Imagine Me Gone

Alec

As I stepped out of the cabin, whiteness blinded me. The snow-covered yard glistened under the full sun. Icicles lining the roof of the shed dripped with meltwater. The fir trees, which had stood motionless and black against the gray sky, appeared alive again, green and moist in the fresh light. The footprints that Michael and I had made on the snowy path were dissolving, fading into ovals on the flagstone. Beneath our tracks in the driveway I could see gravel for the first time since we’d arrived. For weeks it had been frigid cold, but now had come this December thaw. I wasn’t certain what day it was, or what time, only that it had to be well after noon already.

Across the road stood the young lobsterman’s truck. Brown water seeped from the icy muck caked to its undercarriage. The red tarp covering his woodpile showed through a dome of melting snow. Up the slope, on the roof of his little white Cape, smoke rose from the chimney into the sheer blue.

I had to call my sister. I had to tell her what had happened. Hours had passed already, and still I had spoken to no one.

I began walking toward the village. Past the summer cottages closed up for the season, and the houses of the old retired couples with their porches glassed in and their lights on all day behind chintz curtains. In the deep cold this walk had been silent. But now I could hear the brook as it ran down through the woods, and under the road, emptying onto the rocky beach. I could hear the squawk of gulls, and even the trickle of water at the foot of the snowbanks, each rivulet wiping clean a streak of dried salt on the pavement.

I wanted to hear Seth’s voice. I wanted to hear him describe his day, or simply what he had eaten for breakfast, and tell me about the plans he was making for the two of us for when I returned. Then I could say to him that it would be all right now, that we could be together without interruption. But I hadn’t been able to bring myself to call him, either.

As soon as I spoke, it would be true.

I walked on, my coat unzipped, no hat or gloves, almost warm in the sun. My sister would be up by now out in San Francisco, riding the Muni to her office, or already there. My mother would be running errands or meeting a friend for lunch, or just out walking in this fine weather, imagining and worrying over Michael and me up here in Maine, wondering how long she should wait before calling us again.

At the intersection with the main road that led down into the village, I came to the old Baptist church. The high rectangles of stained glass along its nave were lit up red and orange, as if from within. Its white clapboard steeple was almost painful to look at against the brilliance of the sky. I wondered if the lobsterman and his wife came here. Or if he had come here as a child with his father, or his grandfather, or whether he went to church at all.

The sound that he’d made, chopping firewood in his driveway, it had grated on Michael. The slow rhythm of the splitting. It had brought Michael up off the couch, to the dining room window, to watch and mutter his curses.

Why couldn’t that sound do that again? I thought, in the waking dream of the moment, the unreal state of being still the only one who knew. Why couldn’t that sound summon Michael once more? Needle him, scrape at his ears. Why not? What kind of a person would I be if I didn’t at least try to call him back?

I turned around and started walking fast in the direction I had come, along the strip of road that dipped to the shoreline, up the little rise onto the higher ground, driven by the chance to begin the day over.

At first I thought my mind must be tricking me as I made the turn and saw the lobsterman — he was only a couple of years younger than I was — coming down his front yard in his Carhartt jacket and ball cap. I started jogging toward him, thinking he would disappear if I didn’t make it to him in time. But instead he halted a few yards short of his driveway, and watched me approach his truck. When I reached it I rested a hand against the tailgate, steadying myself.

In the month we had been here, neither Michael nor I had spoken a word to him.

We stood there a moment, facing each other. His arms hung straight down at his sides. His bearded face was strangely still.

“Can I help you?” he asked in a slow, wary tone that made of the question a species of threat.

I gestured with my head, toward the cabin. “I’ve been staying over there.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen you two.”

Come nearer, I wanted to say. I needed him close enough to hit. Or to fall into his arms.

“Something’s happened,” I said, aloud, for the first time. “It’s my brother.”

Closer. Please come closer. But he didn’t, he stood his ground, squinting, uncertain of himself and of me.

Michael

Hello. You’ve reached the voice mail of Dr. Walter Benjamin. I am currently out of the office. If you are one of my patients, please leave your name, a very brief message, and your telephone number, even if you think I already have it, as it may not be handy. I will return your call as soon as possible. Please note that I am out of the office on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and that any messages left on those days will be returned on the following Monday.

If this is an emergency, and you have gone on holiday by accident with your younger brother, in the hope that you might finally tear your eyes away from the scenes you have been fixedly contemplating your entire life, but find instead that a storm blowing in from paradise has become caught in your wings, so that all you can see is the wreckage of the past piling up before you, one single catastrophe, with no future, then please hang up, and contact my answering service.

Finally, if this is about a refill for a medication you require in order to survive, and you have some concern that your request may not reach me in time, and it seems likely that the words you are about to speak into this machine will be your last, then please know that you tried very hard indeed, and that you loved your family as deeply as you could.

Margaret

We’re bound to forget something in the rush. I could pack only so much yesterday with taking Alec to the doctor to get his stitches out, Kelsey to the vet, and stocking up for the trip. But I did all I could, and at least John helped Alec and Celia pick out their books when he got home from work last night. Come hell or high water, we leave at eight thirty sharp. John drums it into the children. He turns it, like everything he does with them, into a game: You’ll be left behind if you’re a minute late and we won’t come back for you! When he parades through the house and calls out, Time to go, they’ll grab what’s at hand, assuming I’ve got the rest, and race for the car to compete over the backseat and the bucket seats, Michael and Celia opening another front in their roving war, Alec running behind toward another defeat at their hands. If he’s not included he’ll whine to quash their fun. Departures speed all their wants and fears, this one most of all: summer vacation, two weeks up on the water in Maine, in a borrowed house.

The babysitter has agreed again to feed the rabbits, the guinea pig, the bird, and even Michael’s snake, which requires her to dangle defrosted mice on the end of a stick. Of the menagerie, only Kelsey comes with us, most unruly of all, and object of the children’s keenest ridicule and devotion. Their untrained mutt of a mascot, who plows through window screens and shits on beds, though I still love her through their eyes.

For the long drive I make them surprise boxes, which I hold back until we’re halfway there, giving them something to look forward to and buying me a half hour’s peace once they’re doled out. The shoe boxes are full of license-plate games, peanuts, and oranges, a little Lego set for Alec, a book for Celia, and a music magazine for Michael. I have to finish putting them together now before they come downstairs or the effect will be lost, and I manage it just a minute before Alec appears in the kitchen asking, What’s for breakfast?

He’s followed by Michael, who walks straight up to his little brother, squeezes his upper arm until Alec cries out for him to stop, and says, “Mom’s in a preparatory mode which means Dad will cook and he only cooks Viennese eggs so that’s what’s for breakfast, you little thing.”

Michael and Celia both treat Alec as akin to Kelsey on the evolutionary scale, a reliable entertainment when properly goaded.

“That hurt,” Alec says, clutching his arm, but Michael’s not listening. He’s at the radio changing the station, flying over news, violins, shouted ads, Dolly Parton, and rock ballads, up the dial and back down again three or four times before he settles on a disco song, his favorite music of late.

“Please,” I say, “not now.”

“We can’t listen to any more baroque music. It enervates the mind. We need a beat.”

Where does a twelve-year-old get “enervates the mind”? From some novel he’s reading, no doubt. Beguiled by the sound of the phrase, he’ll repeat it for a week before latching onto the next one. He tries them out at the dinner table, usually on Alec, who at seven has no recourse that doesn’t confirm his siblings’ conviction that he’s stupid. “I believe you have delighted us long enough,” Michael said the other night, as Alec tried explaining how the teams worked on field day at school. Michael waited a diplomatic second or two before glancing surreptitiously at John and me to see how we’d reacted to his bon mot. Alec kept on about sack racing, until Michael once more pinched his arm.

“Not now,” I say, so he turns the dial back to whatever it is Robert J. Lurtsema is playing this morning on WGBH, and opens the screen door to let a wheedling Kelsey into the yard, following her out.

The sun’s been up more than two hours already—5:17 this morning, a minute later than yesterday — and is already well above the tops of the pines. Finches and sparrows flutter in the square of the birdbath, which sits atilt in my bed of marigolds. It’s a rather ugly object made of coarse concrete, and it looks forlorn in winter holding askew its dome of snow, but this morning with the splashing birds making its water glisten it’s a perfectly pleasant part of the mild shabbiness of the place — the barn with the collapsed rear roof that we have to constantly remind the children they’re not allowed to play under, and the gently crumbling brick patio, where I’ve got the morning glories blooming up the drainpipe, their petals crinkled like linen around their dusty yellow centers.

Kelsey has lit off down the path into the woods — that’ll be another fifteen minutes — but Michael’s declined to follow, instead stopping at the station wagon, where he’s stepped onto the bumper, and, holding the roof rack, is bouncing the car up and down on its rear wheels, as if it were a beast he could coax into forward motion.

John appears spiffed up in one of his jaunty summer outfits, Bermuda trousers, a canvas belt, a blue Izod polo, ready to captain our seafaring adventures. It’s nothing to the children that the house on the mainland and the house on the island and the boat we use to go back and forth are all loaned to us by a partner of John’s, that we couldn’t possibly afford this on our own, not two weeks of it, not a hundred-acre island to ourselves, and mostly it’s nothing to me — a happy gift that we happened to have been given three years running now, a place I’ve come to love. It’s just that not knowing if we’ll have it, or when we’ll have it until what seems like the last minute reminds me how provisional, how improvised our lives here are.

This isn’t the town we were meant to live in, or even the country, and it’s not the place we want to put the children through school. We lived in London and had Michael and Celia there for a reason, because that was John’s home. And it’s where he wants to return. Living here as long as we have is a kind of accident, really. He was sent to Boston on a consulting assignment for what we thought would be eight months, so we rented this house down in Samoset up the street from my mother, in this town we used to come to in the summers, where she moved full-time after my father died, a house it turned out some carpenter ancestor of mine built back when the whole family used to live around here.

Then John’s firm in London went out of business. And here we were. Lots of space for the children to play in. Their grandmother three minutes away, which has its pluses. So John looked for a temporary job, while our furniture stayed in storage back in England. He found one, then another, and then one potentially more permanent in this new business of venture capital, and the life we’d assumed we’d have — urban, with his friends, and the parties — stayed on hold one year after the next, for eight years now, the presumption we’ll return always still with us, up ahead in the distance. Which can leave me feeling in limbo. Though most often, like this morning, when the children are happy and the weather is fine, I don’t want to think too much about it.

Behind the wheel, John wears his tortoiseshell sunglasses, completing his summer look. He’s a showman when he’s on, capable of great largesse. In his sunny moods the winningness flows like water from the tap. He prefers Ellington to Coltrane, Sinatra to Simon and Garfunkel; likes to dance in the living room after the kids have gone to sleep, and find me across the bed in the morning; and he knows he’ll never stop working or earning, because his ideas for new ventures are that good and there are that many of them, such an easy multiplication to perform. And lately I must say he’s been fine, not overbrimming, but more than half full. Steady at work, and he comes home in time for dinner and to see the children, and plays with them on Saturdays and Sundays in the yard, mowing paths in the field for them to ride their bikes on, and clearing paths in the woods, and really it’s fine, however different it may be from the gin-drinks parties at the house on Slaidburn Street, off the King’s Road, and his glittering eyes and well-dressed friends, and so much of that time in London before our wedding.

I knew him naively, then. He wasn’t raised to be understood in the way people think of relationships now. He grew up in the old world of character as manners and form, emotion having nothing to do with it, marriage being one of the forms. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love me. He’s just British about it. I think when he met me he realized he might be able to escape some of that, in private at least. In his eyes, I had that American openness he admires, though in fact by coming to London I was escaping my own old world of coming-out balls and the matrons of Smith College. We were meeting in the middle, I suppose.

“At least we all speak the King’s English.” That’s what his mother said to no one in particular at the dinner table the first time I visited his parents, outside Southampton. She was apparently less appalled at my accent than she’d expected to be. His father had installed a putting green by the side of the house, where he spent most of his afternoons before coming in for a supper he preferred eating in silence. At breakfast, there was the tea cozy, and cold toast in a rack, and at Sunday lunch mint jelly with the dry lamb, and in the evening being asked if I planned on taking a bath. John was and is his mother’s favorite, the oldest, who went to Oxford and into business and wears good suits and understands there are proper and improper ways of going about things, all of which he plays up when he’s around her, keen to reflect back her image of him.

I had a job at a library, out in the suburbs. I’d get up early to catch a train to Walton-on-Thames and then the bus along the high street to the red-brick Victorian fortress, where I’d stamp and shelve books all day, and then reverse the journey, riding back into the city on half-empty trains running against the commute.

A few months ago I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night and it reminded me of what I had missed being away from America for most of the sixties, reading about the violence from overseas and hearing about it from my friends, always at a remove. There was one passage that stuck with me. After the posturing speeches followed by the melee at the Pentagon, once they’ve all been arrested and are being driven out to Virginia in buses in the dark, everyone quiet, Mailer writes it’s in motion that Americans remember. Maybe he could have dropped “Americans” and just said “people.” Either way, it struck me as true. If you think of memory not just as looking back but as being aware of time and how it passes and what the passage of it feels like, then there is something about being in motion that does cause it. Through some sleight of mind, physical forward motion makes time seem visible. Which causes me to think that maybe the unnatural speed of cars and jets actually creates nostalgia. Because the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants.

Like, I suppose, my rides on those nearly empty trains back from Surrey in the early evenings, already dark in winter, passengers across the car visible in reflection on the glass — a fixed memory I carry now as a stand-in for the more particular instances of wanting badly to see John, to be done with the courtship so we could live together and see each other every night as a matter of course.

Or like all of this coming to me now in the car after I’ve handed out the surprise boxes and earned a lull in the children’s impatience for a while, with the windows down and the salt air rushing in on us. Remembering being at a packed, loud party at the flat with John’s roommates, everyone in ties and dresses, on the evening that the fire engines appeared at the building, and we all had to scurry down the four flights of stairs with our sloshing glasses, John running back up to grab his jacket in case the press appeared to cover the impending blaze — a jest to prevent the good cheer from dissipating on the sidewalk, which worked, keeping the laughter going until we got the all-clear and clambered back up to keep drinking.

It was almost grave the way he kissed me in the beginning. His nerves showed like they never did with friends; with them, words were the only currency that mattered. The contrast seduced me as much as anything. The American boys I’d dated in college and immediately afterward brought their offhand confidence into the bedroom, where it struck the same slightly false note that it did in company. John might have wanted to be that smooth, but with me he couldn’t manage it. Which I’ve always decided to take as a compliment. And then, as if he’d betrayed himself in the dark, he’d up the gallantry the next day, appearing at my door with a picnic basket and a borrowed car and driving us into the countryside, where even if no one was around he still wouldn’t try to touch me, as if it proved something about his character. I fell in love watching him do that. I knew the starkness of the difference between his savoir-faire and his wordless, heavy-breathing grasp in private owed something to his never knowing exactly where he stood with me, because he couldn’t interpret me as easily as he could an Englishwoman. By the same token, I couldn’t help wondering if my being an outsider in his world was what drew him most. Which could make me skeptical of him, parsing his words and deeds for signs that he’d noticed or appreciated something about me other than my foreignness.

It was all part of what kept up a sense of mystery between us at the start. That tension of not knowing but wanting to know. You’d think that after seventeen years of being together and three children and moving together from London to a small town in Massachusetts, this kind of mystery would be dead and gone, the ephemera of early love washed out by practicality. And much of it is. He doesn’t charm me anymore. I see how he charms others, how far his accent alone goes in this country to distract and beguile, but it’s not the kind of effect that lasts in a marriage. And I am certainly no escape for him anymore, not in the simple sense of being a departure from familiarity. We fight. We disagree. He indulges the children to curry favor with them, suspending my bans on this or that, leaving me to stand alone as the enforcer. I resent not knowing when or if he’ll decide the time has come for us to go back to Britain, and I resent that it depends on his work. Not all the time, and not that I can fault him for it entirely, but I’m not quiet about it when it gets to me. Like when I’m rummaging through old furniture in my mother’s garage for dressers or side tables because the ones we bought together after our wedding are sitting in storage an ocean away and he doesn’t want to ship it all here since maybe we’ll be returning soon.

And yet there remains mystery between us. What I want to say is that we still don’t know each other, that we’re still discovering each other, and of course because it’s no longer the beginning it isn’t always, or even mostly, a romantic proposition — the not knowing, the wanting to know — but there is the wanting. Certainly there are times when I think maybe it’s one-sided, that he knows just about all of me that he cares to, and that I’m the one who’s still deciphering, which can be its own source of resentment.

Whatever it is, it’s not about nationalities anymore, or his family or mine. It’s what all that stood in for at the beginning without my realizing it. At least until his episode shortly before our wedding.

That autumn of ’63 after our engagement I could tell something was getting to him at work because whenever we met up he’d be more distracted than usual and have less to say. He was the fastest-talking person I’d ever met, that is before Michael started talking, and in the right mood I could just sit back and listen to him go on about the complacency of Harold Macmillan or the latest news in the Profumo affair, he and his friends interrupting and talking over one another, dashing and clever and well oiled with drink. I’d think of my friends who’d gotten married, junior or senior year, to men just like the ones they’d grown up with, headed now to Wall Street or law school, some of them already with three- and four-year-olds, and I’d think, Thank God! I’m not a doll in the house of my mother’s imaginings. I got out. And far.

But during that October John’s clock began to run more slowly. It wasn’t dramatic at first. He didn’t talk much about his work but I imagined it was some pressure there that was tiring him out, making him less inclined to spend evenings with friends. He just appeared let down, that was all. Harold Macmillan resigning as prime minister was the sort of thing he would usually have been reading and talking about furiously but he showed barely any interest. It was the evening Kennedy was shot — evening in Britain — that I thought to myself something must be the matter with him because when I appeared at his flat in tears he hugged me and sat me down on the couch and tried to calm me, yet it didn’t seem to have reached him at all. I didn’t expect him to cry — it wasn’t his president — but it was as if I’d told him a distant uncle of mine had expired, obliging him to pat me on the shoulder. It was unnatural.

Three weeks later I sailed back to New York for Christmas. I stayed just under a month. We wrote several times a week. Daily bits and pieces but lots of fond things, too. There were some particularly ardent ones from him — as strong about how he loved me as he’d ever said or written before.

I didn’t understand what his flatmate was saying when I called the day I got back to London and he told me that John had been admitted to the hospital.

“Has he had an accident?” I said.

“No,” he said. “But perhaps you should call his parents.”

I phoned right away. His mother handed the receiver to her husband with barely a word. “Yes,” he said. “We were rather hoping all this business was done with. His mother finds it most unpleasant.”

I had nothing to prepare me. John sat in what looked like an enormous waiting room with clusters of chairs and coffee tables, all those waiting being men, most of them reading newspapers or playing cards or just gazing through the filmy windows. His face was so drained of spirit I barely recognized him. If he hadn’t moved his eyes I would have thought he was dead.

The room got only northern light and the shades were half pulled. It just made no sense to stay in that tepid, dingy atmosphere so I said, “Why don’t we go for a walk?” I had to leave there to plant my feet back in reality, and to bring him with me.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. It turned out this wasn’t the first time he’d been hospitalized. His second year at Oxford he’d had to leave for a term. Since then — almost ten years — he’d been generally fine. He’d been the man I’d met. Now, utterly unlike that person, he barely spoke. He just held my hand as we walked through Hyde Park, the ghost of John in John’s frame.

He had to rest, he said. He was tired. That was all. But I knew that couldn’t be it, or was only half true. Being the pushy American, I made an appointment to see his doctor. This was most surprising to the staff, “But all right then,” he would speak with me.

I remember the man’s blue checked cardigan and square glasses, and his thick black hair brushed back with Brylcreem. I couldn’t tell if the room where we met was his office or just a space for meetings off the ward. The books on the shelves were arranged in desultory fashion and there were no diplomas on the walls. But he seemed comfortable and settled there and offered me a smoke before showing me to the couch. He sat opposite and attended mostly to the tip of his cigarette, which he flicked frequently against the rim of the sea-green ashtray nestled in its tarnished brass stand.

“He’s doing reasonably well,” he said, glancing upward with a slight nod of the head, hoping perhaps that would settle it.

“But why is he here? Can you tell me that?”

“How long have the two of you been together?”

“A year and a half.”

He thought about this for a moment, as if deciding how to proceed.

“There’s an imbalance,” he said, crossing his legs and resting the hand that held the cigarette on his knee. He wore cuffed wool pants and brown leather brogues. He must have been twice my age. Between the absence of any white lab coat and the slow, considered pace of his conversation he struck me as a professor more than a doctor.

“You could say his mind closes down. It goes into a sort of hibernation. He needs rest and sometimes a bit of waking up, which may not be necessary right now, but which we can do if it becomes so.”

“And it’s happened before.”

“Yes, it would have done.”

“And that means it’ll happen again?”

“Hard to say. It could well do. But these things aren’t predictable. Stability, family — those things help.”

I think that’s when I was closest to crying. I hadn’t spoken to anyone about what was happening. Not more than to mention and excuse it in the same breath, to say that all was well. But in that room with that man whose English kindliness undid something in me, I suddenly felt afraid and homesick, and probably I did cry for a moment. “We’re supposed to get married this spring,” I said.

He tapped his cigarette again against the lip of the ashtray, then slowly changed the cross of his legs, his shoulders and head remaining perfectly still. He pondered my statement for such a long time that I wondered if he’d heard me. Then he looked up with gentle eyes and asked, “In that case I presume you love him?”

I nodded.

“Well, then, that’s as it should be,” he said.

I went to the ward in Lambeth every afternoon and we took a walk together, even if it was raining. The light in that room was a kind of malpractice. I never saw or spoke to the doctor again. It was hard to get information from anyone. Asking questions wasn’t the proper form. It was the same way a couple of years later when I gave birth to Michael at St. Thomas’s, everyone perfectly pleasant but with nothing but blandishments to offer.

John stayed on the ward for a month. His father visited once, his mother not at all (John was perfect, and she wanted nothing to do with evidence to the contrary). I don’t know what he told his roommates or managers, but it wasn’t that he’d been in a psychiatric hospital. Often during that month I didn’t know which was worse, his dark mood or the shame and frustration it caused him. And he didn’t want to talk about the particulars with me.

I decided not to tell my parents. And certainly not my friends, because they would only worry. My sister, Penny, I did confide in, but swore her to secrecy. In an odd way I felt closer to John. I was the only one who visited regularly, and though it was a strain to be making decisions about a wedding when he barely had the energy to read the news — having to wonder what kind of shape he’d be in by then — there was something about those walks in the park, perhaps precisely because he didn’t talk a blue streak as he usually did, that added a kind of gravity to being in love with him. I’d always wondered before if the mystery that made the beginning of romance enthralling necessarily had to vanish, or if with the right person it just lasted on. I couldn’t have imagined the answer would come in this form, so tied up with trepidation and anger at him for disappearing, in a sense, leaving me with this remnant of himself, but there it was, a mystery deeper than I had guessed at. All his animation and verve could vanish like the weather and stay lost, but then somehow, after six weeks or so, return with such self-forgetting that he didn’t see anything strange about how blithely he led me by the arm into a car showroom to look at MGs, and then took me out to lunch and a bottle of wine, as if nothing had ever happened.

In the fifteen years of our marriage, he’s never gone back to a hospital or come anywhere close, in fact. He’s never had to stop working, or gone nearly so low as he did that fall. He has moods, and occasionally a stretch of a few weeks when I notice his energy flagging, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to rid myself of the worry I have then, that it will all get much worse. Which is part of what keeps the mystery between us going. You could call that perverse. Fear playing that role. But it’s not only fear, and what’s hard to explain is that the fear is also a kind of tenderness. I’m the only one who knows in the way I do that he needs someone to watch over him. At the worst moments, when the children are tired and the house is a mess and I see from the pace of his walk up the drive at the end of the day that he’s at a lower ebb, it can seem no better than having a fourth child and I want to walk straight out the door and not come back for a month. But most of the time it’s not like that. I may not be able to tell what he’s thinking, but he reaches for me. And the excitement from the beginning fills me again at those moments. I don’t see how it could if I understood him through and through.

Seventeen years together. Three children.

And here we are, the five of us, floating up Route 1 in this boat of a car, the children beginning to scramble again in the back: Michael calling out additions to his list of a hundred names for Kelsey ending in ator—the eviscerator, the nebulator, the constipator — all of which she answers to from the bucket seat, yelping in response, having ears only for the tone of a voice, causing Celia to climb over the backseat to protect her from Michael’s mockery, while Alec stands up behind his father’s seat and reaches his hand around to play with John’s double chin, asking how much longer it’s going to be, all of them their father’s impatient children.

I’m the only one who doesn’t always want answers. John may never articulate his questions, but they are with him, a way of being. And the children want answers to everything all the time: What’s for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner? Where’s Kelsey? Where’s Dad? Why do we have to come in? Why do we have to go to bed? Some days the only words I speak to them are answers, and reasons I can’t answer, and instructions in place of the answers they want.

The questions won’t stop up here, but once we’re on the island and the three of them are spending most of the day playing on the rocks, or in the boat with their father, or traipsing up and down from the porch to the tide pools and back with their crabs in tin saucepans, the salt water and sun will wear down the edges of their nervous energy, and now and then I’ll get to be with myself long enough that when they come back, or I spy them going about their business, I will actually see them for a moment. Which ordinarily I don’t. Sight isn’t really my sense of them. They’re touch and sound. I can look at pictures from just a few years ago and barely recognize them. But the day starts and ends with their voices and bodies. John is something else. There are parallel worlds. Apparently science says so now, too. I didn’t know it until Michael was born. Now it’s obvious. I was reading a novel the other day and some character said, “We live among the dead until we join them,” something portentous like that, dreary, and I thought, Maybe, but who’s got time for the dead with all this life, all these lives, all jumbled up?

We arrive at the little blue clapboard cabin in Port Clyde in midafternoon and go to the general store to order the propane for the morning and buy groceries. John wants us to get up early again tomorrow to get out to the island as soon as possible. He’d go this evening but by the time we got the house sorted out and the food put away we’d still be making beds by oil lamp. And besides, the children like this mainland cabin too, playing on the granite boulders that jut from its sloping lawn, dashing up and down the aluminum bridgeway that runs over the tidal flat to the jetty. I watch them at it as I get supper ready.

They sense, without noticing, the new world about them, the salted air, the clear light we don’t get farther south until autumn, the brightly painted lobster boats reflected in the rippling mirror of the bay. These are not things to pause over for them, the objects at hand always being what matter most — the chain Michael can put across the bridgeway to try to block the others from coming down, the bushes they hide behind, the tall grass they climb through, which will have Alec and Michael wheezing soon enough.

After supper, Michael and Celia are allowed to stay up for another hour reading. Though he has a room to himself at home, Alec doesn’t like being on his own when he imagines the other two are still conspiring together somewhere in the house. But tonight it’s okay because his father’s telling him a story. John never reads them books. He makes the stories up. I don’t have the energy at the end of the day for that, or his invention. He makes a ghost out of tissue paper, a king out of a wooden block, and Alec will be quieted to the point of trance, by the story, but also because his father’s attention is pouring over him, and only him, like the air of heaven. And when John leans down to kiss him good night, Alec will reach up to feel his double chin again, chubby and warm and a little scratchy, and he’ll be content in a way I can never make him because I am never the exception.

I disappear for twenty minutes into Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier while John does the dishes, fighting past my initial irritation at all the class nonsense and how no one will say anything of significance to anyone else because it’s simply not done to be explicit. Like in James or Wharton. Those novels where you’re screaming at characters to go ahead already and blurt it out, save us a hundred pages of prevarication. But my pique wears off and I sink into the allure of the Ashburnhams at Nauheim, idling on the notion of how someone could so distort his life around an obsessive love, when John comes in having forgotten the dish towel still over his shoulder, and looks across the disarray of the room for the newspaper somewhere in the tote bags. He wouldn’t be able to remember where he stowed it to save his life. I reach into the side pocket of his briefcase and hand it to him.

“Did you call Bill?”

“Yes, we’re all set,” he says, already scanning the headlines, settling into the chair opposite me beneath the standing lamp.

I’m pleasantly tired enough to trust he got the dates right when he spoke to Bill Mitchell. Why it couldn’t be settled a month ago I don’t understand. I just have to assume we have our two weeks (they arrived a day early one year and we had to check into a motel). John’s absentmindedness is chronic and infuriating. Whereas I remember the dates for everything. It’s embarrassing actually to admit how much I still store in my head: our first visit to John’s parents (April 5, 1963), the day he bought his Morris Minor (March 10, 1964), and on and on. I remember the anniversaries of these events too, but I don’t mention them to people because unless it’s a birth or death or wedding I get quizzical looks, as in, Why have you bothered to retain such trivia, why does it matter? (I tell the children instead; they have no idea what I’m talking about and don’t really listen, but nod anyway before asking their next question.) It was sixteen years ago last month, for instance, that John appeared unannounced on my doorstep with a car already packed with food and wine and drove us all the way to the Highlands, to a friend’s house he’d been loaned for the weekend.

John’s friends’ houses. That’s where we spend all our vacations.

Upstairs, Celia has fallen asleep with her book propped on her chest. She rolls over without opening her eyes when I lift it from her hands. Michael’s still sitting up against the headboard reading his novel, his feet wriggling beneath the blanket. It takes him forever to wind down. Alec and Celia have simpler batteries that burn through and fade. But to Michael this is a new bed and a new room, even if he’s been here three summers in a row, and all the driving and running in the yard aren’t enough to still him. In a few days, out on the island, he’ll unclench a bit, getting into a rhythm closer to the other two, but never entirely. He’s seen me come in but keeps reading, his teeth biting softly at the inside of his cheek. I run my hand through his thick black hair, which needs a cut — it’s coming down over his eyes and ears — and start feeling for ticks. He turns his head away.

“You already did that.”

Alec is so easy to touch. He never doesn’t want to be touched. Celia’s ten now and beginning to notice she lives in a body, so touch is getting more complicated, no more clasping at my leg, more pushing and pulling and long looks. But with Michael it’s been fraught from the start. Babies are scrunched little creatures, but then they splay flat on the crib or floor. Except Michael never quite did. Like a little old man, he remained almost always hunch-shouldered and bent at the waist. He slept blessedly well but when he did cry, holding him rarely helped. I didn’t understand. That’s what a mother was supposed to do, hold her crying child. I thought maybe it was my inexperience, but then Celia came, and then Alec, and picking them up when they cried was like throwing a switch: the wailing ceased. And then I knew the difference. Celia’s and Alec’s discomforts were creaturely and fluid; they passed through them and were gone. But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went. Without knowing what it was, I’d felt that tension in his little groping arms and fitful legs, the discomfort of the foreknowledge. Was I more skittish in my touches and kisses because I sensed my ineffectuality? I can’t say. With children, everything’s already happening and then over with. It happens while you’re trying to keep up and gone by the time you arrive at a view of things.

“We’re getting up early tomorrow,” I tell him. “You should turn out the light.”

“But I’m not tired,” he says, still without looking up from the page.

I’m sitting beside him on the bed, my arm over his shoulder. That I should notice the position of my body to his at all — that’s the difference.

“What are you reading?”

“Thomas Mann. He’s German. But it’s set in Venice. Have you ever been there?”

“Before I married your father.”

“Did it smell?”

“Not particularly. Do you like the book?”

“I only just started. The poet of all those who labor on the brink of exhaustion. That’s not bad.”

“Is that all you brought?”

“No. I’ve got the one on machine code.” A tiny-print tome he’s ordered direct from McGraw-Hill about computers or the numbers in computers. It’s Greek to me. But there’s another boy at school who’s interested and he doesn’t make friends like the other two, so I’m all for it.

“Five more minutes, all right?”

“Okay, okay,” he says, turning the page, rendering me superfluous.

Downstairs, John has poured himself a glass of Bill Mitchell’s Scotch and moved on to the business section. I must make the children’s lunches for tomorrow, I think, until I remember there’s no school and so no rush.

Suddenly, my eyes are brimming with tears. I wipe them away. John hasn’t seen it. “Spend time with Michael,” I say. “While we’re up here. Take him on the boat, the two of you. Or pack a lunch and take a walk. Will you?”

“What’s the matter?” he asks, not looking up from the paper.

“Nothing’s the matter. He’d never ask for it. Any more than Alec would stop asking. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” he says, meeting my glance now. “That’s fine.”

“Would you get me a glass of that?”

“This?” he says, holding up his highball, surprised.

“Yes.”

He goes to the sideboard and pours me a drink.

I sip it on the couch beside him while he reads a while longer. I’ve seen him at the mirror when he doesn’t see me, glancing at the strands of gray at his temples, trying on the notion that they make him look distinguished, a state he’s always aspired to, tinged with the fear that he hasn’t accomplished enough yet, that the gray means nothing more than getting older.

I should ask him about the meetings he had this week, about the possible new investors in the fund he’s been trying to raise for over a year now, if he’s still worried about how long they’ll commit for, or, rather, still worried as much. He needs to be asked. He won’t talk about it of his own accord. He imagines that if he can contain it inside himself its resolution will be contained as well. That everything will work out — his upbringing distilled into a superstition.

He puts the paper aside and leans toward me and we touch foreheads. Sometimes this is prelude to a kiss, other times it’s just its own little respite. Giving up effort, letting in the drowsiness which isn’t yet sleep coming on but is the body gaining on the mind.

“Thank you,” I say, combing my fingers through his hair.

“For what?”

“For this. For bringing us here.”

He kisses my cheek. However nervous he was at the beginning about our lovemaking, he’s always been gentle. I suppose some women would find this boring. I don’t. Perhaps because most times between us feel like the overcoming of an unlikelihood, as if I was unsure if it would ever happen again and now here it is, happening. Finding him is such relief.

Celia

We’d already bought the lobsters from the lobsterman off the side of his boat, and the island was already in the distance when Dad turned the sputtering motor off and the little cloud of gray smoke that came out of it each time it stopped floated by me, filling my nose with the smell of gasoline. He tipped the propeller out of the water and took the key from the engine, putting it into the pocket of the pink pants I wished he wouldn’t wear, and the boat stopped going forward against the waves and began to rock back and forth between them instead, like the logs we sometimes saw floating out beyond where the waves broke against the shore. Up the side of each wave and down the other, the boat moving farther out, away from the island. Dad lay down in the bottom of the boat, using one of the life preservers as a pillow. He closed his eyes and spoke to us like he did when he was taking a nap, with no expression on his face. All right, then, he said, imagine something happened and I can’t drive the boat and you can’t start the engine. What do you do now? Alec said, Why can’t you start the boat? And Dad said, Imagine me gone, imagine it’s just the two of you. What do you do? There weren’t any boats around or much wind but the water made its own noise and the house was too far away for anyone to hear us if I yelled. I asked him if this was some kind of test. But the way he plays games is to be really serious about it, like it isn’t a game, which makes the games he plays with us more exciting than anything else because everything matters the whole way through and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s never boring. Is it a test? I asked him again, and he just said, Imagine I’m not here. What’s happening? Alec said. The back of his red life preserver came up above the top of his head because there weren’t any small enough for him. When he had put it on the first time, Michael said he looked like an albino rabbit in a Soviet body cast, which made Dad smile and Alec cry because he didn’t understand. What do you think is happening? I said. We have to figure out what to do if Dad is gone. It’s like a safety drill at school. I don’t want to, Alec said. Can you sit up now, Dad? But Dad kept his eyes closed and didn’t say anything. He can take a nap anywhere and it was even possible he was actually already asleep. The lobsters in the canvas bag next to him were trying to get out but couldn’t fit more than a claw through the knotted handles. We have to row, I said. If there’s no engine, we have to use the oars. I picked up the one nearest me. It was long — much taller than I was — and heavy. I had sat between Dad’s legs before and held both oars with his hands over mine so I knew how it worked but I needed both hands to lift one oar and when I put it over the edge of the boat, the water grabbed it, sliding it almost out of my hands, and I had to pull it back in again. Then I remembered they were supposed to go in the little metal horseshoes that hung on the chains either side of the middle bench. I told Alec to take the little horseshoe hanging on his side and put in the holder. For once, he did as he was told. When I got the oar in the holder, I put just a bit of the paddle in the water so it wouldn’t get pulled down in again and I moved it back and forth. That’s not how Dad does it, Alec said. You’re doing it like a girl. In the direction the boat faced I saw only water and sky ahead of us and I had to turn to make sure that I could still see the island, which I could, but it looked even farther away than a minute ago. Dad, she can’t do it, Alec said, shaking Dad’s ankle. Get up now, please. We have to do it together, you little whiner, I said, or it doesn’t work. I pulled my oar in and moved across the bench to pick up the other one. Here, I said, showing him how to hold it. Use both hands. Start out in front of you and then pull it toward you. You have to make sure it’s in the water but not too much. He put his little freckled hands on the handle and sat there pouting. I slid back to my side — you’re never supposed to stand up in small boats because you might lose your balance and fall — and put my oar in the water. Now put yours in the water, I said. We have to do it at the same time or it doesn’t work. He put his paddle in the water but then he pushed the handle forward, which would make us go backwards, and because I wasn’t looking at mine it splashed water and clanged against the side of the boat right next to where Dad was lying. His expression didn’t change at all, like he really was asleep. It wasn’t fair that he was doing this with Alec and me instead of me and Michael because if Michael had been here, even if I had to tell him what to do at least he’d be strong enough to use the oar and we could have moved the boat. But Alec was just too little and he was a crybaby. I don’t want to play anymore, Dad, he whined. She doesn’t know how to do it. Open your eyes, Dad. He’s not here, I said. You can’t whine to him because he’s not here, didn’t you hear him? We have to make the boat move, so stop whining. I showed you how to do it. You have to hold it out in front of you first and then pull it back. Don’t be such a weakling. Just put it in the water and pull it toward you when I say go. We put our oars in and I said go and then the wave coming toward Alec’s side lifted his oar out of the holder and it went into the ocean. Get it! I shouted. He tried but his arms were too short and I had to slide over again, tipping the side of the boat just a few inches from the water, and by then another wave had gone under us, taking the oar with it. I could see it a yard away and then more. Alec started sniffling. He shook Dad’s leg again but Dad didn’t move or open his eyes. It was hot in the sun and it hurt my eyes to look at the water because the light on it was blinding white. I looked back and we were getting farther away from where we’d been when Dad waved down the lobster boat and farther away from the island too. It was so unfair of him, leaving me with the crybaby. I lifted my oar out of the holder and crouched up to the front of the boat onto the little thin bench where you’d normally get wet from spray. This is what Dad did when there was fog and we were getting close to landing. He’d turn off the engine and row from the front, one stroke on one side, one stroke on the other, poking through the mist to find the jetty. He could do it sitting down, but I had to kneel on the bench to get high enough for the oar to go in the water. At least I could see the house from here so I knew what direction we should be moving in but it didn’t do any good because mostly all I could manage was to keep the oar in my hand and not let it get sucked down by the weight of the passing waves. After a few minutes of kneeling like that, rocking from side to side, looking into the water, I began to feel seasick. I turned around and sat on the bench to try to make my stomach feel better. Alec was crying. He crouched on the floor of the boat next to Dad and shook his limp arm back and forth. He’s not here, I said. Though now that I’d given up I knew the game was almost over.

Margaret

“You’re contemplating something,” Michael says, watching me from the top of the steps, holding his computer tome down at his side. He’s thin as a beanpole, which is only more apparent in shorts and a T-shirt. It’s one of the reasons he’s unhappy at school, being teased for it.

“Am I?”

“You’re staring fixedly into space with an expression of mild bemusement. That’s how people are described when ruminating.”

“Where’s your father?”

“He’s mucking around in the boat. He took Celia and Alec.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

He glances over the shimmering water, ignoring my question. “What are you cogitating about?”

It’s been a week and John hasn’t spent ten minutes alone with him yet, and now he’s gone off with the other two. Michael plays with his brother and sister some, but fills most of his hours with reading and sketching out his elaborate parodies, the latest one being of our local newspaper. I found it on his bedside table this morning. The Pawtucket Post-Intelligence: Local Family Goes on Holiday by Accident, Returns. A special joint-investigation with the 70 °Club, plus weather.

In my generous moods, I think John just forgets what I’ve asked him to do, and, being freedom-loving, thinks the children should all do as they like, but at other times my frustration intuits that it’s more than absentminded. He doesn’t know what to say to his elder son; it’s sticky and awkward, and he’d just as soon glide over it, flicking the switch from treating him like a child to treating him like an adult who can teach himself how to cope with the world. John was sent to boarding school at eight. He’s enlightened enough to believe that was and is a form of organized cruelty, but having gone through it himself, some remnant of the fear of being associated with weakness remains lodged in his gut. Michael gets the silent brunt of it, Celia and Alec none at all.

“What about Sand Dollar Beach?” I say. “We haven’t been there yet.”

“Are you suggesting a divertissement?”

“I’m suggesting a walk. It’ll be cooler in the woods.”

“Cooler, but treacherous in the event of a hurricane.”

“Come on,” I say, “let’s go.”

He puts his book down on the bench and with a pensive look of his own passes by me into the house. They’re polite, my children. We’ve raised them to be polite. It never occurred to us to do anything else. It’s not the British relegation of them to silence in the presence of adults. But manners teach them the forms of kindness. The way to greet a stranger, and eventually how not to make a scene over every little feeling because there are other people to consider. Overdo it and it will stifle them. I don’t think my mother ever stopped to wonder what good form costs a person, because the cost could never be greater than someone having a poor opinion of her. It could never exceed the failure to live up to the standards of propriety. John’s mother is more hidebound still, appalled that we don’t better contain the children’s energy. She told John it’s my American influence. She blames me for her son being in the States, as if I’m the one in control of where we live.

We didn’t discuss raising our children differently than we were brought up, it’s just a natural softening, I suppose. As if Celia would ever be a debutante, even if we had the money; it’s absurd. Of course I want others to think well of my children but they already do and through no great labor of mine. It’s just a matter of pointing out what’s rude and what’s the proper way to thank a person, and the importance of imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes, that’s all. John spanked Michael and Celia when they were much younger, and he’s spanked Alec two or three times, but it was only when they lied or refused repeatedly to obey. And now with the older two it barely arises. They’ve learned how to behave. We’re not a formal family, but we set the table for meals, and we eat meals together, and they have to ask to be excused when they’re done. I suppose some people would consider it dated. I should encourage their whims in case they are the seedlings of genius. But that doesn’t make sense to me. Whatever they do, there will be other people around and they’ll have to converse with them and be polite. I want them to be happy. That’s the point.

At the trailhead, Michael holds the branches of the blackberry aside for me as he leads the way through the overgrown stretch of path up the slope and into the trees. The beach is twenty minutes away, which is perhaps too far a round trip when I should be getting supper ready, but it’s good to stretch our legs. He’s talking about Mr. Carter, the man he got his king snake from, but the breeze carries every other phrase out of earshot. I stay close enough not to lose track entirely.

Last night it rained and the mushrooms are out — I should know their names but I don’t. There are the perfectly white billowy balls, like bits of solid cloud floating over fallen branches, and the creamy clusters with brilliant orange tips massed on the sides of rotting stumps, and those extraordinary zigzags of brown crescents wending their way up the bark of the older trees like staircases for the Lilliputians.

It’s amazing how many thin young pines and spruces strive to reach the sunlight lavished on the mature trees, and how many of them lie fallen like oversize matchsticks on the forest floor, the ones that didn’t make it, hosts for the lichen and moss, food for bugs.

We climb up and down the steps that Bill Mitchell cut into a giant Douglas fir that must have fallen years ago across the path and now has ferns growing in its opened seams.

I wish Michael enjoyed the wonder in all this more, but his asthma has taught him to be cautious of the outdoors, or of too much running in the field behind our house, and even of the winter cold, which can set off an attack.

“…where he keeps the iguanas,” he’s saying as I come up beside him, now that the path has widened, “with the little stream running through his downstairs, he says he’s thinking of getting a small crocodile if he can build a big enough habitat, but he’s not sure, because it would take up the two spare bedrooms.”

John met David Carter a few years ago when he came to a minority entrepreneurs’ forum. If I remember rightly, he wanted to expand his pet business, and John tried to convince his partners to invest. They didn’t, but John stayed in touch, and he took Michael over to see the reptiles. One day, without consulting me, they brought back a four-foot-long black king snake. I could hardly say no given Celia’s rabbits, Alec’s hamster, the birds, and Kelsey. Michael has never given it a name, which seems right somehow. It’s apparently a constrictor, not a biter, but if that is meant to reassure me, it does not. He takes good care of it, mostly, cleaning its terrarium in the playroom, feeding it those awful dead mice, but he did leave its sliding door open a slit one night, and it got out, somehow making its way up into his bedroom, leading to a terrible commotion when he woke to use the bathroom and placed his foot on it. I didn’t mean to yell at him the way I did, but the whole thing was too awful.

“If he got the crocodile,” Michael continues, “then he’d have a complete collection, or almost with the boa and the python, and the monitor lizard.”

“He doesn’t let you get close to those other creatures, does he?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Michael says, swatting at ferns with a stick. “They’re tame.”

We walk for a minute in silence.

“I think he’s sad,” he says. “I think that’s why he keeps so many pets in his house.”

“I wouldn’t think reptiles made the best company.”

“Did Dad want to help him because he’s black?”

I’m not sure how to answer this. I don’t know why John’s taken an interest in getting minority businesses started. It may have begun through the Small Business Administration, some advantage to that sort of investing. But if so he’s carried it well past that: a Hispanic magazine in Chicago, a restaurant chain started by a black football player. It’s a fair amount of what he does. If he were American, I suppose you’d say he was lending a hand in the next stage of civil rights, supporting black ownership, and maybe that’s what he’s doing — we don’t talk about it — but because he’s English that doesn’t seem the best way to describe it. He’s not caught up in that particular history. I’m not sure what the draw is, though I’m all for it, certainly.

“I suppose your father enjoys his company,” I say. “I’d say that’s mostly why he wanted to help him.”

“I think one of the reasons he’s sad is because he’s black.”

“Don’t say that, Michael. You mustn’t say that. There’s no reason someone should be sad because of what race they are. It has nothing to do with that. Doesn’t he live on his own? That could make anyone lonely.”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean that being black makes him sad, like he doesn’t want to be black. It’s something else.”

“What has he been talking to you about?”

“Nothing. The snakes.”

“Well, I think you must be imagining it, then. People aren’t lonely because of the color of their skin.”

He ruminates on this awhile as we enter the meadow. Half of it is covered in shade, and it’s in the shade that the buds of the wild primroses have begun to open, their heart-shaped yellow petals peeling away from the stamens. Caterpillars feast on the seeded heads of the milkweeds. Butterflies flutter in the high grass. We have a field behind our house in Samoset, but not so lovely and secluded as this.

Michael seems to take no notice at all of where he is.

“If you were a slave, you’d be depressed,” he says. “And you’d be terrified.”

“What are you talking about? Mr. Carter runs a business. He lives in a perfectly nice house. I hope you don’t say this kind of thing to him. He could be quite offended. He has nothing to do with slavery. Where did you get that idea?”

“You can’t say that. His ancestors, they were slaves.”

“Michael: What has he been talking to you about?”

“Nothing. I told you.”

“So you’re just dreaming all this up on your own?”

“Never mind. You don’t get it.”

This is one of his new refrains: you don’t get it. I suppose I should be used to it coming from my children. And I would if I thought the phrase meant for Michael, as it already does for Celia, an attachment to a world of peers. But when Michael says it to me it’s not because he’s caught the first hints of adolescent cynicism from some commiserating friend. He’s referring to something else, something he sees alone. It’s not just I or his siblings who don’t get it.

The ground slopes down from the meadow and a few minutes farther on bits of clear sky show through the gaps in the trees as we approach the cliff above the beach. It’s a sharp drop-off, thirty feet or more. The way down is to the right, along the angled sheet of granite running from the trees to the ocean. It’s lined with cracks, amazingly straight and parallel and sealed with some kind of black magma however many thousands of years ago. Boulders sit on it like old men keeping watch for returning ships.

The beach itself is small, just a clearing in the rocks, really, with hard-packed sand, where a flock of plovers skitters through the thin water of the retreating waves. Farther back, the sand is dry and powdery, strewn with seaweed and driftwood. This is where we’ve found the sand dollars the last couple of years, which the children put in the saucepans and buckets they collect the crabs in, furnishing their little aquariums with other inhabitants of the sea.

Michael, eyes down, writes in the sand with his stick. He’s only a few inches shorter than I am and a year from now he’ll be my height, and soon enough taller altogether. He doesn’t know what to do with his new body, how to sit or stand, which is why he never stays still, hiding in constant motion. Or it’s partly why, the rest being his ceaseless brain. His limbs twitch in response to it, more bother than pleasure, let alone athletic joy. A whole dear, unknowable creature, molting before my eyes. And if in that strange little office off the ward of the hospital in London the doctor had said to me, No, you might want to reconsider what you’re getting yourself into, you might want to put the marriage off, if he hadn’t asked me if I loved John, the unthinkable would be possible: Michael wouldn’t be here at all. His name loses meaning when I repeat it too often to myself, but I have no other word to designate the mystery of him, my firstborn. There’s something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they’re doing, who can only experiment. It’s unfair, he had no choice.

“Aren’t you going to look for sand dollars?”

He keeps writing, giving no indication that he’s heard my question.

“What does that mean?” I ask, coming up behind him to read what he’s scrawled in capital letters: YOU MAKE ME FEEL MIGHTY REAL.

“It’s a lyric. By Sylvester. You don’t know Sylvester?”

“Is that disco?”

“That’s an understatement. But, yes, you can call it disco.”

“You like those records so much. Why don’t you ever dance to them?”

He rolls his eyes and walks away toward the far side of the beach, scraping a curving line in the sand behind him. He’s at that turntable of his hours a day with his headset on but he never does more than move his head back and forth. It seems a pity to me that he doesn’t take physical pleasure in it the way we did, and sometimes still do, with our music.

“We’re going to move back to England,” he says, still facing away from me. “Dad’s going to move us back there.”

Something in the tone of his voice brings me to a halt. It’s been cracking lately, dropping down a register at the oddest moments and then skipping back up into his boyish chirp, but these words come out complete in his new lower range, a sound from his chest, not his throat, and he utters them in a perfectly matter-of-fact way. Most disconcerting of all, he says them slowly, and he never speaks slowly.

“What are you talking about?” I say. “Did he tell you that?”

It wouldn’t be beyond John, in some abstracted mood, to mention such a thing, thinking aloud to the children with no cognizance of where it might lead their own thoughts. If it’s true, I’ll wring his neck — to hear it from Michael first.

“Well, did your father say that? Answer me.”

He turns around at my raised voice and shakes his head.

“So why do you say it?”

“Why are you angry?”

“I’m not angry. I just want you to tell me why you said that.”

“Because it’s true.”

He’s got John’s black hair, his hazel eyes, the same pale complexion. It’s clear as day they’re father and son. Which is only natural. But why, then, staring at this utterly familiar face, stilled now by something invisible, something new but very old — why is it that I am so terrified?

Celia

When Dad got us back to shore, Michael was waiting for us on the jetty. He told Dad that Mom wanted to see him. Dad went up the wooden steps to the house, and Alec and I followed Michael the other way, out onto the rocks. Michael started running, skipping from rock to rock. I kept up, watching his feet and following his jumps, avoiding the slippery edges. Alec called from behind for us to wait. Michael slowed down but kept going toward the point that we couldn’t see past from the house, the point where the shoreline turned onto the open ocean. When he got to a big flat rock just above the spray he stopped and stared out at the waves breaking onto the boulders. Alec caught up to us and immediately went down closer to where the spray was blackening the gray stone and then scurried up again each time just before it landed, looking back at us to see if were watching him.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Michael said, and I agreed. Alec said he didn’t like that game, but Michael and I started searching for the right little nook or cave in the rocks, and Alec came after us, saying we should look for crabs instead. We found a good spot with a flat bottom and a little overhang from a bigger slab of rock above it. It was shaded, almost like a real cave. Okay, get in there, Michael said to Alec, who complied, sitting cross-legged and fidgeting with the stones he’d picked up. Who am I? Alec asked. You’re a monk, Michael said. This is where you live. Who are you guys? That doesn’t matter. You don’t know us yet. What am I supposed to do? Alec said. You live here, you little fidget-buster, Michael said, squeezing Alec’s arm. You live here and think about the sea. Alec said, I don’t want to. Tough, I said. Why do I always have to stay in the cave? Alec said. Because you’re the monk, Michael said. We have to find you. Just stay there and don’t look what direction we’re going, okay? Shut your eyes. Alec closed his eyes and Michael and I ran across the smooth rock up along the tree line, going on like that for a while until we were well out of view of where we’d left Alec. The waves were bigger here and the water was loud, slapping against the rocks, then rushing off them as the waves drained back into the sea, showing all the seaweed and barnacles on the sides of the boulders, which disappeared again when the throat of the next wave rose up and covered them. It was getting later in the day but the sun was still in the sky.

Look, I said. Down on a broad rock just above the spray line to our right three seals were basking. They look dead, Michael said. They’re not dead, they’re sleeping. We climbed diagonally down toward them. Not too close, I said, they’ll wake up and go back in the water. Their skins were gray and brown and green and a little bluish too, all the colors mottled together, and they had huge dirty white whiskers and snouts that were wet like Kelsey’s. The biggest one was huffing and snoring. Do you see the blubber on that thing? Michael practically shouted. We could harpoon it and harvest its body fat for fuel, that blubber whale! His voice said he wanted to squeeze it like he squeezed Alec’s arm, squeezing the fat till it almost hurt.

I think they are protozoan, he said. What does that mean? Very old. Ancient. They were here before humans, living off their own blubber. Michael liked that word, blubber. He said it all the time, even if there was nothing blubberish around. We squatted down and watched them. Every few minutes one of the seals would raise its head, look over its shoulder at us, and then lay its head back on the rock. Eventually the middle one started rubbing its snout against its flank.

Do you think we’ll be late for supper? Michael asked. Maybe, I said. How long have we been here? he asked. A few minutes, I said. No, on the island. I don’t know, I said. Do you think we have a week left? he asked. I don’t know. Do you think we have ten days? Maybe.

He asked questions like this a lot but I usually didn’t answer because I didn’t really get them. It was just Michael saying stuff, asking things Mom ignored too, but that sometimes he convinced Dad to answer, which he’d do by asking more questions of Michael.

A harpoon would wake those puppies up, he said when I didn’t answer. Alec would have laughed and squealed at that, egging Michael on, but I didn’t. Michael stood up and walked in an arc around to the other side of the seals, keeping his distance. A minute later I followed him and we squatted down again, this time in the shade. A big wave doused the heads of the seals and they jostled themselves back from the wetness like big lazy dogs with no legs.

Mom and Dad are going to argue tonight, he said. How do you know? I just do, he said. Mom’s going to get angry at him. She always gets angry at him, I said. No she doesn’t, that’s not true, he said. Yes it is. She gets angry at him after we go to bed. Not every night, he said, she doesn’t do it every night. Besides, all couples have arguments. Mom told you that, I said. All couples have arguments. Mom told you that. So what? he said, that doesn’t make it not true.

Down the shoreline from where we’d come there were black cormorants on a wet rock. Some stood perfectly still with their necks folded back. Two had their big wings wide open drying in the sun, which made them look a little scary, like giant bats. None of them seemed to notice any of the others, like each bird was the only one on the rock. Out a ways seagulls flew in big circles above a lobster boat headed back toward the harbor. I still didn’t understand how they could stay up in the air that long without resting.

Michael tossed a pebble onto the tail of one of the seals but it didn’t notice. Don’t, I said. He lobbed another that landed on the biggest one’s back but it didn’t react either.

Don’t!

They’d heat Cleveland for a week in January! he exclaimed. He said that kind of thing all the time to his one friend, Ralph, our babysitter’s younger brother, and Ralph made strange noises and piled on more, like, They’d heat Nova Scotia for a year! and they’d keep going like that. Alec tried to join in but he didn’t understand how it worked so he was never funny. I understood, but they didn’t like playing with a girl. Stop it, I said, and he threw the rest of his pebbles away down toward the water.

What did you do in the boat? he said. Dad made us pretend he wasn’t there, I said. Michael had started taking small shells out of a tidal pool in the rock, drying them on his shirt, and arranging them in a straight line at his feet. I picked some up and added onto the line until it stretched in front of me too. Do you think it’s three weeks before we go back to school or a month? I don’t know, I said, why? I just want to know, he said. Once the line stretched a few feet on either side of us, he started removing shells until it looked like a white chain with missing links. A fine spray in the wind was making my face damp. I’m hungry, I said, let’s go have supper. The seals had backed themselves onto all dry rock again and weren’t moving at all, not even their heads.

Michael didn’t want to return to school, that’s why he was asking about it. Ralph was his only friend. Usually he didn’t get upset until a few days before we started, not this early, when we were still on the island.

He stood up and looking down at the seals said, Protozoan mammals beached like giant, animate pork loin. Then he started back along the rocks up by the trees and I followed him.

I hate you guys, Alec said when we reached the cave again. But we found you, Michael said. That’s how the game ends. You’re Saint Francis of Assisi praying here until your palms bleed. I don’t get it, he whined. Who are you? I’m Saint Francis as a younger man, Michael said, and Celia is his friend Clare, who cares for lepers. I hate you, Alec said, standing up and running out over the rocks ahead of us.

I knew Michael had to be right about the argument that would come later because Mom didn’t say anything about us being gone or even ask where we’d been. In the kitchen, Dad had the extra cheerfulness he got with us when Mom was angry at him. He let us each drop a lobster in the boiling water. He had to hold Alec so he’d be high enough not to get his hand splashed. Their black antennae whipped back and forth against the sides of the pot before disappearing.

Mom told us to clear the saucepans with crabs in them off the dining room table, and we put them on the floor by the door to the porch, a whole collection, fifteen or twenty, different sizes and colors. They were all alive and seemed happy enough. Kelsey sniffed at them but didn’t like the way they moved.

The invigilator is hungry, Michael said, petting her flank.

After supper Alec did his hyperactive-playing-then-crying sequence, and Dad took him up to bed, and he screamed that it was unfair. Mom had left the dishes for Dad to do and was reading a book by the dim yellow light of one of the oil lamps. We each had our own (except Alec) to carry from room to room and another by our beds. You turned up the oil-soaked canvas wick with a key on the side and, once you’d lit it, placed the curvy glass cover back in its metal holder. It was hard to make out the different shades of color in the Brueghel puzzle with it, but I didn’t feel like reading so that’s what I did until we played Boggle, and Alec came down again whining, and Mom said it was time for all of us to go to sleep.

After a few minutes I could hear the two of them through the floorboards. Mom started in her loud whisper. Totally different from her normal voice, faster and much more intense. I could make out some of her words but not all. Dad responded quietly like he usually did, in a much lower voice. I couldn’t make out any of his words, just the flat tone that didn’t change, which wasn’t how he normally talked either. Mom said something about furniture, and God bless it, which is what she said instead of swearing. Dad didn’t make any response to that. And then Mom’s voice got louder. You’re just going to sit there? You’re not going to say anything!

I was lying on my side and I wrapped my pillow around my head so it would cover my other ear but I could still hear her: It’s Michael who tells me! I ask a thousand times and I have to learn about it from the children! Dad said something I couldn’t hear, low and quiet again. Whatever it was just made her angrier, which didn’t seem fair, that every time he spoke she got angrier. And then what? she shouted. Another year, another two years, and all our lives, mine and the children’s, hanging on whether you talk these people into doing what you want them to do? Goddamn it, John! she shouted. It sounded like she hated his guts.

My door opened and I heard Alec sniffling. Why don’t they stop? he said. My blood was pumping in my ears as loud as when I held big seashells up against them. Just go back to bed, I whispered. But he was crying now, not the whiny give-me-attention crying but scared crying. He never went into Michael’s room when he got upset like this, only into mine. He was standing at the edge of my bed now.

And you sitting here not saying a damn word! she yelled. You think it’s my fault! You think I’m being unreasonable! This isn’t how people live. It’s a fantasy!

Why won’t they stop? Alec sobbed. Shut up! I whispered. Just be quiet. Dad said something short in the same flat, low voice.

Before Mom could start yelling again, I ripped off my covers and ran down the stairs into the living room, and shouted, Stop it! Stop it! I’m trying to sleep!

Mom was standing over the couch above Dad. She wheeled on me, her eyes wide with fury. Dad only moved his head to look at me. His face was pale and had no expression. Alec stood on the stairs behind me, still crying. Christ! Mom said to Dad. Look what you’ve done now!

Stop it! I shouted. He didn’t do it! You did! It’s not fair!

Oh, good Lord, she said with a sigh. This is nothing for you to worry about. Really, Celia. You don’t need to worry. Take them upstairs, would you? she said, and Dad stood up and walked toward me, holding his arms out to pick me up, but I was too big for that now, which he didn’t even seem to remember, so instead when he got closer his arms went down onto my shoulders, and he turned me around toward the staircase.

All right now, he said, as calmly as if he were napping and wanted us to be quiet.

Why do you yell at him, Mom? I said.

That’s enough now, Celia, really. Please. Just go upstairs with your father.

I shook his hands off my shoulders and stomped back up the steps, pushing Alec ahead of me. Down the hall, Michael was peeking out from a crack in his door, which he closed as soon as we reached the landing.

Get back into bed, Alec, Dad said, I’ll be there in a minute. He followed me into my room holding one of the oil lamps, and waited for me to climb into my bed and pull the covers up and then he sat on the edge of my mattress, facing the shaded window, so that I could only see the side of his face in the light of the lamp, which he’d put on the bedside table. My heart was beating fast and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a long time. He reached his big hand down onto the side of my head and ran his fingers through my hair and over my ear until he had the back of my head in the palm of his hand. His thumb rubbed against my temple.

Why do you let her yell at you like that?

Your mother’s upset. She’ll be all right.

I didn’t want to, but I started crying a little as he rubbed my scalp. But why are you always arguing? You think I don’t hear you, but I do.

He looked away, his shadow flickering on the wall behind him and across the ceiling above. He held my head, but didn’t say anything. His shadow seemed darker than no light at all, because when there was no light there was nothing to compare the darkness to. I had stopped crying. I wanted him to say something more. But he just rubbed my head, staring at the white grain of the shade, and then he patted me on the arm and rose to leave.

Michael

August 27

Dear Aunt Penny,

Greetings. I hope this letter finds you better off than we are. Our journey is proving to be a rough one. It started with the town car Dad had hired to drive us from his friend’s house in Armonk to the West Side piers breaking down on the Henry Hudson in ninety-five-degree heat. You can imagine how frazzled Mom was! The minutes to sailing ticking by, steam billowing from the engine, the five of us and the defibrillator on her leash standing on a little wedge of road at the top of an off-ramp sweating like heifers. It took them forty-five minutes to send another car but we made it to the pier in time. As you know, Mom has been driven to distraction waiting a whole year to move since Dad announced his plan last summer, but she held him to his promise that we’d travel by ship. She so wanted us to experience the way she used to go Europe as a young woman, and certainly we were all very excited about it.

I don’t know when you’ll receive this letter. We’re now on day four of our eight-day crossing to Southampton but I haven’t figured out how their supposed “daily mail” system works (it hasn’t exactly been a priority, for reasons that will become clear). But I know you’re always curious for news of the family so I wanted to bring you up to speed. Unfortunately, as we were on our way to dinner the first night, Mom tripped on one of those raised metal doorjambs that I guess are meant to keep water from rolling in off the deck (not all that effective, as we’ve learned). If it had been a simple stumble I think she would have been okay, but she got her other leg caught up too and was whipped down onto that metal flooring pretty hard. The ship’s doctor threw around a lot of vocab—“fractured tibia,” “subluxated knee,” “contused femur”—but I don’t know what any of it means. Basically, I think she broke her leg. The cast sure makes it look that way, together with the pulleys it’s raised up with. Suffice it to say, Mom is basically out of the picture. We visit her when we can but there’s been a lot else going on.

For one thing, Alec is currently missing. We lost him at a lunch buffet the day after Mom’s accident and haven’t been able to find him since. Weirdly, the crew isn’t all that responsive, even to Dad, who as you know isn’t shy about demanding things from service people. They say it’s a big ship, this kind of thing happens all the time, and that he’ll find his way back to our cabin eventually. It is true that there are plenty of couches in the lounges for him to sleep on and that he’d have no trouble feeding himself with all these dining options. And as long as we assume he hasn’t fallen overboard, how far could he really have gone? Still, it’s been forty-eight hours now and I can tell that Dad’s miffed by it. Obviously, we haven’t told Mom. That’s the last thing she needs, trying to heal her shattered leg. Celia said Alec’s probably just trying to get attention and that the best thing is to ignore him and let it blow over.

I more or less agreed with her, at least until yesterday morning. I don’t know if you remember how you left that long message on our machine about transatlantic crossings during hurricane season, and then sent Mom that clipping a couple of days before we left about the cruise ship in the Caribbean that got slammed by a huge tropical storm, resulting in several fatalities, but let me just say: you were right. They can talk all they want about their radar and stabilizers but as you’ve probably read in the paper already, Esmeralda, that category 3 that grazed the Outer Banks and then hung a right into the North Atlantic a few days ago, well, it reached us at about six a.m. yesterday. They canceled breakfast and told everyone to remain in their cabins, probably because they wanted to prevent people from vomiting on the upholstery in the common areas. Through our porthole Celia and I watched the gale-sheared mountains of water carve valleys beneath us before striking the ship and covering the glass entirely, like we were in an aquarium, the waves crashing onto the deck high above us, sending us onto the listing floor along with the luggage knocked from the closets.

I won’t lie. It was a rough day. Dad took it all in stride, telling us stories about sailing as a boy to the Isle of Wight in choppy seas. He said there was no chance of us sinking, just a bit of broken china and a lot of sick passengers. In point of fact, a female honeymooner

was

washed off the stern, though her husband’s spinal injury from that same incident wasn’t nearly as serious as first reports suggested. Of course we thought about Mom in the infirmary, swinging from her pinioned leg for all we knew, but they’d powered off the elevators and we weren’t about to climb six flights to check on her, or on the deregulator, who’s boarded in the kennel up by the funnels. Frankly, I am more worried about Alec now that someone definitely

has

gone overboard. Still, Celia and I were vomiting all day and it turns out there’s only so much you can worry about when you’re vomiting.

That said, yesterday probably sounds more dire than it was. The worst of the storm passed to our west and by nightfall the skies had cleared and the temperature dropped a good twenty degrees. We ate up the week’s worth of snacks we’d brought with us (no dinner service) and went to bed early.

It wasn’t until this morning that I finally had time to sit down and write you this letter. I haven’t seen any small craft coming up alongside the ship and certainly no helicopter, so I’m not sure exactly how it’s supposed to get posted but I wanted to try to get word to you one way or another. Whatever you do, don’t worry about us. We’ve got another four days to Southampton, and they promise to be much calmer than the last four. Meantime, everyone here sends their best.

Yours,

Michael

August 29

Dear Aunt Penny,

As I wrote the day before last, not sure when this will reach you, but I know you’ll be keen for an update so am stealing a few minutes here in the casino to toss off this missive. There’s no sign of Alec yet, though Celia is pretty sure she saw him from the promenade deck exiting the pool area after breakfast. On the whole, though, things on the ship are getting back to normal since the storm.

And you’re never going to believe this! Guess who’s on board? Guess who I’m sitting just three one-armed bandits away from right this very second? Donna Summer! I am not even kidding. It turns out, unbeknownst to me — why Mom and Dad didn’t have the wit to tell me months ago, God only knows — she is the main stage entertainment for the crossing! I can’t imagine how much dough they had to drop to get her (maybe she gets a free cabin?) but whatever they paid is worth it.

The evening shows are twenty-one-plus, but it’s dark and crowded by the entrance and last night I managed to squeeze in undetected and stand behind a dormant food cart. Needless to say, I’ve listened to her records more times than I’ve had hot dinners. I must have worn down a dozen needles on “MacArthur Park” alone. I packed five of her cassettes for the trip (the other twelve are in the crates). As you no doubt already realize, she is the avatar of an entirely new dispensation, machine-driven but secretly brokenhearted. I am convinced she is aware of this but tortured by it. “This monstrous, monstrous force.” That’s how she described her career to

Rolling Stone.

“This whole production of people and props that you’re responsible for, by audiences and everything that rules you until you take it upon yourself to be a

machine.

And at some point a machine breaks down.” She’s all carved up by ears and eyes like mine. I’m part of that monstrous force. And I can’t help it. The music is salvific.

So there she was, live, in person, in the same room as me, in dazzling white sequins and bloodred lip gloss and metallic-blue eye shadow, her upper lip and nose flaring slightly heavenward, just like on the album covers (did you know she grew up in Dorchester?), and her long painted fingernails wrapped tightly around her wireless black mic. That audience of luxury-craft pikers had no concept of her larger significance. They were just there to digest.

I don’t know how closely you followed the controversy over her first American twelve-inch, “Love to Love You Baby” (Oasis/Casablanca, 1975), but you may remember that’s the one the BBC refused to promote and a bunch of U.S. stations wouldn’t play because of the moaning sounds she made on the track, which simulated — maybe you’ll think I’m too young to say this — climax? Apparently, when she recorded it (Musicland Studios, Munich, May — June 1975), she asked for the lights to be turned down and sang the lyrics lying on a sofa imagining herself as Marilyn Monroe. Hard to confirm, obviously, but it makes sense when you hear that cooing-whispering tone in the first few verses — she did it live, too — and then those throaty ecstatic passages that whipped the scolds into a flurry.

As of this writing, she is sitting about six feet from me feeding a slot machine, dressed in a nautical-themed outfit of white cotton pants, a navy linen blazer, and the largest sunglasses I’ve ever seen (it’s pure Halston). She’s with this tricked-out Italian guy with an Afro and a handlebar mustache and sunglasses almost as big as hers, whom I believe to be none other than

Giorgio Moroder,

her producer and collaborator, who at this point you’d have to say is really one of the fathers of disco (I promise, Aunt Penny, I’ve never done coke, but I feel certain that he has).

I have no urge to talk to them, though. What would be the point? They could have no conceivable interest in me as a social matter, and all I could say is what they already know: that they are changing the course of history. When she sang “Love to Love You Baby” last night it left me weak-kneed. And yet even that did little to prepare me for her encore, “Our Love.” Are you familiar with that particular assault on the soul? It’s on side four of

Bad Girls

but didn’t get much radio play until a few months ago when they released it as the B-side on the “Sunset People” twelve-inch (“Sunset People” itself is anemic, just a bloodless, dialed-in glorification of LA nightlife, not one of their better outings). But “Our Love” is epochal. Short of nailing this letter to a copy of the twelve-inch and sending the whole thing COD, I don’t know how I can do it justice. That plaintive opening line is enough to cripple a water buffalo.

Dropping you this line to give you peace / And to set your weary mind at ease…

People think disco is shallow, that it’s plastic and heartless, but they fail to hear the depth of its sadness. What else forces you to move and weep at the same time? When Moroder strips away all the effects at the one-minute mark, leaving only the drum track, and Summer’s voice hardens to belt out the chorus, insisting their love will last forever, over and over, twelve repeats, you can’t help but hear the lie in it. Of course it won’t last. And yet still she wants to give us peace, to set our weary minds at ease. Could a person ever not want that? And the bubbling, alien synth that comes in at the end? That whipping, chemical torque? That is the sound of what’s to come. There’s not a dance floor from Rotterdam to Tokyo that isn’t stretching that track to the breaking point. It’s the most important twenty seconds on the album. In two years, you won’t have to go farther than a fire-department bake sale to hear that beat sampled into every white pop-radio hit you can shake a dollar at.

Seeing her live was a jackhammer to the frozen sea within me. I stumbled out of there higher than a mule on a horse. Which is when I saw Alec down at the far end of the promenade. It turns out he’d had a rough few days himself. Apparently, he’d been abducted by a child-prostitution ring down on deck 3. English, Russians, and he thought maybe Dutch. He was about to be sealed in a crate and smuggled to a Soviet resort on the Black Sea when he managed to secrete himself on the bottom of a curtained tea trolley that rolled him into the kitchens. I was obviously taken aback. Transshipment to Sebastopol would have been a suboptimal outcome for Alec. As I understand it, sex slavery is pretty much a nightmare. But what it makes me wonder is, Is there anything that

isn’t

happening on this ship?

Please don’t mention this last episode to Mom or Dad. They’ve got a lot on their minds at the moment, and we’re doing our best not to worry them with anything further. Alec says he’ll steer clear of deck 3 from now on and stay out of the casino during the afternoon hours when they allow minors to play slots. We told Celia but she said Alec was making it up. She’s currently reading a nine-volume biography of the Brontë family and doesn’t like to be interrupted.

I guess the lesson is, wherever you go, life follows you there, hunts you down, and abducts you (just kidding). We’re only two days from landfall in England, where Mom can be transferred to a tertiary-care facility. And on the last night of the crossing Donna Summer is performing again!

Come visit us soon!

Yours,

Michael

September 7

Dear Aunt Penny,

I was expecting to be writing to you from England by now but it turns out our trip has been extended. Dad, as you know, is a bargain wizard, a master at traveling in style for a fraction of the going rate. But this time he’s really outdone himself. About a week ago, scanning the horizon with my binoculars for the tip of Cornwall, I saw a bunch of islands off the port side, which in due course I was able to identify as the Azores. This certainly explained the “heat wave”! For days, passengers had been complaining about sunburn and doffing their evening cruising jackets like hookers. Everything got damp and no one felt like moving. The crew was initially circumspect, saying only that we could look forward to a big surprise. But by the time we had dropped anchor somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea, people wanted an explanation. The captain came on the PA and said that every once in a while Cunard tacks on a tropical excursion as a way of thanking their loyal customers. There would be no extra charge, he said, and free champagne.

At least for those still on the ship. It turns out Alec’s brush with that syndicate down on 3 is only the tip of the iceberg. At first, it just seemed like fewer people were coming to dinner, and we figured the heat had sapped their appetite. It made sense that the oldsters would keep showing up owing to their greater sense of form. As far as the tropical excursion went, we basically just sat parked in the baking sun. So the whole marketing angle got bogus in a hurry. I’ve been going down to the rec room every morning after breakfast to play video games, and two days after we’d dropped anchor, when I swung the door open I saw something peculiar: a row of naked guys in their teens and twenties lined up against one wall, with their wrists bound. At a stretch, I suppose it could have been some kind of gay event that they hadn’t put on the public schedule. That might even have explained the two crew members wiping their bodies down with baby oil. But if this was some kind of affinity group, why were so many of them crying? I was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it, especially Dad, so I just stopped going to the rec room.

But what really set off alarms for most people was seeing that first lifeboat head for the coast loaded with naked men yoked at the neck. That, I think, was the proverbial “wake-up call.” Turns out this puppy is a full-on white slaver! And quite a cargo it has.

Being late to Southampton was one thing. But there seemed no excuse for this. And the captain’s explanation — that the shipping company had a contract with the U.S. government to deliver extradited criminals to Gabon — struck many of us as thin. Just how many people did the U.S. regularly extradite to Gabon? And even if they were criminals, didn’t they at least deserve some protection from the sun? At our table, the Milfords said they were going to ask for a complete refund (including taxes and fees) and were considering circulating a petition. Sally Milford says Cunard has gone seriously downhill. And of course Mom is disappointed, not only that she’s still in traction, but also that our experience of an Atlantic crossing has been so different from her own earlier trips, of which she has such fond memories. I’ve seen Dad get high-handed with plenty of hotel employees, but this time he really went off on the purser, who was the highest-ranking officer he could reach. He told him he knew a member of Cunard’s board of directors (not true) and that those responsible for exposing passengers to this ugly business would be held to full account.

But let’s face it — those were the salad days. We were still getting three meals and dessert. Our waiter, Lorenzo, was still putting a flower on Celia’s cake plate every evening and the whole waitstaff sang their nightly happy birthdays and anniversaries. At least until half the diners had contracted dengue fever! Mom got kicked out of the sick bay like a two-bit malingerer to make room for that afflicted horde. But what really stank, literally, is that the ship’s sewage system got backed up — something about a broken pump — which meant we couldn’t flush the toilets anymore. They said they would send crew members around to slop them out at least once a day, but like a lot of their representations, this proved false.

Those lifeboats leave every few hours now packed with butt-naked passengers slickened up like competition weight lifters, chained from neck to toe, and they come back empty. Celia thinks the larger ones are being sold for blubber, while the fitter ones are likely to enter the agrarian sector or be traded on into the interior for other goods. She said she read about it in

National Geographic.

I told her that was impossible, that whatever was taking place here must be part of an underground economy. But she said no, she’d definitely read about it, and that the most common fear was cannibalism but that this was a racist stereotype. At worst, people’s fat was harvested for fuel, not food. Which was probably why none of us had been taken yet because we were too thin.

The truth is, I think Mom’s really pissed. Which always makes me nervous. I want to find a way to calm her down but sometimes she just gets in a state and there’s nothing I can do to end it. It’s scary.

Of course, she’s not the only one. The Milfords are fit to be tied. If I sign that petition of theirs calling for the captain to resign one more time I’m going to be had up for fraud. It’s all they talk about at dinner. They strike me as the kind of overwrought liberals who are glad for the opportunity to finally be outraged at something actually happening to

them.

I guess some people just want to drag you down with their obsessions so they don’t feel so isolated with them. But is that really the adult thing to do?

We’ve certainly gotten to know couples in the neighboring cabins better than we might have otherwise, like Jim and Marsha Pottes from Harrisburg. Jim says our situation reminds him of the Battle of the Bulge, though Marsha says

everything

reminds him of the Battle of the Bulge, and what does that have to do with slavery anyway? I like her. She’s always got an ice bucket of Lipton tea going, and she wears these one-piece jumpsuits that she doesn’t even realize would probably get her into Studio 54 if she rode in on a gazelle. But mention the Milfords to Jim and Marsha and they just roll their eyes. Sure, lashing Sally to a bench on the sundeck yesterday and horsewhipping her until she bled from her flank and then leaving her there, exposed to the sun, was harsher than necessary. But Jim’s point was that Sally’s not about to be rowed to the coast and sold, and so maybe she ought to just butt out now and then. Rome wasn’t built in a day (he says that all the time, too).

Suffice it to say, between one thing and another, the social atmosphere on the ship has taken a hit. I see fewer people shopping in the jewelry store or getting their portraits taken, and I think some of the couples who got hitched on the crossing are wishing they’d just gone ahead with land-based weddings.

I have to run, though. Time for this new daily group-exercise thing that the captain has us doing. More soon, I promise.

Yours,

Michael

September 19

Dear Aunt Penny,

This trip bites! Now Mom’s got that Marburg virus,

the same one you were obsessed with last year!

She’s doing her best to stop the bleeding, but man is it a DRAG. Our situation is getting ridiculous. It seems that we’ll be parked here until virtually everyone has been auctioned off. And it’s not just the lifeboats now, either. Canoes, Boston whalers, a whole slew of small craft show up and barter with the crew, taking passengers right off the port-side service entrance. There are at least three other cruise liners anchored near us doing the same thing. Weird, right?

A few days ago a bunch of people just began to say, “Fuck it,” and started jumping off the ship. The Potteses’ tablemate Jill Sinclair jumped after her husband kicked it with the dengue (the ship doesn’t have a morgue so it’s all burial at sea, though I have to say the ceremonies have been getting progressively less elaborate). According to her husband, Mrs. Sinclair used to be a decent swimmer. Though apparently not good enough to outrun a shark herd. It was a full-on nature special. That gave some folks pause, though not everyone. It’s gotten to the point where the captain felt it necessary to order the crew to put up nets all around the edges of the ship, to prevent people calling it quits. I suppose it’s a public-health intervention of sorts, but I have to say it doesn’t offer much comfort.

To my shock, Celia has actually stopped reading about the Brontës, so she’s more available now, but still it’s getting pretty grueling. And she’s right: cannibalism

is

the biggest fear, followed by what are presumably less-than-ideal labor conditions in Angolan mines. Lots of people are saying it must be one of those African famines that has made this business a runner, but that’s just ignorant because the famines are usually in Ethiopia, and I don’t see how white tourists could be cheaper than rice. Truth be told, there’s not a lot of blubber left on these cruisers. Between the dysentery and whatever slop they’re buying in off the coast to feed us, they should advertise the trip as a weight-loss clinic. Alec is back down to twenty-three pounds, which has Mom out of her mind with worry. I just try to remind her that she needs to focus on her own bleeding. Alec will fatten up in no time once we get to England.

I told you about the mandatory exercise, right? I’m guessing it’s not Donna Summer’s favorite contract clause, singing some of her finest work to the remaining five hundred passengers crammed onto the stern pool area while the crew shouts through bullhorns for all of us to dance. And yet she brings to these performances something remarkable. I’d give my front teeth for a recording of yesterday’s rendition of “On the Radio.” Its opening piano and strings have always hovered between LA session-music schmaltz and the prelude to a tragedy, only to be redeemed by the purity of her voice in that first verse. But yesterday she reached higher still, a longing as clean as elation.

Someone found the letter you wrote me on the radio / And they told the world just how you felt…

By the time the beat came in, I could have sworn I saw tears in her eyes. Her makeup was running, like the mascara on many of the ladies in front of her, who still put their faces on each morning even though their clothes and luggage have been confiscated. They’re not the best dancers and can be quite lethargic, but yesterday I saw many of them close their eyes and begin moving their hips in time not to the drum machine but to the rhythm of her words.

When she reached the middle verse, that pool deck might as well have been the Paradise Garage at two a.m. on a Sunday, minus the gay and black people. She had that crowd of sun-charred crackers dancing like jackrabbits. They tripped on their chains but just got right back up again.

After this morning’s session (“Dim All the Lights” and “Bad Girls” followed by a “MacArthur Park” that left even the weary crew in tears) I passed a suite on 9 whose door had been left ajar, and there Donna was, kneeling at the foot of the bed, praying. I was more ashamed than ever to be dressed in nothing but my underpants. At any moment, her bodyguard would return from his toilet break and hustle me off. Still, something about the image of her at prayer arrested me and I couldn’t help watching.

At this late date, I suppose there’s no reason not to tell you that I have in fact (forgive the confession) “pleasured” myself a number of times to “Love to Love You Baby,” and not only to the drum track, but also to visions more particular to the artist herself. Apparently, she’s always considered herself plain and been highly self-conscious concerning her physical appearance. When I read that I felt closer to her, if only because I’m the same way. As I was peering at her through the slit in the door, Giorgio Moroder opened it wide and started at the sight of me. “Buzz off,” he said in an Italian accent. I didn’t think. I just reacted. “You’re the greatest producer of our age,” I said.

This took him aback, and for a moment he didn’t seem to know how to respond. He too had been shackled in leg irons. His striped linen pants were soiled and ragged. He asked me how much of his early, solo work I knew. All of it, I told him.

That’s Bubblegum, That’s Giorgio

(Hansa, 1969). Not exactly a seminal bubblegum album, but that’s not the point. Somewhere in there he was hearing what would lead him to the Moog synthesizer and the revolution in the sound of modern life, to a music that mirrors to an almost frightening degree the frictionless surface of commercial culture, but reminds us that it’s still human beings who are condemned to live in it, caught in the undertow of its melancholy. And so his first work, I told him in all honesty, is interesting in the way Picasso’s early academic realism might be to an art historian. He handed me a towel to cover myself and invited me into their suite.

He shut the bedroom door to give Donna her privacy and then told me this gig was like nothing they’d ever done before. “Bullshit,” he called it. He’s been bribing an officer to send telegrams to everyone in LA he can think of to try to get them airlifted out of here, but he suspects the messages are never sent. Donna apparently has a heart condition which is acting up. She was supposed to be in the studio five days ago, and her voice is at the breaking point. We talked a bit about Munich in the mid-seventies, the dilemma about whether to sign with Geffen, and how Donna wanted to move toward more of a rock sound on her next album. I wanted to tell him that they couldn’t control what they’d started, that the beats would only get faster and the synth more gorgeous, but this seemed presumptuous. I was worried the door might open and Donna might appear and I would be ugly and dumbstruck. So eventually I excused myself, and hustled back down to our cabins on 5.

To be honest, Aunt Penny, I’m not sure what will become of us now. We thought it was bad when Dad got shackled to Jim Pottes two days ago, making sleeping awkward for everyone, and then Dad woke up with Jim’s corpse locked to his ankle and wrist, dead with the Marburg that Mom presumably gave him. We lost half the morning cleaning up all that blood and mucus (except that little fidget-creature, Alec, who said he had a headache). I’d planned to do so much reading on this trip, and have got to practically none of it. In any case, at the rate the crew’s expiring I guess they’ll need someone to sail this puppy north again, so maybe I’ll have a chance to catch up then.

In the meantime, be well, and know that while this move of ours has turned into a major bore, the five of us have our eyes fixed on one another like cement. Someday soon you’ll come visit us in England at our new house and we’ll all have a good laugh about the crazy turns life can take.

Yours,

Michael

Alec

The downstairs bathroom had a cork floor and one of those strange electric towel racks. There was a bathtub but no shower. To flush you had to pull a chain hanging from a water tank up the wall. The sink was high and tiny. But no one could see you in the bathroom, it had no window, which made it safe. And it was warm, too, unlike every other room in the house, and brightly lit.

I sat on the toilet until my legs went numb, but still nothing came out. Being there that long, my legs tingling, it was as if I had the power to see through the door, out into the front hall, and onto the driveway and the little lane that Michael called twee-to-beat-the-band, and beyond that through the other houses to the center of the village we’d been living in almost two school years already, into the weird English food stores, the butcher and the greengrocer, and the newsagent. Sundays were the only times I got to wear long pants here, because it was the only day I didn’t have to go to school, and long pants were for the upper-form boys, the ones with pubic hair.

The lined gray wool of my trousers lay crumpled around my ankles. When the numbness started to hurt, I got up from the toilet and stepped out of them. All I had on now was Michael’s silky white shirt, which felt like someone touching me. I unbuttoned it and let that slink to the floor, too. I put the footstool in front of the sink and climbed up to look at my bare self in the mirror, and then I leaned forward and flapped my penis up against the glass.

Have a good look then, you little wanker, Linsbourne had said in the showers after games. I’d been staring at his without knowing it. Everyone looked at me, and I looked down at the gray soapy water puddling by the drain.

But here with the door locked no one could see me bobbing my penis up and down with the handle of my toothbrush, or running naked in circles around the bath mat. I touched my bare legs to the curves of the towel rack, and the radiator, which burned, and my stomach to the knob of the linen closet. Then I got bored and went over to the door.

I took the knob of the sliding-bolt lock between my thumb and finger. The lock was stiff and hard to use. Mom kept saying that. You had to press it until your fingers hurt. She kept telling Dad to fix it. I pressed hard enough to feel the little pain on the pad of my thumb. But not enough to shift it open. Which excited me again. One hard push and they could open this up and discover I was naked.

I knocked on the door. Then I stood very still, and listened, not breathing. Nothing happened. I knocked again, more loudly. I heard footsteps. Mom coming into the front hall.

“Who’s in there?”

“It’s me. The lock’s stuck. I can’t get it open.”

“Just push it a little harder.”

I pressed the knob again, enough to feel the prick of the little pain.

“It’s too tight,” I said. “It won’t move.”

“Well, then find something to push it with. The handle of the plunger or something.”

I did as I was told, crossing the room, naked, getting the plunger, and scraping the wood of it against the metal loud enough for her to hear.

“It won’t go,” I said.

“What’s the matter?” Celia asked, coming down the stairs.

“He can’t get the lock open.”

“Why, because he’s too weak?”

“No,” I called through the door. “Because it’s stuck.”

“Well, push it harder.”

“He’s tried. I knew this would happen. I told your father.”

Kelsey bashed her tail against the bottom of the door, excited by our voices. I heard Michael passing through from the living room.

“Alec’s trapped himself in the toilet,” Celia told him.

“I keep saying he’s the fortunate one,” Michael said. “But no one believes me.”

“That’s not helpful,” Mom said. “I have to check the meat. Could you two help your brother, please?”

“Just open it,” Celia said. “I need my barrette.”

“I can’t,” I said, my cheeks burning, a strange light-headedness lifting my body until I almost floated there just a few inches from them, the door the only thing covering me.

“What are the conditions like in there?” Michael asked. “Are you well provisioned?”

“You’re just encouraging him,” Celia said, walking off toward the living room. “Leave him there and he’ll come out.”

But Michael stayed. He sat in the creaking wicker side chair by the hall table. I heard the drawer open, and a moment later the end of a black shoelace appeared under the door.

“What’s this?”

“You could tie it to the bolt and pull.”

I pressed my bare back to the wall and slid down it until I was sitting cross-legged.

Michael had hated his school as much as I hated mine, at least in the beginning. He’d cried about it, even though he seemed too old to. I listened at night from my bedroom, to Mom telling him it would be okay, that he would meet people and it would get better. That was when the two of us had still played together with Kelsey on Sundays, steering her into the same room as the white Persian cat that had come with the house, so we could watch them fight. But now Michael usually went into Oxford to go record shopping instead. And during the week he didn’t get home until suppertime, and always studied afterwards.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, fiddling with the shoelace.

“In bed,” Michael said. “Where, of late, he is wont to be.”

“Why does he sleep so much?”

“I guess because he’s tired,” Michael said. “Very tired. Apparently unemployment will do that to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He picks you up from school, doesn’t he? Did he ever do that before?”

Dad had started coming to get me from school in the last month, in the blue Skoda wagon. On the way home, on the straightaway of the country road, he’d speed up to eighty or ninety miles an hour, and then shift the car into neutral and turn the engine off. We’d swoop into the valley, freewheeling through the open fields, seeing how far we could get, if we could make it all the way to the pub at the bridge, until we were going only a few miles an hour and cars behind us were honking and passing.

“He’s not still in there, is he?” Mom said, agitated now. “This is ridiculous. Where’s your father? Michael, get your father.”

I leaped to the sink and put my clothes on. And then went to the door, and was about to slide the lock open but I didn’t. I waited. For Dad’s footsteps on the ceiling above me. For the sound of him moving in their bedroom. He would have to get up now. He’d have no choice. And then I heard him on the stairs, and heard his voice just on the other side of the door.

“Alec?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the trouble, then?”

“The lock. It’s jammed.”

He walked out of the hall without saying anything and came back a moment later, and I heard a scraping at the base of the door, and saw the tips of a pair of pliers. But they wouldn’t fit through the crack. He got up again and returned with a smaller pair, which he slid through to me.

I clasped them to the knob and scraped them along the metal.

“You have to squeeze,” he said.

I stopped the scraping and made a little grunt. “It doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s still stuck.”

“For God’s sake,” Mom said, charging back in. “The food’s on the table.”

“Open the fucking door,” Celia said.

“You will not use that language,” Mom said.

All four of them were there now, and Kelsey, too. Dad didn’t say anything.

The blood was pumping in my ears.

“That’s it, then?” Mom said to Dad. “You’ve got nothing else to offer?”

“Alec,” he said. “Step back, step away from the door.”

“What are you doing, John?”

“I’m going to break it down,” he said.

“No!” I said. “Wait, let me try again.” And I grabbed the pliers, biting the steel with them and yanking the bolt across.

John

From the clearing in the woods, I can see down through the spruce trees to the river, where a long slab of rock parts the slow-moving waters covered now in morning shade. The rock is mute and still in the encroaching summer heat. It has the inhuman patience of objects. A reminder that mineral time does not care for sentiment, or life. Every human thing, a ruin in waiting. On a planet that is a ruin in waiting. Which says nothing about divinity, one way or the other. I only know that this trial is what has become of my sliver of time.

My great return to Britain was a great failure. There was a recession. Purposeful risk was a hard enough sell to my complacent countrymen. The declining market made them more cautious still. I did what I had told all the entrepreneurs I ever trained not to do: moved my family before I had sufficient commitments. These, at least, are some of the excuses Margaret encourages me to give myself for what happened. That is, when she is not eaten up by fear and rage at the fact that she and the children have been uprooted twice now: first to go over there, to retrieve our furniture from where it had remained in storage, to settle the children in English schools, and then less than three years later to retreat back here to America. Because of me. Because I was fired by my own partners, told they couldn’t afford my debilitation any longer — at the firm I had started. Back here to a different town and different schools, everything new again. Walcott, west of Boston. Because at least here, a man whose business I had helped to start pitied me sufficiently to offer me a job. Which itself couldn’t possibly last, and didn’t. Eighteen months of work, and then the suggestion that I go part-time, and then, a few months ago, the end to that, too.

Against the monster, I’ve always wanted meaning. Not for its own sake, because in the usual course of things, who needs the self-consciousness of it? Let meaning be immanent, noted in passing, if at all. But that won’t do when the monster has its funnel driven into the back of your head and is sucking the light coming through your eyes straight out of you into the mouth of oblivion. So like a cripple I long for what others don’t notice they have: ordinary meaning.

Instead, I have words. The monster doesn’t take words. It may take speech, but not words in the head, which are its minions. The army of the tiny, invisible dead wielding their tiny, spinning scythes, cutting at the flesh of the mind. Unlike ordinary blades, they sharpen with use. They’re keenest in repetition. Self-accusation being nothing if not repetitive. There is nothing deep about this. It is merely endless.

I taught my children how to handle themselves on the water, how to step in and out of a boat, how to row, how to steer an outboard and tie knots, and when I had the chance I showed them how to sail. I taught them how to ride their bicycles, and in the country, in Samoset, I cut paths in the field for them to ride on, and built them a tree fort. And back in Britain, for the two and a half years we lasted there, I showed them castles and Roman walls, and taught them what history I remembered from school. You could say that I fathered them as I was never fathered, but that sounds awfully American and psychological. My father did what his time expected of him without complaint, and I have no bitterness toward him. We weren’t meant to know each other and we didn’t. He didn’t plant the monster in me. It’s older than him, and far savvier. He worked for his family’s shipping business in Belfast, and when he turned thirty he became their agent in Southampton, where he met my mother. He saw his family through the Depression and the war, and ensured that his children were properly educated, and throughout it all he spoke very little, which was no deprivation given that I’d never known him to behave otherwise. It’s easy to make too much of fathers, I want to say.

A few months ago, a fog blinded me, thicker than ever before. I slept in the monster’s arms. I felt its breath on my neck, its scaled stomach rising and falling against my back, its head and face invisible as always. I couldn’t pretend anymore to Margaret that I was working. The children receded into noises grating on my ears. I stopped moving. Weeks went by indistinguishable one from another. I could smell the rot of myself, my armpits, my breath, my groin, as though the living part of death had already commenced, the preliminary decomposing, as the will fades. In Dante and Milton hell is vivid. Sin organizes the dead into struggle. The darkness bristles with life. There is story upon story to tell. But in the fog there is nothing to see. The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.

But it didn’t happen. Through the window by the bureau I saw the leaves of the Japanese maple and the roof of the house next door and clouds stretched across the sky. Particulars began to return. Dust in the sunlight. The weave of the carpet. The very things which earlier harbingered trouble by threatening to derail my attention and distract me from the through line of a conversation were now, strangely, signs of mental animation: the registering of color, the sharp delineation of objects against their grounds. I got out of bed. Talking seemed nearly impossible but I started eating again with the family. Margaret was exhausted but still she made sure to cook a meal most every night. I noticed again how oddly beautiful my children were, even amid the moroseness I had imposed on the house. Celia’s black hair shone in the buttery light of the sideboard lamp and her enormous eyes coursed with anger at the stifling fact of me and her mother. And Alec — uncannily already my height, always trying to keep up with his sister, measuring his opinions against the force of hers, guileless yet acting at the same time (perhaps his acting is what makes him guileless). I can’t imagine I was ever that young, not so unguardedly. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, unsure of who or what I am.

And then there is Michael’s empty chair. He came back with us from Britain, but he couldn’t stand it here. Or maybe he couldn’t stand me. Simon, a friend of his from the comprehensive, said he could go back and live with his family to finish his last year of school, and eventually we consented. Of course it made sense. If I hadn’t created such a wreck of things he wouldn’t have been so miserable. The fact is, his being gone makes it easier. It’s harder for me to look at him than at the other two. When he was little he tripped on the stairs in Battersea and hit his head. It wasn’t a serious injury and Margaret didn’t ring me at the office. But around that time, midmorning, I got a terrible headache, bad enough that I left the building to get some air. Walking in the park, trying to shake it off, I sensed something had happened to him. When I rang Margaret I didn’t mention that I already knew what she had to tell me, because I didn’t want to disturb her.

Michael was quiet and very thoughtful as a boy. There were times when he had the air of a mystic about him, as children sometimes do, as if he were staring calmly into the nature of things and had the wisdom to know there were no words for it. But more often his prescience spun him into worry. Was there enough petrol in the car to get us to his grandmother’s house? Did we have enough time to make the train or would it leave without us? What if the water boiled over when his mother wasn’t watching? What if the policemen didn’t know where to find the criminals? His questions had no end and no answers sufficient to mollify him. I didn’t mind. Then he became old enough to realize his questions were childish and instead of asking them aloud, he turned them inward. We stopped having the conversations where I explained simple things to him. School, which made him so unhappy, took over, and whenever I tried to protect him from it, like speaking to a classmate’s parents about how their child was teasing him, I only made it worse. Now he’s taller than I am, thin as a rail, and he talks as fast as can be, not questions but endless invention, his imagination running out ahead of him, to make sure everything stays in motion, that he doesn’t get stuck.

A few weeks ago, the first night that I ate with Margaret and the children again, Celia kept scrunching her napkin on the table beside her, clenching and unclenching. When I told her to put it on her lap, she shouted at me that she would do what she wanted. Margaret slammed her utensils down and said if we didn’t stop it she would leave the table. But the next night was a little better. Michael wasn’t there to distract his brother and sister with laughter, but still, it was better.

Being up and about again, I started taking these walks. I wake early and bring Kelsey, who runs off the leash once we reach the woods. The cool oxygen of the plants and trees before the sun has dried them feels like a balm to my lungs. I’ve always preferred the woods in America to the woods where I grew up in Hampshire, which I can never help knowing are the hemmed-in exception to towns and villages and farms. New England is the other way around: a series of clearings in a forest. Keep walking north, and the clearings will shrink, until there are none. I don’t meet other people here, and that’s what matters. My mind can rest. Which is when my situation becomes obvious. There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.

It’s midmorning by the time I cross back over the river and follow the path into the field at the end of our street, which is saturated now in the July heat. The grass is intensely green, the scrub-apple trees by the road past blooming, on into their pure summer verdancy, along with the rhododendron and the lilac, their flowers gone, their leaves fat with sun. The air smells of the fecund soil — the flesh covering the skull of the planet, the muck from which the plants rise, busy in the mindless life of heat. Celia and Alec were drugged with sleep when I left the house, as they always are, and I didn’t want to wake them. In summer, I can’t be sure of their whereabouts, but last night at dinner I paid attention, and got a sense of where they would be today.

Turning before I reach the house, I carry on into the center of the town. It’s quiet. Kids are away at camp or on holiday. The shops have bins and tables of merchandise out on the sidewalk and signs announcing sales. A few skateboarders sit glumly on the bench under the awning of the ice cream store watching the cars move slowly past. Across the street a woman smiles at me and waves enthusiastically and I nod and wave back, though I have no idea who she is. A mother of one of the children’s friends, in all likelihood, someone I’ve met at the school or in a driveway picking up Alec or Celia. I look away and keep walking lest she cross the street and begin speaking to me. In another time, I would have hooked into the aggression of her good cheer and doubled it up until running into her became an event with a momentum of its own. I’ve lived vicariously at times off that birthright of the American upper-middle class — their competitive optimism. It’s what I loved about working in this country. What are your plans? How’s the project? How’s business? When I left university in Britain, we didn’t have entrepreneurs. We had managers and industrial relations. Meeting someone at a party led to the circumlocutions designed to tease out where you’d been at school, one’s accent having made one acceptable company in the first place. In America, I flew all over the country talking to people about their wildest ambitions and they were always delighted to see me, even if I could promise them nothing. Calling them back a year or two later, after my partners and I had raised a fund, and telling them I wanted to help them create what they’d been dreaming of was a heady feeling. But that was a lifetime ago.

Back then, in Samoset, we rented a house for three hundred dollars a month. We had a secondhand station wagon, a vegetable garden, enough money that Margaret could stay home. Alec used to gallop up the street to meet me as I was walking back from the bus. He’d take my briefcase and carry it with him across the front lawn and around the house, where Michael and Celia would be playing in the tree fort or in the barn, and they’d come rushing over to push through the back door ahead of me, calling out to their mother that I was home. In the summer, we’d eat outside on a picnic table left by the previous tenants. I’d moved the table over toward the edge of the woods, onto a mossy square of concrete, and from there you looked back across the circular dirt drive to our octagonal house, white clapboard with a black roof and brick chimney. Margaret’s great-great-grandfather had been a carpenter in the town, and it turned out he was the one who had built the place for a Methodist minister. There had been an enthusiasm for the design among members of the Spiritualist movement. Having no right angles, the octagon was said to leave no corners in which evil spirits might become trapped. In the evening, with the windows illuminated, it resembled a squat lighthouse sending its warning in all directions. When the children were full and drowsy and had ceased their play I’d sometimes pretend with them that the house was haunted and tell them stories about the people who had gathered there a hundred years ago to speak with the dead by candlelight. Michael didn’t want to listen, pretending he was too old for ghost stories. Margaret would say, You’ll frighten them before bed, but Alec and Celia would squeal to me, No, no, keep going. I told them how the neighbors would come and join hands in the dark listening for the voices of their departed relatives, who would appear in our very living room and speak of the life of the dead. Alec clung to my side, Celia became very fixed and still, peering into the trees behind us, long after Margaret had cleared the table and Michael had gone off to his room, the three of us there together under the full-laden branches of the oak, surrounded by the hum of crickets. I sensed their tremendous need for me in those moments — for my voice to go on, to carry and protect them from everything that encircled us. And I did protect them. I told them they were safe because their mother’s ancestor had built our house so that no ghosts would ever stay, that all the frightening things that might ever have happened were long in the past and couldn’t possibly reach them now. Then I’d put Alec over my shoulder and take Celia’s hand and walk them into the house and up to their beds.

Walking past the cemetery of the Congregational church, I cross the street into the grocery-store parking lot. It’s barely half full and baking hot. Through the glass door at the rear of the building, I can see the row of three cash registers. And there’s Alec, leaning against the steel rim of one of the narrow black conveyor belts, talking to Doreen, a heavy smoker in her late sixties with a dyed-red bouffant and heavy jowls. Whenever I come into the store she tells me how much everyone loves Alec and she herself is clearly charmed by him, by how polite he is and how well he listens. He has a slightly precious manner for a fourteen-year-old, almost courtly. He asked me last year if he should take metalwork or theater, and I told him he’d meet more interesting people in the theater class. Which may be part of the reason for how he holds himself now, I suppose — the acting he’s been doing. But his formality he gets from his idea of me. He’s the only one born in America, the only one of the three who was excited when we told them we’d be moving to England.

I’ve never watched a child of mine strain to be an adult before. Michael and Celia have done it in private, away from my view, though their mother says I’m the one locked away from them, and I suppose I can’t deny that. But here is Alec now with his chin ever so slightly raised, nodding with judicial solemnity at whatever Doreen is pattering on about, while one foot taps rapidly on the linoleum floor and he holds his hands down at his waist, picking discreetly at his cuticles, his attention fixed on her. Something she says causes his eyes to widen in surprise, and he shakes his head, feigning indignation. And then his hands are out at his sides, he’s leaning forward, gesticulating with great vigor, and Doreen rolls her head back, laughing. Alec smiles, delighted by what he’s just said and the response it’s getting. The young actor with the audience of one. I find it almost repulsive. The overweeningness of it. Is this what I have bequeathed him? Doreen turns back to her register, and starts passing a woman’s groceries down the belt for Alec to bag.

All three of my children have jobs and more or less pay for their own things. Still, I don’t know how much of our situation they understand: that there is only debt. Their mother would never tell them, but she yells it at me at night. And though Celia has given up, Alec sometimes knocks on the living room door and pleads with us to stop fighting, and then the liquid in my skull becomes so heavy I can barely keep my eyes open, wanting so much for it all to go away — the tight air, the words contracting like muscle over bone. Alec pushes the woman’s grocery cart to her Volvo, but it’s only as he’s skating it back across the parking lot that he sees me off to the side and comes to a halt.

Business being slow, they don’t mind him taking his lunch break early. We walk down toward the town hall. I have no destination in mind and he doesn’t ask for one. It’s ordinary for us not to talk when we’re alone together, which isn’t often. He’s become prehensile, stretched up on spindly legs. He could probably bathe more than he does. He’s in that larval stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child’s body. This is what boarding school is for. To store them away during years like this, so they can suffer without the embarrassment of their parents watching. And much good that did you, Margaret would say. He’s fiddling with his fat little Swiss Army knife, picking out each blade and tool, folding them back down again, then fanning them out at different angles.

“I’m hungry,” he says.

We keep going past the Catholic church and the police station and the semi-detached white town houses set back from the road. There are free tables visible through the window of the diner; at least it will be cool inside. I spent a lot of time here last fall with a legal pad drafting letters to investors for what I thought might become a new investment fund. Tradesmen and retirees are the people who frequent the place. Not the young mothers or men on business meetings. The food’s too greasy and the inside not clean enough. The owner, a Latvian fellow who sat with me one afternoon and spoke for two hours about his life in the Soviet navy, waves from the kitchen. The smells from the fryers are unusually heavy. They fill my head and lungs, leaving me slightly nauseous. I notice the dandruff on Alec’s shoulders as he hunches over the laminated menu. He is asking me if I heard his question. The waiter is standing by our table. No, I tell him, what’s your question?

“Is it okay if I get the chili and a Monte Cristo sandwich?”

Afterwards he will want chocolate cake. In restaurants his mother tries to save small sums of money by ordering the cheapest thing on the menu. Which I’ve always considered defeatist.

“What are you getting, Dad?”

“Nothing,” I say, “I’m fine.”

The beast isn’t in Alec. I have no way of knowing this for certain. He’s too young. Maybe I just don’t see it and don’t want to. But in his eagerness to please there is such squirming energy and a kind of literalness. He’s up on the surface of himself opening outward, even when he’s embarrassed, perhaps particularly so then, because he finds embarrassment so painful he’ll do anything to get off the spot. He’s a bit of an exhibitionist, too. As a toddler he used to walk naked into our bedroom and stand there, biting his lower lip and smiling. There’s a photograph of him at my brother-in-law’s house at Christmastime when he’s four or five standing at the top of the back stairs with his trousers down asking for help in the bathroom. Who the drunk was that took the picture before helping him, I forget. Never such things with Celia, and certainly never with Michael. Being the youngest, that is part of it. He understood the rules from the point of view of someone who got to break them. They were provisional, and with wile, they could be set aside. And then eventually I would have to give him a spanking and he would weep. But his sullenness never lasted. He was too impatient. And still is. Impatient to be older. He eats his sandwich with his mouth open.

“Are we going to go back to Maine ever?” he asks. “Like, this summer?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and I can tell from the way he stops chewing for an instant and glances at me that he suspects there is something wrong with me again, though what that means to him I have no idea. I am, after all, out of bed and here with him now. And I am all he has ever known. I heard him once through the door of his room boasting to a school friend that his father had his own company and made all the decisions himself and traveled all over the world. My strange American son, who doesn’t close his mouth when he eats, but is otherwise so well mannered.

“Celia earns more money than I do,” he says. “And she just makes salads at the restaurant. But she gets better tips. So I think maybe I should ask for a raise. I saw the assistant dairy manager’s paycheck and he makes eight forty-five an hour, I get six twenty-five, but I still work the dairy case when he’s not there. Don’t you think I should ask for a raise?”

“You should visit your grandmother in England,” I say. “She’s mentioned that to you, hasn’t she? You coming there to stay with her sometime?”

“There’s nothing to do at her house.”

One day he’ll go. She won’t tell him the story of her own father, or the one time I met him — by accident, in a shop in Southampton — because for her it wouldn’t be proper to discuss such unfortunate things. Which makes me think that I should tell him.

My mother never mentioned my grandfather because he’d divorced my grandmother, which was unheard-of then, and taken his sons with him. He’d gotten rich several times and always wound up broke, though how I’m not sure. The day I met him would have been sometime in 1946 or ’47. My mother and I were in a queue at the bakery, waiting for bread rations. She gripped my arm and I looked up to see her staring in guarded terror at a man with a gray-brown mustache, dressed in an expensively tailored suit and bowler hat, who had stopped beside her.

“Hello, Bridget,” he said. “You look well. And who is this?”

For a moment, she said nothing. I thought the man had offended her by being familiar. But then, in an oddly low tone, very unlike her usual voice, she said, “This is John. John, shake your grandfather’s hand.”

It was the first time she’d seen him in twenty years. He waited with us in the line and then came back to the house for tea. He told us he was living in London, and that he had come down to Southampton for the day on business. I remember how he sat with his legs crossed in the wingback chair by the fireplace, with his gold cuff links and polished brogues, his body very much at ease, as if he’d run into an old friend and was visiting a house he knew well. Each time he took a biscuit from the plate he gave me a little smiling nod. After half an hour of pleasantries and intermittent silence he checked his watch and said he had a train to catch. On the doorstep, he kissed my mother on the cheek and tipped his hat to me. “Very glad to meet you, John,” he said, and then he was gone.

Given that he was a stranger, his sudden brief appearance didn’t much matter to me. But the sight of my mother perched on the edge of the sofa as the two of them spoke — her jaw tightened, her eyes wide and unblinking, her body rigid as a post — quickly and quietly destroyed the illusion of her perpetual sameness, of her having always been my mother and nothing else. She suffered for alien reasons, caught up in times I could never reach. I’d understood that people put on various manners: the soldier’s perpetual joking; my teachers’ punitive zeal; even my father’s brusqueness, which suggested everything was an interruption, could seem an act. But my mother had always been actual life, not prejudice or adaptation. She was the way of knowing anything to begin with. Until that afternoon. Air raids hadn’t frightened her. She would shoo my brother and me into the reinforced room, get the little bag of food from the cupboard, and tell us to sit under the dining room table while she and my father sat in chairs nearby, only occasionally whispering to each other. Her voice didn’t change then. It simply became more efficient. But here was an elderly gentleman having tea on a Saturday morning in our sitting room who could make her very speech and body foreign to me.

We didn’t talk about his visit once he’d gone. I presume she told my father about it, but not in my presence. It would have happened eventually, the revelation of her partialness, that she might need something, that her need could be a burden, but it came so suddenly and so starkly. I forgave her everything I had ever blamed her for and tried to love her more without saying anything. She lives on her own now in a pleasant market town outside Southampton, in a comfortable little brick-house development that my brother found for her. To the children she is Granny with the good dark chocolates and the strict table manners. She will blame Margaret.

“You didn’t say if I should ask for the raise,” Alec says.

And in my children’s eyes, how long have I been partial? How long have I been a burden?

“Why not?” I say, but my words have no life to them, and he knows it.

His cake has arrived and is already gone. He scrapes at the last smudges of icing. “Mom said you were better.”

His straight brown hair falls at a slant across his brow. I could reach over the table now and touch the top of his downturned head. The beast is a projector too, every day throwing up before me pictures of what I’m incapable of.

The little agony of stillness is ended by the appearance in the diner of a boy whose name I should know; he’s one of Alec’s friends — Scott or Greg or Peter. I’m facing the door so I see him first. He waves and comes over to our booth. Like most of Alec’s friends, he’s dressed in dark, secondhand clothing — a black suit jacket and paisley shirt, both several sizes too large. When they’re together they look like a group of young hobos. If it’s meant as some kind of class transvestism it doesn’t much work; the air of the costume gives it rather the opposite effect, of boy actors affecting a pose. He and Alec greet each other with elaborate nonchalance. Yet I notice Alec is blushing. Something about the moment is making him nervous. He trips over a question about whether Scott or Greg or Peter is getting together later with others, and the boy, who’s greeted me with an upward nod of the chin, as if he and I were convicts meeting in the yard, replies to Alec with what I think he means to be a sardonic comment, but which instead comes off as a mixture of daffy and cruel. It’s a reference I can’t follow, about someone being lame.

He perches on the banquette beside Alec, who looks most uncomfortable now. They’re like harlequins, the two of them, young and droopy-faced and strange. As a little boy Alec would wake me from my naps by climbing up on the bed and rocking back and forth until I grabbed him and pulled him down on top of me, and then I’d take a coin and grasp it in my fist and he’d use both hands to try to pry my thumb loose and get at it, and everything between us then seemed as I thought having children would be, and as it had never quite been with Michael. I want to break Alec back down to that, to wipe away all this tentative foolery, just for today. And say what to him? Do what? If I ever had the care of his soul, I don’t anymore. I gave it up ten times over by not getting out of bed, by lingering in the basement and letting him find me there, staring at a wall. I may have been all he knew for a time but he’s been old enough for a couple of years now to measure me against others. My trousers don’t fit me. I have to cinch my belts to the last notch. Soaping myself in the bath, I can feel the softness of my flesh where my muscles once were.

“I’m going record shopping with Brad,” Scott or Greg or Peter says; he’s ordered a milk shake without asking if we are staying, and sucks on it noisily. Alec’s desire to go off with him on his expedition is all the more obvious for how he tries to hide it, saying Michael’s probably already got whatever albums they’re looking for. But if he didn’t have to go back to work shortly, he’d be out the door with him. At their age, I wore a blue uniform and spent my idle time avoiding the cruelty of prefects. Excitement was the purchase of candy at the tuckshop. They have more merchandise in their rooms than we had in our house. Still, I’m glad he knows nothing of that world. I pay at the cash register, wave good-bye to the owner, and eventually Alec and his friend trail after me onto the blazing sidewalk.

My family will never know how they saved me. Margaret, maybe, but not the children. When I turn back Alec is looking almost beseechingly at his friend, who seems oblivious to the attention he’s receiving, as he kicks a pebble down the pavement, loping with an ostentatiously casual gait, the cartoon of a rock star, all flounce and droop. I have the passing urge to visit upon him some deprivation to see how his elaborate manner would fare in less bountiful circumstances but more than being angry at this little customer, I realize that what I really want is for Alec to stop paying him such mind. After we’ve passed the town hall, he finally takes his leave, and Alec walks up beside me again, reluctant and clearly deflated as we climb the hill back to the grocery store.

“Remind me who that was.”

“Sam,” he says, sounding practically disconsolate now. All this is wrong. Our time can’t end like this. “Come on,” I say, “let’s walk.”

“My break’s over. They’ll get mad at me.”

“I’ll tell them — I’ll explain it.” I’m already leading him to the other side of the street, the cars halting to let us cross. The sun burns directly above, the buildings giving no cover. I don’t know where we are going. Shards of light from the glass and steel of parked cars burn at my eyes. A little farther on we reach the footpath that shadows the brook — a strip of parkland winding through the town behind backyards and playing fields. I head onto it, making for the shade. I’ve never adapted to the climate here. Summer is an oppression.

“What are we doing?” Alec says.

He’s trailing many steps behind me now. I think that of all of them, he will manage the best. His born selfishness. His impatience. The way we spoiled him. I stop and wait for him to catch up.

“My break’s over,” he says again, pausing a couple of yards away, kicking lightly at the grass. “I have to go. What are we doing here, anyway? Why’d you come to the store?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Why are you acting so weird?” he says. “Can’t you just stop?”

There is nothing I can say to him now that isn’t murder. But I have to try. “Sam — he seems like a nice fellow,” I say, though I don’t believe it. It’s just that Alec will have friends, and I want him to know that. People he can rely on. People to spend time with.

“What are you talking about? You don’t even know who he is. Just stop, please, will you?” He looks as mortified as if the two of us were onstage together naked.

I can see in his eyes how hard he’s trying not to pity me. This is what I do to them. Over and over. And then, like Alec’s face now, their faces become the mask of the beast, used by it to torment me. My voice used to protect Alec, the way I invented stories for him. Protecting him from the ghosts. Now I’m the spirit trapped in his house.

He’s turning to go, upset and fed up. I walk over to him, to put a hand on his shoulder, but he ducks out from under my touch and hurries back up to the street.

The deepest shade is beneath a maple further along the path. I lean up against it, sitting on the grass. The water of the brook is clear to the sandy bed. These beauteous forms / Through a long absence, have not been to me / As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye / But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din / Of towns and cities, I have owed to them / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet…That first time I went into hospital, during university, I remember being glad Mr. Gillies had made us memorize poems at school …that blessed mood / In which the burthen of the mystery / In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world / Is lighten’d — that serene and blessed mood / In which the affections gently lead us on, — / Until the breath of this corporeal frame / And even the motion of our human blood / Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul. The words meant nothing to me as a boy. They were just a rhythm. Jumbled up with Gilbert and Sullivan and “Onward Christian Soldiers.” But after the treatments, I would come back to my room bruised across the chest from my convulsions against the restraints, and for several days I wouldn’t be able to recall much of anything except passages of music and those stanzas. They became the way I measured time. By bringing back that earlier world, assuring me it had existed, and thus that when more time passed things might be different still. And so I began to piece together the meaning of the phrases. That the motion of our blood could almost stop, our bodies be laid to sleep, but somehow the soul be kept alive. Simply by the things we saw and heard, in any given moment. It was a report from the inside of another person’s head, someone who’d been in lonely rooms, who’d lived through hours of weariness but knew a path back to life. Which is what I found then. Returning to my college, being with friends, having happiness. I’d seen the monster, but I didn’t recognize it because I was young and had never encountered it before. Why should I think I ever would again?

In the Royal Signal Corps, I met Peter Lorian, and when our compulsory service was done we got an apartment in Chelsea together with two other friends and started having our parties. Where a few years later Margaret appeared. In her green satin dress and long dark hair, tall and slender. No woman had ever looked at me as directly as she did. I couldn’t stop trying to charm her because I wanted her to keep looking. And she kept blushing at my attempts, but laughing too, which made the difference, because then I could keep going, and we could acknowledge the game for what it was, and forgive each other for playing. It’s what let us fall in love. That we could laugh together.

These bits of poetry float back to me again now, and they still measure time, but cruelly.

It’s no use resisting this heat. My shirt is soaked, the sweat has seeped into my shoes. But I mind it less. There’s nothing of my person to protect anymore. The simplicity of this is a great relief. An empty stomach and throbbing temples are no more personal than a bank of thriving weeds, or the mirage of asphalt melting in the distance along the bridge. Such distinctions are made of tension, and the tension is melting. Why fight? The inanimate world has such unimpeachable wisdom: no thought.

“Where in Christ were you? It’s three o’clock.” Margaret’s stricken voice comes at me across the front lawn before I even reach the walk. “I just drove all the way out to the restaurant to pick up Celia and the manager tells me she didn’t show up today. No sign of her. None. Are you listening? I’ve had it. You understand? You need to get in the car and go over there to the Schefers’. That’s where she’ll be, with that Jason.”

I suggest maybe she’s at the track. Margaret explodes, shouting that school has been out three weeks! There is no practice! Arguing is pointless. Her anger spreads in too many directions, and I am the root of it. She has lost me already. But she refuses to know this, and the refusal drives her mad. It galls her that I gave us so many years and so much life together unmenaced, and then simply no longer could. Before, she had a choice. To break it off or go forward. Now she has none, any more than the children do. I don’t even provide money enough for food and clothing. They’re put on credit cards.

“I’ll go,” I say. “Give me the keys, and I’ll go.”

Mrs. Schefer lives on Raymond Street, up behind the post office. Her house is one of those split-level Colonials with brown siding and a garage cut into the hillside. A circle of large white pines blocks out most of the sunlight. A girl of ten or eleven answers the door and says that her mother is not there. I tell her I’m looking for Celia and she says she hasn’t seen her, and that her brother is out as well. There is a television on in the background. The girl has peanut butter smudged at the corners of her lips. “Celia’s pretty,” she says. “Are you her dad?” I am, I tell her, and ask if she knows where her brother might be. She has no idea but says he sometimes stays with their father on the other side of town. It strikes me as negligent to leave a child this age on her own, but who am I to judge?

It’s not because Celia missed or skipped work that Margaret wants me to find her. It’s because of Chris Weller. A few months ago, when I was deep in the fog, we were woken one night well after midnight by shouting in the front yard. A boy, clearly drunk, was yelling up at Celia’s window, “Give me back the fucking ring, give me back the fucking necklace.” Then he started knocking loudly on the front door. He was waking the whole neighborhood. Margaret shot out of bed and went to the window. Celia came running into our room. “Get up!” Margaret yelled at me. “For God’s sake, get up!” I swung my stone legs to the floor and pushed with my arms to bring myself to my feet. “What the hell is going on?” Margaret demanded of Celia. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, failing to hold back tears. I’d never seen her so terror-stricken. “You need to go down there,” Margaret said to me. “Go out there and tell that idiot he needs to be quiet and he needs to leave.”

I stood there mute in front of the two of them as they waited for my response. The boy kept hammering at the door. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go down those stairs and cope with it. It was as if the boy’s fist were hitting my chest and it was all I could do to stay upright. My wife and daughter gaped at me, appalled. “The police,” Celia said desperately, “we can call the police.” Margaret told her not to be ridiculous, that it would cause a scene; we weren’t going to have flashing police lights in front of our house in the middle of the night. “Where’s the jewelry?” she said. “Do you have it?”

Celia stopped crying then and went stony-faced. I saw the change happen. It took only an instant. She turned from us and left the room. Margaret and I followed, standing on the upstairs landing as she went into her bedroom and put on a pair of trousers, and then walked down the stairs on her own, to open the front door and confront that raging boy. As if we weren’t even home.

That was the last of Chris Weller. But not of Celia’s dating. Now there is Jason, with whom Margaret thinks she’s using drugs of some sort. Apparently when she comes home late her eyes are bloodshot and she doesn’t want to speak with her mother.

The little girl told me the name of the street her father lived on, where Jason might be, and she said the house was white, but that doesn’t narrow it down. There are no people out in their yards to ask. Stopped at an intersection, I see someone who I think might be Jason glide past in an old gray Audi, and follow him around the corner to another split-level Colonial with an unused flagpole mounted over the front door. He notices me pulling up behind him. I was expecting a lout like Weller, one of those oversize American high schoolers. But this boy’s face is more blurry than aggressive, his cheeks covered in an adolescent attempt at a beard and his brown curls flopping over his forehead. “Oh, hi,” he says, to my surprise, for I have no recollection of ever having met him. When I tell him I’m looking for Celia, he says he dropped her at the track, and from his hapless eyes I can tell that he is adrift, afraid he’s been caught at something but unable to focus sufficiently to defend himself. He isn’t Celia’s equal. He doesn’t have her will. Whatever she’s doing, it isn’t at his bidding. He asks if something is the matter, if there is some kind of emergency, and I want to say, What business would it be of yours? But I can hear the concern in his voice, and I realize he spends more time with my daughter than I do. Margaret wants me to interrogate him, to find out what they get up to. But it’s too late for that. All of that is far away. It’s Celia I need to see.

I find her at the track, running sprints along the straightaways in front of the empty bleachers. It’s even hotter now than at midday, the afternoon haze pressing against the field. I open the gate and step onto the oval. She’s wearing shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and a bandanna round her forehead. She’s running away from me, and so doesn’t see me at first. When she comes to the end of her sprint, she pulls up and rests her hands high on her waist, leaning her head back and heaving for breath. I’m past the goalpost and well onto the field by the time she notices me at a distance of fifty yards or so. She bends forward, palms to her knees, still huffing.

Neither of her brothers is the least athletic, but Celia’s played on teams since grade school: softball, field hockey in Britain, volleyball, track. She’s kept it up through both our moves. For years, there has always been a practice to drop her at or pick her up from.

She jogs back down to the starting line as I approach, staying focused. I watch as she crouches into position, raises her knee, and then leaps into the lane again, arms swinging, chest forward and head back, shooting past me and over the finish line, jogging from there around the bend before turning once more to walk back to the start. Her breath’s still rapid when she reaches the steps of the bleachers where I’m standing. Every inch of her skin runs with sweat and her face pulses red.

“I told Mom I didn’t need to be picked up from work. She’s checking on me.”

She takes a towel from her knapsack and wipes her forehead. It’s no surprise that boys are attracted to her. There’s a precision to her good looks, a fierceness even. That, and the way she carries herself, with a confidence bordering on aloofness. Which I suppose she got from me. An earlier me. And what do I do now? I steal her confidence back, day by day, cheating her of steadiness and care. Of the three of them, she sees me most clearly, which makes it harder for her because she isn’t protected by distraction. Michael has never been able to bear the tension, so he disappears into other worlds. And Alec is too young to conceive of the situation independent of himself. But Celia’s ways of coping are already the adult ones: discipline, drinking, the search for someone else to love her.

She’s explaining why she didn’t go to work, and how irritating it is that her mother is monitoring her, but none of it matters and I don’t really listen. Which of course she notices, getting more irritated still. Once she’s gathered up her things, we walk together across the field.

Being beside her, close enough to sense the heat flowing from her body, I’m momentarily astonished at her existence — this child of mine. How narrowly we all avoid having never been. Yet even if the knife of chance did happen to cut her into being, I have the passing terror that it isn’t so simple, that in these ultimate matters time is collapsed into a single moment in which you are forever in danger of having the knife tilt the other way, as though, if I am not careful between here and the parking lot, I might go astray and she will be canceled, stolen back by not-being, like a thief grabbing her through an open window. But we make it to the car, and she tosses her bag over her shoulder into the backseat and puts her feet up on the dashboard.

I take us along Green Street past the dense thicket of the nature preserve. When I miss the turn toward the house, she asks where we are going, and I mumble something about the other route, carrying on under the rusting railroad bridge. We drive on in silence for a while, the motion of the air through the open windows offering some relief from the heat.

“How come you don’t have to be anywhere?” Celia asks. “Do you still work for that company?”

There are only woods now on either side of us. The evergreens are thick and the shade between them dark. It is a long, straight stretch and there is something mesmerizing about the lines of the trees reaching out toward each other in the middle distance. She is thinking of Roger Taylor’s firm. He is the one I had to ask for a job when we moved back. I had helped him start his consulting company a decade earlier. He gave me an office and a salary. And it lasted those eighteen months before he politely suggested it might make more sense for me to go part-time, which turned out to mean occasional projects, and eventually none. Margaret says he is ungrateful. The ending of it is so small to me, next to the defeat of leaving Britain in the way I did, that I have trouble thinking about it much.

“Did you hear what I asked?”

“I don’t work there anymore. The fact is, I’ve let you down. All of you.”

“You just missed the other turn,” she says.

I say I’ll go back, but she says it’s okay, she doesn’t mind. I suppose she’s in no hurry to get home. The road winds toward the less inhabited side of the lake. We pass the entrances to two or three mansions, the only houses out here, hidden away up the hillside. I sometimes get this far on my longer walks with Kelsey. It’s the first really quiet place I discovered when we moved here, a beech forest mostly. I pull into a turnout, where the road comes close to the water, and I switch off the engine. A gap in the stone wall leads onto the path around the lake. From here you can see across to the wooded shoreline of the college campus, and the two brick towers stretching above the trees, thunderheads gathering behind them.

“You haven’t let us down,” she says flatly, looking away into the woods. She is being kind. As she was raised to be. To strangers and relatives and those to whom it is good to show care. That is what it has come to. She doesn’t believe anymore that I’m strong enough to bear her complaint or frustration. And I can’t blame her. If she let herself love me, she’d be furious. So she shows me kindness instead. “Did you want to take a walk?” she asks. “Is that why you parked?”

It’s impossible, what I’m trying to do. To say good-bye without telling them I’m leaving.

I follow her across the edge of a meadow, through a patch of swampy ground, and then back under the cover of the trees, as we reach the first point along the shore. Her form is marvelous, the supple muscles of her legs, the gentle curve of her spine, her strong shoulders rolling back, her head balanced. I held her hundreds of times as a girl, tossed her shrieking above her bed, caught her in my arms. I’ve felt the weight of her head on my chest and the warmth of her body under the shelter of my arm. But her body has never struck me as quite the miracle it does now. It seems almost enough to live for, that she came from me and is part of me, and yet as soon as I think this I know again how selfish that is, and disordered, for a parent to need so hopelessly a child still so young.

“I broke up with Jason,” she says over her shoulder, turning only far enough for me to hear her. “If that’s who you and Mom are worried about. That’s why I wasn’t at work. I had to talk to him.” This business of teenagers having personal lives — it’s alien to me. I’ve never known what to say. “You don’t have to worry about me, though,” she says. “They’re not going to fire me. I still have a job.” Taking an offshoot of the path, she leads us to a log bench facing the water and perches at the far end of it, leaning her forearms down on her knees. The air has gone still between the peak of the heat and the break of the rain to come.

“I’m sorry you have to work,” I say, “that there isn’t more money. I know your mother and I don’t talk to you much about my difficulties. It’s a kind of sickness. When that other fellow came to the house this spring, when he was shouting at you, I wanted to help. But I couldn’t. And that isn’t fair to you.”

It’s not until she sits up and wipes her eyes that I realize she’s crying. My words are like knives; they cut into the people I love. It will be worse if you touch her, I think, a worse lie. But I ignore this thought, shifting down the bench to put my arm around her — my daughter — and as I do, she weeps openly, pressing her face against my damp shirt.

I am a murderer. That’s what I am. I am a stealer of life.

A patch of water on the far side of the lake wrinkles under a new breeze, ruffling the black mirror to a scaly gray that shimmers dully under the gray sky. Peter Lorian has a house in the Highlands of Argyll, and standing at his front windows you can see the weather traveling over the hills from the Irish Sea, the bands of rain filling the valley and then the loch and then the fields in front of the house, all before the first drops arrive. You don’t get such views without elevation but here on the water’s edge, the sky and the expanse before us are big enough to see clearly the first motions of the storm: the branches of the trees on the far shore swaying like congregants to a hymn, the gray scales flashing now over the lake. The wind reaches us, cooling the slick of moisture on my face and neck. Celia sits up and wipes her nose. The dropping air pressure seems to slacken the pressure in my head. The whole static atmosphere is coming to life. A roll of thunder echoes in the distance. If it passes off to the south, this may be all we get, a stirring of the elements. We sit for a few minutes in the churn, looking onto the water. The clouds darken and take on a bluish tinge. And now the real wind arrives, carrying leaves and pine needles into the air, making a racket in the trees. We walk back along the path, me in front this time. As we cross the meadow, it flashes before us in the glow of lightning, thunder cracking the air. Loud, heavy drops are slapping our shoulders as we reach the car. We roll up the windows, which steam over almost at once. It sounds as if the roof is being pelted with stones. Sheets of water stream down the fogged windshield. The worst storm I was ever in happened aboard a sailboat in the middle of the English Channel, caught in a squall that nearly capsized the boat, and though Celia and I are perfectly safe here and mostly dry, the force of the rain releases some tiny fraction of that adrenaline that comes with fear of death, and I manage a sigh, so gladdening is the momentary sense of balance between me and the world, the violence everywhere now, unleashed. Celia asks what’s the matter. I tell her it’s nothing.

When the rain lets up to a shower, I turn on the engine and back the car onto the road. By the time we get home, the sky is nearly clear. The early-evening sun is bathing the side of the house, where the storm has soaked the shingles.

Margaret has made the four of us a cold supper. We sit at the dining room table with all the downstairs windows open. There’s a reason I try to be away from here as often as I can. The worst of the fog may have lifted, letting me see again, but it’s in the most familiar objects that the beast still nestles, exuding itself from the caned rocking chair in the corner, the one that Margaret and I bought together in Southampton, and from the fluted-glass lamps on the sideboard that her parents gave us as a wedding gift. It pulses in the watercolor of the old octagonal house that hangs above the sideboard, over Margaret’s shoulder, as she passes Celia the bulgur salad and Alec the plate of bread, and it slinks onto the table between us, its head invisible as always but its body breathing, everyone straining to behave as if there were only four us here, eating supper together on a summer evening.

“Aren’t you going to take some food?” Margaret asks, unable to hide her impatience, holding her knife and fork rigidly against the table, waiting to start, which is when I notice that all the dishes are at my end and my plate is empty. A few months ago, I overheard her describing to a friend on the phone the exhaustion of trying to get me out of bed in the morning, how her energy for the day was spent before breakfast.

“I asked for the raise,” Alec says, interjecting himself to protect me from his mother’s ire. “The manager said she’d think about it.”

I take some salad and bread so they can begin their meal. A moment later, the phone rings. Celia starts up from the table before the first bell has ended and strides into the hall to answer it.

“It’s Michael,” she calls out. “He wants you to call him back on their number.”

“It’s quite late for him,” Margaret says, standing up from the table. She carries the phone into the living room and closes the door behind her as Celia takes her seat again. The two of them miss their older brother — they laugh less without him — but they would never say it because they know he wasn’t happy here, and that he wanted so badly to go back.

They eat quickly and then excuse themselves, bringing their plates into the kitchen. Margaret is still on the phone. I stay at the table for a while, feeling the cooler air drifting in through the screens. Above the hydrant at the foot of the drive, the street lamp flickers on, casting a pale oval of light onto the pavement. Crickets sing in the bushes. Through the wall behind me, I hear Alec leaping up the stairs, then Celia following more slowly, muttering something about him staying out of her room. These sounds don’t grate anymore. They flow back into me now, ordinary once again.

There’s a click of the latch to the living room door, and Margaret calls out my name. “Here,” she says, handing me the phone. “He’s got his literature A level tomorrow, and he can’t sleep. God knows what this call is costing.” She walks away, back to her meal, and I close the door between us.

“Dad?” he says, and I know from the strain in his voice that the words have already been streaming out of him to his mother. It’s been a relief having him gone. Margaret never let up about what I wasn’t doing, how I didn’t make time for him, or speak to him like I should to an eldest son. But it was never what she thought — some hesitancy or lack of nerve on my part about his reaching puberty and adolescence. I wouldn’t have talked to him about that in any case because he wouldn’t have wanted it any more than I did from my father. Our silence wasn’t about that.

“Yes?” I say.

“I can hang up now, if that’s better, I know it’s expensive.”

“You spoke to your mother about your exam.”

“Yeah.”

“No use fretting about it.” I want to say more, to say, You’ll be fine, in the long run, you’ll be fine, but I don’t believe it, not as I do about the other two.

“I know, I know, you’re right, it’s just that I couldn’t read everything in time, not closely enough.”

This is the thing: He isn’t calling about his exam. I don’t want to know this, but I do. He’s calling to be reassured about something he can’t put into words yet. I glimpsed it in him when he was young, but told myself, No, don’t imagine that. Children have stages; he’ll change. Then the words started running out of him in a torrent, and I knew they were being chased out by a force he couldn’t see. What was I supposed to say to Margaret? That I see it in him?

“I’m sure you’ve studied more than I did,” I tell him. It is dark outside now. The light from the kitchen lies square on the unmown grass.

I will leave him more alone than anyone.

“If we don’t get into a university,” he’s saying, hurrying to fill the silence and prolong the conversation, “Simon and I decided we’re going to move to London together. He’s got friends who already have a flat, and he thinks it would be easy for us to get jobs.”

My son in London as a young man. It’s hard for me to picture.

“You should talk to your mother about that.”

“You wouldn’t mind — if I didn’t get in anywhere?”

I tell him that he will. “It’s late,” I say. “You should get some rest.” He agrees, reluctantly, wanting to stay on the phone. “How are Celia and Alec?” he asks. “Are they okay?”

I’m reminded I haven’t answered only when he says, “Dad? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

He senses the trouble. He knows it is there. If I could only take that part of him with me, to spare him. But I can’t. And so, unlike the others, it’s as if he is following me, and won’t let me go.

“It really is late with you,” I say. “You’ll be fine — with the exam. You’re a good writer.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then,” he says. “I guess I’ll go.”

“Good-bye, Michael. Good luck.”

“Okay, Dad,” he says. “Bye.”

Later, lying next to Margaret as she sleeps, I sense a tingling in my feet and ankles and up into my calves. It is the opposite of numbness. My muscles are awake, my blood moves freely. This halo of warmth creeps over my knees, easing space into the joints, letting the bones of my thighs settle into the mattress. It lingers over my belly, and my gut goes slack, unclenching the muscles at the base of my spine. My lower ribs rise with my breath up off my stomach, stretching the skin from navel to sternum, arching my back. It feels as if my lungs have doubled in size, allowing me to swallow air in great gulp-fulls. My shoulders fall back, my throat opens, the tingling warms my jaw and scalp and then moves through into the folds of my brain, releasing it away from my forehead, letting it rest against the back of my skull. Thus it is that the beast passes out of me, to hover in the darkness above, faceless still, but quarry now, its hours numbered.

I get up before dawn, rousing no one but Kelsey, who lifts her head from her blanket in anticipation of her walk, and then scampers toward where the leash hangs by the back door. I pat her on the head, and leave her there, getting what I need from the tool drawer, and going out the other way, through the front door, closing it quietly behind me. Outside, in the charcoal light, it is blessedly cool, as if the fever of summer has broken. It’s still too dark to make out the far side of the sloping meadow at the end of the street. The dew-covered grass blends into the trees silhouetted against the barely brightening sky.

It is the fallow field next to my parents’ cottage, where I played in the tall grass; and the field behind the octagonal house, where I cut paths for the children to ride on; and the hillside in Scotland where I walked with Margaret; and the woodland meadow on the island in Maine. All of these are given back to me now, the landscapes of my happiness, returning in this damp calm, limpid and flooded with life.

I cross the street and walk into those fields. There is just a tinge of blue emerging between the branches. The shadows at the edge of the woods are retreating. At last, I have the beast out in front of me, out in the open. I sense it trying to run, to flee ahead of me into the woods. But the long night is ending, and there is nowhere left for it to hide. Not in my children’s faces. Not in Margaret’s stubborn love. Not in all my failures. There is no cover left for it on this terrain. I know its paths too well. Through the tall pines and down along the riverbank. Across the footbridge, and up through the spruce trees to where the ground levels out. I’ve come here so often trying to escape this monster. But now it is the one sapped, and limping. And I am the hunter. In the clearing overlooking the bend in the river, we come to a halt. The first rays of dawn pierce the gray light of the forest. I sit on the pine needles, up against a fallen trunk.

Invisibility. That is its last defense. That I won’t have the courage to look it in the eye. You wretch! it cries, desperate for its life. You selfish wretch! Leaving them with nothing! But it is no good. It is my prey now.

The razor opens the skin of my wrist almost painlessly. Blood runs down my palm, and along the length of my fingers. My head rolls back, and I gaze upward.

And there it is: the face of the beast — my face — human after all.