albie, who knew this to be true, gave his friend a Tylenol with codeine while they watched cartoons.

By the time they had graduated from Jefferson Middle School, Albie and Lenny and Edison were fourteen and Raul was fifteen. They were tall but not as tall as they would be. From a distance it was impossible to tell if the bicycles were ridden by boys or men. They went too fast, and since they were always trying to see which one could outdo the other, the pack of them shifted in furious rotation, like the lead men in a race.

The Goddamn Boys on Bikes stole less candy after middle school, concentrating instead on the cans of Reddi-wip they slipped into the kangaroo pockets of their sweatshirts when they went to Albertson’s. Later they would ball up together on the floor of Albie’s bedroom to take in the small, sweet kick of fluorocarbons, or huff airplane glue from paper lunch bags. Each of the four mothers despaired at the bad crowd her son had fallen in with and, with the exception of Teresa, each of the mothers believed the other boys were entirely to blame.

Then one hot day in the summer they were mostly fourteen, Raul’s bike slipped its chain. They were miles from home, on a narrow service road that ran beside a field that stretched out wide behind an industrial park. The boys waited while Raul squatted beside his bike and worked on the chain. The field was unmown and given over to tall grasses and various weeds, all of which had died months before. That was Torrance. Albie lay on his back on the pavement, which was maybe two degrees away from being hotter than he could stand. It felt good on his shoulder. He wished he had sunglasses but none of them had sunglasses. He took a blue Bic lighter out of the giant buttoned pocket of his long shorts. He had a little pipe in there too, with a little wooden slide over the tiny mesh basket, but that was just for show. He was long out of pot and out of the money he had stolen from Holly’s babysitting stash to buy more, so instead of getting high he raised his arm straight up and flicked his lighter at the sun.

“What?” Lenny asked. He had tried to sit on the pavement but it was too hot. He couldn’t believe that Albie was lying on it.

“Fire communicates with fire,” Albie said, thinking that sounded profound. Then he turned his head to the right, towards the field, and saw two brown moths dipping over the dry grass, and just like that he brought his arm straight down to the right, the Bic flame turned to high, and touched the fire to the grass.

This was a field made to be burned. The flame licked at Albie’s wrist as he snatched his hand away and rolled twice across the pavement before jumping up and grabbing his bike. The fire made a whooshing sound and then an ecstatic crackling like stiff sheets of cellophane balled up by human hands.

“Fuck, man,” Raul said, stumbling back. “What did you do?” They were pulling their bikes farther and farther away, swinging a leg over to get out of there but none of them turned to go. All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where there was grass and not bothering them at all on the pavement. The fire came as high as their waists, their chests, gorgeous beyond anything they’d seen, the rippling orange sheets hanging in the air like a desert mirage, like something that was there and not there. Black smoke curled above the flames, announcing to the neighborhood this very private thing that Albie had made. Fire! Fire! they’d be calling in the industrial park, even though it was already starting to die out around the edges. The fire needed so much. The boys could see it looking for more grass, anything to keep itself alive. It would have happily burned them up if it meant going for another minute.

“We should get out of here,” Edison said, though for all the world it sounded like, Would you look at that?

Forget the whip-its, the huffing, the pot. Forget the bikes even. From that first minute all they wanted was primordial fire. In the distance they heard sirens. Yesterday they would have ridden towards the noise, followed the bright-red trucks to the action like a bunch of little groupies after a band. Today they were the action, and they knew enough to get the hell out of there.

It was his grandfather Cousins who had first taught Albie and Cal how to make match guns one summer in Virginia. All the device required was an old-fashioned spring clothespin, a couple of rubber bands, a box of kitchen matches, and a scrap of sandpaper. The boys had been instructed to pay attention to the unspeakably boring old man, who had been instructed to impart some piece of family wisdom to the boys. A match gun was what he’d come up with. It meant something different in Virginia, of course, where at least for that one freakish summer of incessant rain the world had been rendered deep and lush and essentially fireproof. In Virginia people stored wood in the garage in the hopes that one day it would be dry enough to burn. Having made their guns, their grandfather adjusted a match into position and, zing, sent the missile sailing off the front porch in a pretty arc of flame.

“Never in the barn,” their grandfather had said to them when he handed over his invention. “In fact, never by yourselves. Are you listening to me? If you’re going to shoot matches, I have to be with you.”

Cal was underwhelmed. Whenever he got the chance he took his father’s handgun out of the glove compartment and stuck it in his tube sock under his jeans, tying the butt to his ankle with a tight bandanna. He was wearing it that day on the front porch while his grandfather fussed over the clothespin.

But Albie didn’t have a gun and so the little flame thrower held his interest, enough that when he tried to reconstruct one from memory five years later in Torrance, he found he could. Spreading out his materials on the dining room table, he made a match gun for each member of his posse. After a single practice session in Edison’s backyard, in which they burned up paper towels and Kleenex laid out on the grass at varying distances, they set fire to a mountain of empty cardboard boxes banked behind the liquor store and two dead shrubs in front of an Exxon station. On the days they got up early enough, they shot matches into the newspapers that waited on the sidewalks and front steps of their neighbors’ homes. When they were much better at it they shot those papers while on bikes. They took a city bus all the way to the Sunset Strip and shot matches into the palm trees, standing back to wait for the rats to tumble down the slender trunks as the dried out fronds burst into flames overhead. They tried to shoot the rats but that never worked. Rats were fast and not particularly flammable.

All through the summer they set things on fire despite the drought and the winds, despite the roadside admonishments of Smokey Bear. Fuck Smokey. They weren’t interested in anything as sloppy as a forest fire. They liked precision, the art of flame, the single burning newspaper, one abandoned lot. They lit matches through the first two months of their freshman year at Shery High. As shoplifters they had had a spotty record, but as arsonists they were remarkably adept at not getting caught, or they were until they set their school on fire.

Raul had art last period on Fridays, a peaceful moment at the end of his week in which he was free to draw meticulous dragons breathing fire into trees. Just before he left the classroom, in the second after the bell rang and everyone began to shove their notebooks frantically into their backpacks, he leaned over and flipped the catch on the window sideways, to the unlocked position. The art room was in the basement of the school and the windows were big and at ground level. No one was looking in his direction and so no one saw him do it. He did it only because he could. Miss Del Torre the art teacher would turn it back before she went home, or if she didn’t think to do it, and Miss Del Torre was an idiot so who knew, the janitor would do it when he mopped up after school.

“I want to go see something,” Raul said to the other boys on Saturday morning. Nothing else was going on and so they didn’t even bother to ask him what it was he wanted to see, they just got on their bikes and followed him over to school. He led them behind a low hedge that blocked the window’s view to the street and, looking into the art room, Raul pushed on the glass, barely tapped on it, and the window swung open. Albie, elated by the possibility of an interesting Saturday, dragged the four bikes behind the hedge, while Lenny, who was smallest, squeezed through first. Once he was inside and straightened up he smiled at them through the glass, and waved. He found another window at the other end of the room that opened wider, a portal to another world, and one by one the Goddamn Boys on Bikes slipped inside.

There was no explanation for how the school, which was the major source of misery in their lives, could have been transformed into the most compelling place on earth simply by virtue of its being Saturday. What a difference a day makes, Albie’s mother used to sing back when she still did things like that. Twenty-four little hours. The halls were silent and wide without the hordes of furious children and bitter, defeated adults. Without the buzzing overhead lights the sunlight fell down the walls and across the linoleum tiles, collecting in watery pools around their feet. Edison wondered what it would be like to be old, as old as his father, and come back here then. He figured it would be like this, the building entirely his, because he didn’t take into account that other children might be coming in the future. Raul stopped and looked at the winners of the art contest lined up on a cork board. Only two of the pictures were any good: a charcoal drawing of a girl in a sundress, and a small painting of two pears in a bowl. Both had only been awarded honorable mentions while a ridiculous collage of a skyscraper made out of tiny magazine pictures of skyscrapers had won. He wondered if Miss Del Torre, who, it couldn’t be said too often, was an idiot, hadn’t been able to see which of the students had actual talent because there were always too many people around.

They had lost Lenny at some point. None of them had noticed he was gone and then he came back again, walking towards them down the hall. “Guys,” he said, waving his arm as if they might miss him. “Come here. You’ve got to see this.”

The squeak of their tennis shoes echoed in the halls and the sound made Albie laugh, and then they all laughed as they passed the endless row of lockers, all of them closed, all of them exactly the same. “Look at this,” Lenny said, and he turned into the boys’ bathroom.

For a freshman in public high school in Torrance, and especially for Lenny, who was not as tall as the other boys and skinnier despite his efforts, no place was more terrifying than the bathroom. He used every means he could think of to stay out of there, though sometimes he suspected it was thinking about it so much that made him need to go. But this room, which as recently as yesterday had been as foul and dangerous as a junkie’s den, a haze of boy sweat and shit and piss, the acrid stink of boy fear, this room was now perfectly clean. It smelled vaguely, even pleasantly, of Clorox, like a public swimming pool. In fact, the way it was all arranged — the mirrors and sinks on one side, the line of toilet stalls with their green metal doors on the other — had a sort of peaceful symmetry. There was a huge amount of space between the toilets and the sinks so that you wouldn’t have to bump up against any other kid unless that kid was very specifically trying to bump you. For the first time the boys noticed three bands of tiles that went around the entire room, three bands of blue that served no purpose whatsoever except to be decorative. Raul went to a urinal and, tilting back his head with the flow, noticed sunlight. “When did they put windows in here?”

Because no one was around to stop them, they went in the girls’ bathroom as well and found it to be exactly the same, except that the three stripes of tile that ringed the walls were in shades of pink, and instead of urinals there was a Tampax dispenser bolted by the sinks on which someone had scratched the words EAT ME into the white enamel. Someone else had tried, unsuccessfully, to sand it out. The room was disappointing somehow. Even Albie and Raul, who both had sisters, thought there would be more to it than that.

All the supply closets in the school were locked, as was the principal’s office, which was too bad because they would have liked to rifle through the desk drawers. They talked about taking everything out of one classroom and switching it with another, or maybe just moving a few things around to make people wonder if they were losing their minds, but in the end they decided not to touch anything. It felt too good to be in school on Saturday, and if they wanted to come again they were better off leaving everything the way it was.

So it was senseless that Albie dropped his matches in the art room trash can just when they were getting ready to leave. He kept books of matches in his pocket all the time now, to practice opening them up and striking a match with one hand. Then he would give the matchbook a hard shake and put the fire out. Except this time when he lit the match he dropped the whole book in the trash can in the far corner of the room near the window where they had come in, much the same way Raul had flipped the lock open on the window. There wasn’t any reason, no reason for lighting the match or dropping it. It wasn’t to impress the other boys, who were themselves always dropping lit matches everywhere these days. There was no reason that it was in the art room, except that the art room was the room where they happened to be, and really no reason they were in the school on a Saturday in the first place. It was a big metal trash can that took the match, waist high, ten times the size of anything they had in the regular classrooms where all a kid would throw away was a pop quiz he got a lousy grade on. The trash can in the art room should have been empty, everything in the school was empty and clean, but down in the bottom of the green plastic trash liner there were still some crumpled-up pieces of newsprint and a couple of oily rags that had been used to wipe down the paintbrushes after they had soaked in the turpentine, and so the trash can lit up like the very mouth of hell, shooting a flame that made Albie jump back as if on springs and made the other boys turn. The flame caught the nubby green polyester draperies that were double-lined to make the room dark for that point in the semester when Miss Del Torre made a slide-show presentation on the highlights of art history. The draperies were the age of their parents and burned faster than the dry grass in the field, the flames tearing straight up to the acoustical tiles in the ceiling and spreading over the boys’ heads to the other side of the room where the paints and brushes and pastels and papers and jars of solvents waited like Molotov cocktails to explode. The smoke was nothing like the smoke they loved outside. This smoke was somewhere between ink and tar, oily and viscous and black. It came for them, sucking up the air while the clear orange flame sucked up the drapes. The whole room was coming for them now with the fire in every corner. They had entered the room through the window but when they checked the window they found it was no longer an available exit.

They had never set a fire inside before, had never seen one, and so they wrongly used the skills they had developed by setting fires outside: they stood perfectly still and watched, the theory being that they had made the fire and so the fire was bound to respect them. Then the school’s fire alarm went off. They knew that bell, so loud it seemed to be going off inside their brains. They loved fire drills, everything dropped, the girls always so upset because they weren’t allowed to take their purses with them, everyone lined up and rushed outside in an orderly manner. The bell brought them back to their senses. The bell saved them. They had practiced and practiced so that in this moment the boys did what they had been drilled to do: duck low, stay together, run for the door. A flame reached out and caught hold of Albie’s Red Baron T-shirt, burning his back. In the hallway Edison pulled it off him and burned his hand. As they ran for the door, the sprinklers they had never noticed doused the long, empty hallway, dissolving the entries for the art contest. They pushed out the side door, ran into the sunlight, and fell on the grass by the parking lot, gasping and coughing, panting and singed, the smell of smoke ground into their skin. Albie thought for an instant of his brother. He wondered if dying had been anything like this for Cal. The four boys lay there in the grass, tears streaming over their blackened cheeks, so exhilarated by the force of their own lives they were unable to move. That was where they were when, a scant minute later, the firemen found them.

It had been a nearly impossible decision for Teresa to send Albie to Virginia to live with Beverly and Bert. Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable. Beverly and Bert had not killed Cal. Teresa knew this very quietly inside herself. They had been negligent in the details of supervision but as Albie’s most recent catastrophe confirmed, so had she. Still, it felt better to blame them. It felt almost good, although good probably wasn’t the word. She could call Bert up on the phone and ask him, “Does it feel good to blame me for Albie? Is ‘good’ the word?”

What Teresa knew for certain was that she couldn’t keep her second son, and since there was no one else volunteering to take him, she didn’t see what else she could do. In the end, Albie went to Arlington, and when he failed in the private school there he was sent to a boarding school in North Carolina, and then military school in Delaware. He was eighteen the summer he came back to Torrance, a junior in high school given the fact that the boarding school had held him back. Holly and Jeanette were both home from college and tried to take him to the beach, to parties with their friends he might remember, but Albie was lodged like an anvil on the couch, watching game shows and eating bowls of cornflakes covered over with a thick sludge of sugar. He kept his collective communication to twenty words a day. He counted them. He worked his way through the liquor cabinet from left to right, though the cabinet itself had no organizing principle. He never started in on any bottle until he’d finished the one preceding it.

Then one day he claimed to have gotten a call from Edison. His old friend had a job setting up bands in a club in San Francisco, and he said that all Albie had to do was carry the amplifiers off the buses and plug them in. Edison had an apartment with some other guys and Albie could throw a mattress on the floor. Albie seemed to be almost excited about this, as excited as Jeanette and Holly and their mother could remember him being about anything. Lifting things, plugging things in, sounded like a job he was qualified to do, so Teresa bought him a bus ticket to San Francisco and made him a stack of peanut butter sandwiches. Holly and Jeanette each gave him a hundred dollars out of their savings. He loaded his bike underneath the bus with his duffel bag, and Jeanette and her sister and their mother waited until he took his seat by the window so that he could see them wave goodbye. He was going away again. He would be someone else’s impossible problem to solve. They were each privately giddy in their relief.

Fodé came into the bathroom that night while Albie was brushing his teeth, one tap and he let himself in, shutting the door behind him. The bathroom was a good place to talk, even if there really wasn’t the space for two adult men to stand comfortably together. Albie was pressed up against the sink, and Fodé, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt, moved around the stacked plastic milk crates full of folded towels and bath toys and Pampers. “My brother,” he said, “listen to me, I want to tell you, you will stay here with us. A week, a year, the rest of your life, as long as you need to be here, we welcome you.”

Albie had the toothbrush in his mouth, minty foam trailing from his lower lip, when his sister’s husband put a hand around the back of his neck and touched their foreheads together. A tribal custom? A sign of earnestness? A pass? All he knew about his sister was what he dimly remembered from when they were teenagers, and about her crazy African husband he knew nothing at all. Forehead to forehead, Albie nodded. He still needed a place to sleep tonight.

Fodé smiled. “Good, good, good. Your sister needs her family. Calvin needs his uncle. And I could use a brother. I am very far away from home.”

“Sure,” Albie said.

“You can talk to me. That’s what we do. You look around this house, your house, and you think things are busy.” He shook his head. “I am very good at stopping. You say, ‘Brother, stop, come and sit with me,’ and here I am. You tell me what you need.” Then Fodé stopped and looked at him again, his face so close it was difficult to focus. “Albie, what do you need?”

Albie thought about this. He leaned forward to spit his toothpaste into the sink. His head was about to split open. “Tylenol?”

At this small request Fodé beamed, his teeth, his glasses, his broad forehead, so many reflective surfaces for light. He reached across Albie and opened the medicine chest, pointing to the second shelf. “Tylenol,” he said proudly. “Are you unwell?”

“Headache.” His eyes did a quick inventory of what was available, which was pretty much the Tylenol and the pediatric Tylenol, eardrops, eyedrops, nosedrops.

Fodé filled the small yellow cup on the sink and handed it to him, the communal cup. “Soon you will sleep. That’s what will help. You’ve had a long trip home.”

Albie swallowed four pills and nodded, a nod which was also meant to cover thank you and goodnight. Fodé nodded solemnly in return and backed out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. Jeanette had told him where this friendliest of creatures had come from but damned if he could remember, Namibia, Nigeria, Ghana? Then it came to him.

It was Guinea.

Even with the additional incentive of Bintou, who, if she wasn’t actually the second wife of his brother-in-law could probably be made while the baby was down for a nap, Albie could not sit in that apartment for the entire day. For one thing it was tropically hot. The radiator hissed and clanked like someone was beating it to death with a lead pipe down in the basement. Neither Bintou nor Dayo even flinched at the noise but it made Albie want to take off his skin. Small wonder Jeanette and Fodé left for work so early. A humidifier blew a steady mist through the tiny room, very possibly an attempt to re-create a sub-Saharan climate in this Brooklyn terrarium. “Good for the lungs,” Bintou said, smiling when Albie got up to see if it could be turned off. The window that led to the fire escape was jammed and so he went down the four flights of stairs to smoke. The third time he went to smoke he carried his bike with him and rode away into the softly felted snow. By one o’clock he had a job as a bike messenger.

It was the work he found in every city, the only employment he felt that life had prepared him for. He couldn’t even call himself an arsonist since he was now twenty-six and hadn’t so much as set a fire in a fireplace since he was fourteen. When asked when he could start work he said now, and then went on to spend the day figuring out Manhattan. It wasn’t a complicated place.

“I am so proud of you! And this means you will stay. Visitors don’t get jobs on their first day in town. Houseguests don’t get jobs. You are a resident now. One day here and you own the city.”

Jeanette smiled at her brother, a small Jeanette smile, rolling her eyes slightly. Africans, she seemed to be saying. What can you do? She was still dressed in her own work clothes, a skirt and sweater. She had been in her second year of graduate school for biomedical engineering when she got pregnant. Jeanette, it turned out, was the smart one. She had explained to Albie the night before that instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fodé had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having The Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment, she had dropped out of school and now worked as a field service engineer for Philips. She did set-up, instruction, and service for MRI machines in hospitals stretching from Queens to the Bronx.

“I plug them in,” she said flatly. “I show people the manual.” She would have to continue to do so, she explained to Albie last night while making up his bed, despite the mindless, soul-crushing nature of the work, at least until Fodé had finished his doctorate in public health at NYU and Dayo was of an age that it seemed bearable to send him to day care. Dayo care, they called it. “If I don’t go back to school,” she whispered while she tucked a sheet over the sofa cushions, “the radical social experiment will have failed because I’ll have to kill myself.”

Albie held the baby while Jeanette heated up the dinner Bintou had left for them. Fodé set the table and opened a bottle of wine, telling them the story of his day. “Americans love the idea of vaccinating Africans. What could be nicer than a photograph of dusty little Nigerian children lined up for inoculation on the front page of the New York Times? But for their own children the mothers of New York City find vaccinations passé. They say the vaccination is not sufficiently natural, that it could possibly cause something worse than it could prevent. I have spent the day trying to convince women with college educations to vaccinate their children and they argued with me. I must go to medical school. No one will listen to me if I am not a medical doctor.”

“I’ll listen to you,” Jeanette said. “Don’t go to medical school.”

“One woman told me she did not believe in epidemiology.” He covered his face with his hands. “It is appalling.”

“Measles are no longer applicable in New York.” Jeanette patted his shoulder. “We’ve transcended measles.”

Jeanette washed the salad greens. Fodé wrapped the sliced bread in tinfoil and put it in the oven. They worked around one another in the tiny space, each one stepping out of the other’s way.

“Tell me about your day instead,” he said to her. “Let’s think of something better.”

“You want to think about MRI demonstrations in hospital basements?”

Fodé stopped for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. “No, no.” He turned then to his brother-in-law, so pleased to have another opportunity. “What I meant to say is — Albie, please, tell us about your day.”

Albie shifted the weight of his nephew in his arms. He spoke to the baby. “I was stopped by security guards in four buildings today. I showed my ID, was told I could go up, and then I was stopped by a second guard at the elevator who told me I couldn’t go up.”

Fodé nodded with appreciation. “This is most impressive for a white man.”

“And I was almost hit by the M16 bus.”

“Stop it,” Jeanette said, putting a bowl of salad in the middle of the table. “No more about your day either.”

“That leaves us with Dayo,” Albie said.

Fodé took the baby from his arms. “Dayo. There is no one I would rather hear from. My son, tell us, was it a beautiful day to be alive?”

“Uncle,” Dayo said, and held out his arms to go back.

Albie, who had lived close to the edge for so long, and at times had strayed past the edge, looked out the window to see the lights shining down from all those countless Brooklyn apartments. He wondered if this was what people were doing — were they making dinners with their family, holding babies, recounting days? Was this what life was like for them?

Albie’s bicycle was an amalgamation of so many different replacement parts it could no longer rightfully be called a Schwinn. It was his job to deliver small packages and notarized insurance forms and promising manuscripts. Sometimes it was a contract and he was to wait for a signature before riding it back to where it had come from. Sometimes he was asked to sign as a witness. New York was the land of limitless deliveries. There was always someone who had something that needed to be someplace else, and so the day went on until he stopped it. He cut in front of buses and between taxis, startled drivers from Connecticut like the Goddamn Boy on a Bike he had once been. The tourists saw him bearing down on them and hung to the curb. When he arrived at his destination, he lifted his bike onto his shoulder like it was his younger brother and carried it with him into the elevator. While Albie was three inches taller than his father, he was only very tall and not extraordinarily tall. He was, however, extraordinarily thin, and the thinness gave him the illusion of additional height. Often the receptionists would blanch ever so slightly to see Albie approaching their desk with a manila envelope in his hand, the bicycle wearing a dent into his acromion. He was a living skeleton with his black tattoos and his thick black braid, like Death himself had come for them, ready to ride them out on his handlebars.

“You should consider upping your caloric intake,” Jeanette said when he came limping back into the apartment in the evenings.

“Occupational hazard,” he said. True and not true — he’d seen some fat messengers in his day.

Albie made money, and after a couple of months of thinking he would leave tomorrow or the next day, he started giving half of it to Jeanette for rent and coffee and wine and Dayo’s education or her education. The other half he changed into hundreds and folded into the zipper compartment of his duffel. He had tried to give the money to Fodé first but Fodé wouldn’t even look at it. The next day he waited for his sister at the subway station and gave it to her instead. Jeanette nodded and pushed the bills into her pocket.

“Don’t you think we should go into therapy someday?” she said as they went past the yogurt shop, the shoe-repair place, the Korean markets with their buckets of daffodils out front. Maybe she thought he was giving her money for therapy. “Once we were on our feet psychologically we could patch Mom and Holly in on conference calls so they could be in therapy with us.” Albie had told her he wasn’t ready to call their mother yet, but Jeanette had called her. She called Teresa most days from work and told her everything.

“What about Dad?” Albie said. The street was crowded and he put his arm around her shoulder while they walked. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t anything he’d done before but it was nice. They had a similar gait.

“I bet Dad’s been in therapy for years. I bet he’s finished with therapy by now.”

“Without ever conferencing us in?”

Jeanette shook her head. “It wouldn’t have crossed his mind.”

Albie had come to Brooklyn to get on his feet, and in certain respects he was on them now, except for the drinking, which he made possible by taking in limited amounts of alcohol with rigorous consistency, and the speedballs, which got him through the latter half of his days. Smoking didn’t count. Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job. He had saved enough money to find a place of his own but he never looked. Somehow, despite the nearly comical lack of space, Fodé and Jeanette made him feel like he should never go. Dayo wanted to hold on to his legs the minute he walked in the door, to stand with both of his feet on Albie’s foot and wrap his arms around the muscled calf to hold himself up. “Uncle” was his best word, perfectly enunciated. He could not say it enough. Albie liked the couch that was too short for him. He liked the days he would ride all the way home in the afternoon and tell Bintou she could take a few hours off while he took the baby to the park. He liked the feeling he didn’t have a name for when he saw Fodé on the front steps waiting for him late at night with a beer. He would leave them eventually, but until he did he would bring home cold sesame noodles from Chinatown, he would fold up his blankets every morning and put them behind the couch, he would find reasons to stay out late several nights a week in order to ensure their privacy, and when he came home very late, he would turn his key in the lock so quietly that he would never wake them.

“Where were you last night?” Jeanette would ask, and Albie would think, You missed me.

At first Albie went to bars and to movies on his nights out but quickly saw that bars and movies in New York could eat a day’s wages. He stayed at the library until the library closed, and then went to the Christian Science Reading Room until the Christian Science Reading Room closed, and then, depending on the quality of the book he was reading and the amount of speed still hopping him up, he went to the Laundromat that never closed and sat amid the dead moths and thumping dryers and the pervasive smell of dryer sheets. Because he had gotten to know the receptionists at the publishing houses where he delivered envelopes and asked them what they were reading, he always had books. There was no other place Albie delivered to or picked up from that ever gave him gifts, but the receptionists at publishing houses didn’t mind giving a copy of a book to a bicycle messenger, even the bicycle messenger of death.

“Tell me what you think of that,” one would say, and in return he would smile at her. Albie’s smile was a dazzling thing, the wonders of his childhood orthodontia never what one would expect from the rest of the package. With that smile the receptionist felt that she had been given a gift in return.

One night after midnight in the early part of June, Albie was in a Laundromat in Williamsburg. The taxis still rushed by but they were quieter. The people on the street were quieter. Albie was reading the novel he had started the day before, and in reading it he’d lost track of time. It was considerably better than the usual fare of detective stories and thrillers he read, because the receptionist at Viking tended to give him better books. She didn’t just give him what had come out that week either, though sometimes she gave him those too. She’d given him a copy of David Copperfield once and said she thought he’d like it, just like that, like he was the sort of person someone would look at and think of Dickens, and so he read it. It was a book he was supposed to read for school the year he was in Virginia. He had carried it around with him for a month, just like all the other kids in his class carried David Copperfield around, but he’d never cracked it. “If I’d known you when I lived in Virginia,” he told the receptionist after he’d finished it, “I might have passed the class.”

“You’re from Virginia?” she asked. Maybe she was his mother’s age, maybe a little younger, and she was smart, he could tell that. These conversations never lasted more than two or three minutes but he liked her. Albie had places to go and the telephone at her desk never stopped ringing. She picked it up and asked the person if she could put them on hold, which she did without waiting for an answer.

“Not from there,” he said. “I just lived there for a while when I was a kid.”

“Stay right here,” she said. “One second.” When she came back she gave him a paperback called Commonwealth. “It was a very big deal last year, won the National Book Award, sold through the roof. Do you know it?”

Albie shook his head. Last year he was still in San Francisco, the money from messengering then going to heroin. A meteor could have taken out the Eastern Seaboard and he wouldn’t have known about it.

She turned the book over and tapped the tiny photograph of the man on the back. “It was the first book he’d written in fifteen years, maybe more than that. Everybody here had given up on him.” The phone rang. All the hold lights were blinking now. It was time to go back to work. She handed him the book and waved goodbye. He gave his head a small bow, smiling at her before he left.

In retrospect he would say that he knew right from the beginning, maybe the middle of the first chapter, that there was something going on, though everything is clear in retrospect. The nearer truth was that the book had taken hold of him long before he saw himself in it. That was the part that seemed so crazy, how much he had loved the book before he knew what it was about.

It was about two sets of neighbors in Virginia. One couple has been in their house a long time, the other couple has just moved in. They share a driveway. They get along well. They can borrow things from one another, watch each other’s kids. They sit on each other’s decks at night and drink and talk about politics. One of the husbands is a politician. The children — there are six of them altogether — wander in and out of each other’s houses, the girls sleep in one another’s beds. It was easy enough to see where things were going except that it wasn’t so much about the miserable affair. It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness. The children, who seem only to be atmospheric and charming at first, are more like a ball of snakes. The oldest and the youngest are boys and there are four girls between them. Two girls in the politician’s house, two girls and two boys for the doctor whom the politician is in love with. An extra husband, an extra wife. The youngest child, a son, is unbearable. Maybe that’s the real problem. He is emblematic of what can never be overcome. The lovers, with their marriages and houses and jobs, employ any trick to find a moment away together, but what they’re really trying to get away from is the children, and that youngest son in particular. The children, who are so often stuck with the youngest one, give him Benadryl in order to ditch him. The older son carries it in his pocket because he’s allergic to bee stings. They feed the little boy Benadryl and stuff him in the laundry basket under a pile of sheets so they can ride their bikes to the swimming pool in town unencumbered. Isn’t that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?

Albie put his thumb on the page and closed the book on top of it. The Laundromat was quite suddenly cold. There were two young punks, the boy with his hair spiked out with glue, the girl with two safety pins through her nose. They sat and smoked while their black laundry made circles in the washer. The girl gave Albie half a smile, thinking maybe he was one of them.

Did he know it was Benadryl? They called them Tic Tacs but did he know? He woke up under the bed, in a field, in the car, on the couch covered over in blankets. He woke up on the floor of the laundry room in Virginia, buried in sheets. He never knew why he woke up in places he didn’t remember going to sleep in. “Because you’re the baby,” Holly said. “Babies need more sleep.”

His hands were cold. He put the book back in his messenger bag and walked his bike out onto the street, hearing the tick-tick of his spokes, the little punks watching him, thinking he was leaving without his laundry. He knew the next part in the book, the part he hadn’t read, how the older son called Patrick would die, how the younger son had been given all the pills so that when they were needed there would be nothing. He knew that wasn’t even what the book was about.

Albie walked his bike down the street. Did he see himself in the Danish detective novels? In the postapocalyptic thrillers? Was there any chance the problem was that he put himself in the center of everything?

That wasn’t the problem.

When he got back to the apartment it was almost two o’clock in the morning. He went into their bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed, Jeanette and Fodé and Dayo all sound asleep. Maybe their subconscious minds had accepted that he lived there now and so no longer heard the sound of his footsteps, or maybe they were so dead tired at the end of their day that anyone could be standing in their bedroom now and they’d sleep right through it. Even with the shades down there was light in the room. That was New York. Nothing was ever really dark. Dayo was in the bed with them, between them, sleeping on his back. Jeanette had her hand on his chest. It was almost unbearable to watch other people sleep. Had she told Fodé what had happened? She would have told him she had a brother who died but what did he know beyond that? Albie had told no one. Not the boys on the bikes or the messengers he had coffee with in the mornings or Elsa in San Francisco with whom he had shared a needle. He had never mentioned Cal. Albie covered his sister’s foot with his hand, her foot and then a sheet, a blanket, a bedspread. He squeezed her foot and in her sleep she tried to pull away but he held on until she opened her eyes. No one wants to wake up to see a man in their bedroom. Jeanette made a noise that was small and choked, a sound of pure fear that broke her brother’s heart. Her husband, her son, they slept right through it.

“It’s me,” Albie whispered. “Get up.” He pointed to the bedroom door and then went out into the living room to wait for her.