The Goldfinch

“Right, later.” I was annoyed—what the fuck was his problem? Yet it was part of our ongoing dark-comedy act, amusing only to us, to abuse and insult each other; and I was pretty sure he’d come find me after English or that he’d catch up with me on the way home, running up behind me and bopping me on the head with his algebra workbook. But he didn’t. The next morning before first period he didn’t even look at me when I said hi, and his blanked-out expression as he shouldered past stopped me cold. Lindy Maisel and Mandy Quaife turned at their lockers to stare at each other, giggling in a half-shocked way: oh my God! Next to me my lab partner, Sam Weingarten, was shaking his head. “What a dick,” he said, in a loud voice, so loud everybody in the hall turned. “You’re a real dick, Cable, you know that?”

But I didn’t care—or, at least, I wasn’t hurt or depressed. Instead I was furious. My friendship with Tom had always had a wild, manic quality, something unhinged and hectic and a little perilous about it, and though all the same old high energy was still there, the current had reversed, voltage humming in the opposite direction so that now instead of horsing around with him in study hall I wanted to push his head in the urinal, yank his arm out of the socket, beat his face bloody on the sidewalk, make him eat dogshit and garbage off the curb. The more I thought about it, the more enraged I grew, so mad sometimes that I walked back and forth in the bathroom muttering to myself. If Cable hadn’t fingered me to Mr. Beeman (“I know, now, Theo, those cigarettes weren’t yours”)… if Cable hadn’t got me suspended… if my mom hadn’t taken the day off… if we hadn’t been at the museum at exactly the wrong time… well, even Mr. Beeman had apologized for it, sort of. Because, sure, there were issues with my grades (and plenty of other stuff Mr. Beeman didn’t know about) but the inciting incident, the thing that had got me called in, the whole business with the cigarettes in the courtyard—whose fault was that? Cable’s. It wasn’t like I expected him to apologize. In fact it wasn’t like I would have said anything to him about it, ever. Only—now I was a pariah? Persona non grata? He wouldn’t even talk to me? I was smaller than Cable but not by a lot, and whenever he cracked wise in class, as he couldn’t prevent himself from doing, or ran past me in the hall with his new best friends Billy Wagner and Thad Randolph (the way we’d once raced around together, always in overdrive, that urge to danger and craziness)—all I could think was how much I wanted to beat the shit out of him, girls laughing as he cowered from me in tears: oooh, Tom! boo hoo hoo! are you crying? (Doing my best to provoke a fight, I cracked him in the nose accidentally on purpose by swinging the bathroom door in his face, and shoved him into the drinks dispenser so he dropped his disgusting cheese fries on the floor, but instead of jumping on me—as I longed for him to do—he only smirked and walked off without a word.)

Not everyone avoided me, of course. Lots of people put notes and gifts in my locker (including Isabella Cushing and Martina Lichtblau, the most popular girls in my year) and my old enemy Win Temple from fifth grade surprised me by coming up and giving me a bear hug. But most people responded to me with a cautious, half-terrified politeness. It wasn’t as if I went around crying or even acting disturbed but still they’d stop in the middle of their conversations if I sat down with them at lunch.

Grown-ups, on the other hand, paid me an uncomfortable amount of attention. I was advised to keep a journal, talk with my friends, make a “memory collage” (crackpot advice, as far as I was concerned; other kids were uneasy around me no matter how normally I acted, and the last thing I wanted was to call attention to myself by sharing my feelings with people or doing therapeutic crafts in the Arts room). I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time standing in empty classrooms and offices (staring at the floor, nodding my head senselessly) with concerned teachers who asked me to stay after class or pulled me aside to talk. My English teacher, Mr. Neuspeil, after sitting on the side of his desk and delivering a tense account of his own mother’s horrifying death at the hands of an incompetent surgeon, had patted me on the back and given me a blank notebook to write in; Mrs. Swanson, the school counselor, showed me a couple of breathing exercises and suggested that I might find it helpful to discharge my grief by going outside and throwing ice cubes against a tree; and even Mr. Borowsky (who taught math, and was considerably less bright-eyed than most of the other teachers) took me aside out in the hall and—talking very quietly, with his face about two inches away from mine—told me how guilty he’d felt after his brother had died in a car accident. (Guilt came up a lot in these talks. Did my teachers believe, as I did, that I was guilty of causing my mother’s death? Apparently so.) Mr. Borowsky had felt so guilty for letting his brother drive home drunk from the party that night that he’d even thought for a brief while about killing himself. Maybe I’d thought about suicide too. But suicide wasn’t the answer.

I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an overly clipped Brit in a dumb tweed motoring cap, whom despite his solicitude I had come to hate, irrationally, as an agent of my mother’s death) complimenting me on my maturity and informing me that I seemed to be “coping awfully well.” And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

v.

QUITE HONESTLY, MY DECKER grandparents were the last thing on my mind, which was just as well since Social Services was unable to run them down right away on the scanty information I had given them. Then Mrs. Barbour knocked at the door of Andy’s room and said, “Theo, may we speak for a moment, please?”

Something in her manner spoke distinctly of bad news, though in my situation it was hard to imagine how things could possibly be worse. When we were seated in the living room—by a three foot tall arrangement of pussy willow and blossoming apple branches fresh from the florist—she crossed her legs and said: “I’ve had a call from the Social Services. They’ve contacted your grandparents. Unfortunately it seems that your grandmother is unwell.”

For a moment I was confused. “Dorothy?”

“If that’s what you call her, yes.”

“Oh. She’s not really my grandmother.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Barbour, as if she didn’t actually see and didn’t want to. “At any rate. It seems she’s not well—a back ailment, I believe—and your grandfather is looking after her. So the thing is, you see, I’m sure they’re very sorry, but they say it’s not practical for you to be down there right now. Not to stay with them in their home, anyway,” she added, when I didn’t say anything. “They’ve offered to pay for you to stay in a Holiday Inn near their house, for the time being, but that seems a bit impractical, doesn’t it?”

There was an unpleasant buzzing in my ears. Sitting there under her level, ice-gray gaze, I felt for some reason terribly ashamed of myself. I had dreaded the thought of going to Grandpa Decker and Dorothy so much that I’d blocked them almost completely from my mind, but it was quite another thing to know they didn’t want me.

A flicker of sympathy passed over her face. “You mustn’t feel bad about it,” she said. “And in any case you mustn’t worry. It’s been settled that you’ll stay with us for the next few weeks and at the very least, finish your year at school. Everyone agrees that’s best. By the way,” she said, leaning closer, “that’s a lovely ring. Is that a family thing?”

“Um, yes,” I said. For reasons I would have found hard to explain, I had taken to carrying the old man’s ring with me almost everywhere I went. Mostly I toyed around with it while it was in my jacket pocket, but every now and then I slipped it on my middle finger and wore it, even though it was too big and slid around a bit.

“Interesting. Your mother’s family, or your father’s?”

“My mother’s,” I said, after a slight pause, not liking the way the conversation was going.

“May I see it?”

I took it off and dropped it in her palm. She held it up to the lamp. “Lovely,” she said, “carnelian. And this intaglio. Greco-Roman? Or a family crest?”

“Um, crest. I think.”

She examined the clawed, mythological beast. “It looks like a griffin. Or maybe a winged lion.” She turned it sideways into the light and looked inside of the ring. “And this engraving?”

My expression of puzzlement made her frown. “Don’t tell me you never noticed it. Hang on.” She got up and went to the desk, which had lots of intricate drawers and cubbyholes, and returned with a magnifying glass.

“This will be better than my reading glasses,” she said, peering through it. “Still this old copperplate is hard to see.” She brought the magnifying glass close, then farther away. “Blackwell. Does that ring a bell?”

“Ah—” In fact it did, something beyond words, but the thought had blown away and vanished before it fully materialized.

“I see some Greek letters, too. Very interesting.” She dropped the ring back in my hand. “It’s an old ring,” she said. “You can tell by the patina on the stone and by the way it’s worn down—see there? Americans used to pick up these classical intaglios in Europe, back in the Henry James days, and have them set as rings. Souvenirs of the Grand Tour.”

“If they don’t want me, where am I going to go?”

For a blink, Mrs. Barbour looked taken aback. Almost immediately she recovered herself and said: “Well, I wouldn’t worry about that now. It’s probably best anyway for you to stay here a bit longer and finish out your year at school, don’t you agree? Now”—she nodded—“be careful with that ring and mind that you don’t lose it. I can see how loose it is. You might want to put it someplace safe instead of wearing it around like that.”

vi.

BUT I DID WEAR IT. Or—rather—I ignored her advice to put it in a safe place, and continued to carry it around in my pocket. When I hefted it in my palm, it was very heavy; if I closed my fingers around it, the gold got warm from the heat of my hand but the carved stone stayed cool. Its weighty, antiquated quality, its mixture of sobriety and brightness, were strangely comforting; if I fixed my attention on it intensely enough, it had a strange power to anchor me in my drifting state and shut out the world around me, but for all that, I really didn’t want to think about where it had come from.

Nor did I want to think about my future—for though I had scarcely been looking forward to a new life in rural Maryland, at the chill mercies of my Decker grandparents, I now began to seriously worry about what was going to happen to me. Everyone seemed profoundly shocked at the Holiday Inn idea, as if Grandpa Decker and Dorothy had suggested I move into a shed in their back yard, but to me it didn’t seem so bad. I’d always wanted to live in a hotel, and even if the Holiday Inn wasn’t the kind of hotel I’d imagined, certainly I would manage: room service hamburgers, pay-per-view, a pool in summer, how bad could it be?

Everyone (the social workers, Dave the shrink, Mrs. Barbour) kept telling me again and again that I could not possibly live on my own at a Holiday Inn in suburban Maryland, that no matter what, it would never actually come to that—not seeming to realize that their supposedly comforting words were only increasing my anxiety a hundredfold. “The thing to remember,” said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, “is that you’ll be taken care of no matter what.” He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglasses who always looked as if he’d just come from a poetry reading in the basement of some church. “Because there are tons of people looking out for you who only want what’s best for you.”

I had grown suspicious of strangers talking about what was best for me, as it was exactly what the social workers had said before the subject of the foster home came up. “But—I don’t think my grandparents are so wrong,” I said.

“Wrong about what?”

“About the Holiday Inn. It might be an okay place for me to be.”

“Are you saying that things are not okay for you at your grandparents’ home?” said Dave, without missing a beat.

“No!” I hated this about him—how he was always putting words in my mouth.

“All right then. Maybe we can phrase it another way.” He folded his hands, and thought. “Why would you rather live at a hotel than with your grandparents?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He put his head to the side. “No, but from the way you keep bringing up the Holiday Inn, like it’s a viable choice, I’m hearing you say that’s what you prefer to do.”

“It seems a lot better than going into a foster home.”

“Yes—” he leaned forward—“but please hear me say this. You’re only thirteen. And you just lost your primary caregiver. Living alone right now is really not an option for you. What I’m trying to say is that it’s too bad your grandparents are dealing with these health issues, but believe me, I’m sure we can work out something much better once your grandmother is up and around.”

I said nothing. Clearly he had never met Grandpa Decker and Dorothy. Though I hadn’t been around them very much myself, the main thing I remembered was the complete absence of blood feeling between us, the opaque way they looked at me as if I was some random kid who’d wandered over from the mall. The prospect of going to live with them was almost literally unimaginable and I’d been racking my brains trying to remember what I could about my last visit to their house—which wasn’t very much, as I’d been only seven or eight years old. There had been handstitched sayings framed and hanging on the walls, a plastic countertop contraption that Dorothy used to dehydrate foods in. At some point—after Grandpa Decker had yelled at me to keep my sticky little mitts off his train set—my dad had gone outside for a cigarette (it was winter) and not come back inside the house. “Jesus God,” my mother had said, once we were out in the car (it had been her idea that I should get to know my father’s family), and after that we never went back.

Several days after the Holiday Inn offer, a greeting card arrived for me at the Barbours’. (An aside: is it wrong to think that Bob and Dorothy, as they signed themselves, should have picked up the telephone and called me? Or got in their car and driven to the city to see about me themselves? But they did neither of these things—not that I exactly expected them to rush to my side with wails of sympathy, but still, it would have been nice if they’d surprised me with some small, if uncharacteristic, gesture of affection.)

Actually, the card was from Dorothy (the “Bob,” plainly in her hand, had been squeezed in alongside her own signature as an afterthought). The envelope, interestingly, had the look of having been steamed open and resealed—by Mrs. Barbour? Social Services?—although the card itself was definitely in Dorothy’s stiff up-and-down European handwriting that appeared exactly once a year on our Christmas cards, writing that—as my father had once commented—looked as if it ought to be on the chalkboard at La Goulue listing the daily fish specials. On the front of the card was a drooping tulip, and—underneath—a printed slogan: There are no endings.

Dorothy, from the very little I remembered of her, was not one to waste words, and this card was no exception. After a perfectly cordial opening—sorry for my tragic loss, thinking of me in this time of sorrow—she offered to send me a bus ticket to Woodbriar, MD, while simultaneously alluding to vague medical conditions that made it difficult for her and Grandpa Decker to “meet the demands” for my care.

“Demands?” said Andy. “She makes it sound as if you’re asking for ten million in unmarked notes.”

I was silent. Oddly, it was the picture on the greeting card that had troubled me. It was the kind of thing you’d see in a drugstore card rack, perfectly normal, but still a photograph of a wilted flower—no matter how artistically done—didn’t seem quite the thing to send to somebody whose mother had just died.

“I thought she was supposed to be so sick. Why’s she the one writing?”

“Search me.” I had wondered the same thing; it did seem weird that my actual grandfather hadn’t included a message or even bothered to sign his own name.

“Maybe,” said Andy gloomily, “your grandfather has Alzheimer’s and she’s holding him prisoner in his own home. To get his money. That happens quite frequently with the younger wives, you know.”

“I don’t think he has that much money.”

“Possibly not,” said Andy, clearing his throat ostentatiously. “But one can never rule out the thirst for power. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw.’ Perhaps she doesn’t want you edging in on the inheritance.”

“Chum,” said Andy’s father, looking up rather suddenly from the Financial Times, “I don’t think this is a terribly productive line of conversation.”

“Well, quite honestly, I don’t see why Theo can’t stay on with us,” said Andy, voicing my own thoughts. “I enjoy the company and there’s plenty of space in my room.”

“Well certainly we’d all like to keep him for ourselves,” said Mr. Barbour, with a heartiness not as full or convincing as I would have liked. “But what would his family think? The last I heard, kidnapping was still against the law.”

“Well, I mean, Daddy, that hardly seems to be the situation here,” said Andy, in his irritating, faraway voice.

Abruptly Mr. Barbour got up, with his club soda in his hand. He wasn’t allowed to drink because of the medicine he took. “Theo, I forget. Do you know how to sail?”

It took me a moment to realize what he’d asked me. “No.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. Andy had the most outstanding time at his sailing camp up in Maine last year, didn’t you?”

Andy was silent. He had told me, many times, that it was the worst two weeks of his life.

“Do you know how to read nautical flags?” Mr. Barbour asked me.

“Sorry?” I said.

“There’s an excellent chart in my study I’d be happy to show you. Don’t make that face, Andy. It’s a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know.”

“Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.”

“These smart remarks of yours are very tiresome,” said Mr. Barbour, although he looked more distracted than annoyed. “Besides,” he said, turning to me, “I think you’d be surprised how often nautical flags pop up in parades and movies and, I don’t know, on the stage.”

Andy pulled a face. “The stage,” he said derisively.

Mr. Barbour turned to look at him. “Yes, the stage. Do you find the term amusing?”

“Pompous is a lot more like it.”

“Well, I’m afraid I fail to see what you find so pompous about it. Certainly it’s the very word your great-grandmother would have used.” (Mr. Barbour’s grandfather had been dropped from the Social Register for marrying Olga Osgood, a minor movie actress.)

“My point exactly.”

“Then what would you have me call it?”

“Actually, Daddy, what I would really like to know is the last time you saw nautical flags showcased in any theatrical production.”

“South Pacific,” said Mr. Barbour swiftly.

“Besides South Pacific.”

“I rest my case.”

“I don’t believe you and Mother even saw South Pacific.”

“For God’s sake, Andy.”

“Well, even if you did. One example doesn’t sufficiently establish your case.”

“I refuse to continue this absurd conversation. Come along, Theo.”

vii.

FROM THIS POINT ON, I began trying especially hard to be a good guest: to make my bed in the mornings; to always say thank you and please, and to do everything I knew my mother would want me to do. Unfortunately the Barbours didn’t exactly have the kind of household where you could show your appreciation by babysitting the younger siblings or pitching in with the dishes. Between the woman who came to look after the plants—a depressing job, since there was so little light in the apartment the plants mostly died—and Mrs. Barbour’s assistant, whose main job seemed to be rearranging the closets and the china collection—they had somewhere in the neighborhood of eight people working for them. (When I’d asked Mrs. Barbour where the washing machine was, she’d looked at me as if I’d asked for lye and lard to boil up for soap.)

But though nothing was required of me, still the effort to blend into their polished and complicated household was an immense strain. I was desperate to vanish into the background—to slip invisibly among the Chinoiserie patterns like a fish in a coral reef—and yet it seemed I drew unwanted attention to myself hundreds of times a day: by having to ask for every little item, whether a wash cloth or the Band-Aids or the pencil sharpener; by not having a key, always having to ring when I came and went—even by my well-intentioned efforts to make my own bed in the morning (it was better just to let Irenka or Esperenza do it, Mrs. Barbour explained, as they were used to doing it and did a better job with the corners). I broke off a finial on an antique coat stand by throwing open a door; twice managed to set off the burglar alarm by mistake; and even blundered into Mr. and Mrs. Barbour’s room one night when I was looking for the bathroom.

Luckily, Andy’s parents were around so little that my presence didn’t seem to inconvenience them very much. Unless Mrs. Barbour was entertaining, she was out of the apartment from about eleven a.m.—popping in for a couple of hours before dinner, for a gin and lime and what she called “a bit of a tub”—and then not home again until we were in bed. Of Mr. Barbour I saw even less, except on weekends and when he was sitting around after work with his napkin-wrapped glass of club soda, waiting for Mrs. Barbour to dress for their evening out.

By far the biggest issue I faced was Andy’s siblings. Though Platt, luckily, was off terrorizing younger children at Groton, still Kitsey and the youngest brother, Toddy, who was only seven, clearly resented having me around to usurp what minor attention they got from their parents. There were a lot of tantrums and pouting, a lot of eye rolling and hostile giggling on Kitsey’s part, as well as a baffling (to me) upset—never fully resolved—where she complained to her friends and the housekeepers and anyone who would listen that I’d been going in her room and messing around with the piggy-bank collection on the shelf above her desk. As for Toddy, he grew more and more disturbed as the weeks went by and still I was there; at breakfast, he gaped at me unashamed and frequently asked questions that made his mother reach under the table and pinch him. Where did I live? How much longer was I going to stay with them? Did I have a dad? Then where was he?

“Good question,” I said, provoking horrified laughter from Kitsey, who was popular at school and—at nine—as pretty in her white-blonde way as Andy was plain.

viii.

PROFESSIONAL MOVERS WERE COMING, at some point, to pack my mother’s things and put them in storage. Before they came, I was to go to the apartment and pick out anything I wanted or needed. I was aware of the painting in a nagging but vague way which was entirely out of proportion to its actual importance, as if it were a school project I’d left unfinished. At some point I was going to have to get it back to the museum, though I still hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to do that without causing a huge fuss.

Already I had missed one chance to give it back—when Mrs. Barbour had turned away some investigators who had shown up at the apartment looking for me. That is: I understood they were investigators or even police from what Kellyn, the Welsh girl who looked after the younger children, told me. She had been bringing Toddy home from day care when the strangers showed up asking for me. “Suits, you know?” she said, raising a significant eyebrow. She was a heavy, fast-talking girl with cheeks so flushed she always looked like she’d been standing next to a fire. “They had that look.”

I was too afraid to ask what she meant by that look; and when I went in, cautiously, to see what Mrs. Barbour had to say about it, she was busy. “I’m sorry,” she said, without quite looking at me, “but can we please talk about this later?” Guests were arriving in half an hour, among them a well-known architect and a famous dancer with the New York City Ballet; she was fretting over the loose catch to her necklace and upset because the air conditioner wasn’t working properly.

“Am I in trouble?”

It slipped out before I knew what I was saying. Mrs. Barbour stopped. “Theo, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “They were perfectly nice, very considerate, it’s just that I can’t have them sitting around just now. Turning up, without telephoning. Anyway, I told them it wasn’t the best time, which of course they could see for themselves.” She gestured at the caterers darting back and forth, the building engineer on a ladder, examining inside the air-conditioning vent with a flashlight. “Now run along. Where’s Andy?”

“He’ll be home in an hour. His astronomy class went to the planetarium.”

“Well, there’s food in the kitchen. I don’t have a lot of the miniature tarts to spare, but you can have all the finger sandwiches you want. And after the cake’s cut, you’re welcome to have some of that too.”

Her manner had been so unconcerned that I forgot about the visitors until they showed up at school three days later, at my geometry class, one young, one older, indifferently dressed, knocking courteously at the open door. “We see Theodore Decker?” the younger, Italian-looking guy said to Mr. Borowsky as the older one peered cordially inside the classroom.

“We just want to talk to you, is that okay?” said the older guy as we walked down to the dreaded conference room where I was to have had the meeting with Mr. Beeman and my mother on the day she died. “Don’t be scared.” He was a dark-skinned black man with a gray goatee—tough-looking but nice-seeming too, like a cool cop on a television show. “We’re just trying to piece together a lot of things about that day and we hope you can help us.”

I had been frightened at first, but when he said don’t be scared, I believed him—until he pushed open the door of the conference room. There sat my tweed-cap nemesis Mr. Beeman, pompous as ever with his waistcoat and watch chain; Enrique my social worker; Mrs. Swanson the school counselor (the same person who had told me I might feel better if I threw some ice cubes against a tree); Dave the psychiatrist in his customary black Levi’s and turtleneck—and, of all people, Mrs. Barbour, in heels and a pearl-gray suit that looked like it cost more money than all the other people in the room made in a month.

My panic must have been written plainly on my face. Maybe I wouldn’t have been quite so alarmed if I’d understood a little better what wasn’t clear to me at the time: that I was a minor, and that my parent or guardian had to be present at an official interview—which was why anyone even vaguely construed as my advocate had been called in. But all I understood, when I saw all those faces and a tape recorder in the middle of the table, was that the official parties had convened to judge my fate and dispose of me as they saw fit.

Stiffly I sat and endured their warm-up questions (did I have any hobbies? Did I play any sports?) until it became clear to everyone that the preliminary chit-chat wasn’t loosening me up very much.

The bell rang for the end of class. Bang of lockers, murmur of voices out in the hall. “You’re dead, Thalheim,” some boy shouted gleefully.

The Italian guy—Ray, he said his name was—pulled up a chair in front of me, knee to knee. He was young, but heavy, with the air of a good-natured limo driver, and his downturned eyes had a moist, liquid, sleepy look, as if he drank.

“We just want to know what you remember,” he said. “Probe around in your memory, get a general picture of that morning, you know? Because maybe by remembering some of the little things, you might remember something that will help us.”

He was sitting so close I could smell his deodorant. “Like what?”

“Like what you ate for breakfast that morning. That’s a good place to start, huh?”

“Um—” I stared at the gold ID bracelet on his wrist. This wasn’t what I’d been expecting them to ask. The truth was: we hadn’t eaten breakfast at all that morning because I was in trouble at school and my mother was mad at me, but I was too embarrassed to say that.

“You don’t remember?”

“Pancakes,” I burst out desperately.

“Oh yeah?” Ray looked at me shrewdly. “Your mother make them?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she put in them? Blueberries, chocolate chips?”

I nodded.

“Both?”

I could feel everybody looking at me. Then Mr. Beeman said—as loftily as if he were standing in front of his Morals in Society class—“There’s no reason to invent an answer, if you don’t remember.”

The black guy—in the corner, with a notepad—gave Mr. Beeman a sharp warning glance.

“Actually, there seems to be some memory impairment,” interjected Mrs. Swanson in a low voice, toying with the glasses that hung from a chain around her neck. She was a grandmother who wore flowing white shirts and had a long gray braid down her back. Kids who got sent to her office for guidance called her “the Swami.” In her counseling sessions with me at school, besides dispensing the advice about the ice cubes, she had taught me a three-part breath to help release my emotions and made me draw a mandala representing my wounded heart. “He hit his head. Didn’t you, Theo?”

“Is that true?” said Ray, glancing up at me frankly.

“Yes.”

“Did you get it checked out by a doctor?”

“Not right away,” said Mrs. Swanson.

Mrs. Barbour crossed her ankles. “I took him to the emergency room at New York–Presbyterian,” she said coolly. “When he got to my house, he was complaining of a headache. It was a day or so before we had it seen to. Nobody seems to have thought to ask him if he was hurt or not.”

Enrique, the social worker, began to speak up at this, but after a look from the older black cop (whose name has just come back to me: Morris) fell silent.

“Look, Theo,” said the guy Ray, tapping me on the knee. “I know you want to help us out. You do want to help us, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“That’s great. But if we ask you something and you don’t know? It’s okay to say you don’t know.”

“We just want to throw a whole lot of questions out there and see if we can draw your memory out about anything,” Morris said. “Are you cool with that?”

“You need anything?” said Ray, eyeing me closely. “A drink of water, maybe? A soda?”

I shook my head—no sodas were allowed on school property—just as Mr. Beeman said: “Sorry, no sodas permitted on school property.”

Ray made a give me a break face that I wasn’t sure if Mr. Beeman saw or not. “Sorry, kid, I tried,” he said, turning back to me. “I’ll run out and get you a soda at the deli if you feel like it later on, how about it? Now.” He clapped his hands together. “How long do you think you and your mother were in the building prior to the first explosion?”

“About an hour, I guess.”

“You guess or you know?”

“I guess.”

“You think it was more than an hour? Less than an hour?”

“I don’t think it was more than an hour,” I said, after a long pause.

“Describe to us your recollection of the incident.”

“I didn’t see what happened,” I said. “Everything was fine and then there was a loud flash and a bang—”

“A loud flash?”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant the bang was loud.”

“You said a bang,” said the guy Morris, stepping forward. “Do you think you might be able to describe to us in a little more detail what the bang sounded like?”

“I don’t know. Just… loud,” I added, when they kept on looking at me like they expected something more.

In the silence that followed, I heard a stealthy clicking: Mrs. Barbour, with her head down, discreetly checking her BlackBerry for messages.

Morris cleared his throat. “What about a smell?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you notice any particular smell in the moments prior?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Nothing at all? You sure?”

As the questioning wore on—the same stuff over and over, switched around a little to confuse me, with every now and then something new thrown in—I steeled myself and waited hopelessly for them to work around to the painting. I would simply have to admit it and face the consequences, no matter what the consequences were (probably fairly dire, since I was well on my way to becoming a Ward of the State). At a couple of points, I was on the verge of blurting it out, in my terror. But the more questions they asked (where was I when I’d hit my head? Who had I seen or spoken to on my way downstairs?) the more it dawned on me that they didn’t know a thing about what had happened to me—what room I’d been in when the bomb exploded, or even what exit I’d taken out of the building.

They had a floor plan; the rooms had numbers instead of names, Gallery 19A and Gallery 19B, numbers and letters in a mazelike arrangement all the way up to 27. “Were you here when the initial blast occurred?” Ray said, pointing. “Or here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take your time.”

“I don’t know,” I repeated, a bit frantically. The diagram of the rooms had a confusing, computer-generated quality, like something from a video game or a reconstruction of Hitler’s bunker that I’d seen on the History Channel, that in truth didn’t make any sense or seem to represent the space as I remembered it.

He pointed to a different spot. “This square?” he said. “That’s a display plinth, with paintings on it. I know these rooms all look alike, but maybe you can remember where you were in relation to that?”

I stared hopelessly at the diagram and didn’t answer. (Part of the reason it looked so unfamiliar was that they were showing me the area where my mother’s body was found—rooms away from where I’d been when the bomb went off—although I didn’t realize that until later.)

“You didn’t see anybody on your way out,” said Morris encouragingly, repeating what I’d already told them.

I shook my head.

“Nothing you remember at all?”

“Well, I mean—bodies covered up. Equipment lying around.”

“Nobody coming in or out of the area of the explosion.”

“I didn’t see anybody,” I repeated doggedly. We had been over this.

“So you never saw firemen or rescue personnel.”

“No.”

“I suppose we can establish, then, that they’d been ordered out of the building by the time you came to. So we’re talking about a time lapse of forty minutes to an hour and a half after the initial explosion. Is that a safe assumption?”

I shrugged, limply.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

Staring at the floor. “I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know,” I said again, and the silence that followed was so long and uncomfortable I thought I might break down crying.

“Do you recall hearing the second blast?”

“Pardon me for asking,” said Mr. Beeman, “but is this really necessary?”

Ray, my questioner, turned. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not sure I see the purpose of putting him through this.”

With careful neutrality, Morris said: “We’re investigating a crime scene. It’s our job to find out what happened in there.”

“Yes, but surely you must have other means of doing so for such routine matters. I would think they had all manner and variety of security cameras in there.”

“Sure they do,” said Ray, rather sharply. “Except cameras can’t see through dust and smoke. Or if they’re blown up to face the ceiling. Now,” he said, settling back in his chair with a sigh. “You mentioned smoke. Did you smell it or see it?”

I nodded.

“Which one? Saw or smelled?”

“Both.”

“What direction do you think it was coming from?”

I was about to say I didn’t know again, but Mr. Beeman had not finished making his point. “Forgive me, but I entirely fail to see the purpose in security cameras if they don’t operate in an emergency,” he said, to the room in general. “With technology today, and all that artwork—”

Ray turned his head as if to say something angry, but Morris, standing in the corner, raised his hand and spoke up.

“The boy’s an important witness. The surveillance system isn’t designed to withstand an event like this. Now, I’m sorry, but if you can’t stop it with the comments we’ll have to ask you to leave, sir.”

“I’m here as this child’s advocate. I’ve the right to ask questions.”

“Not unless they pertain directly to the child’s welfare.”

“Oddly enough, I was under the impression that they did.”

At this Ray, in the chair in front of me, turned around. “Sir? If you continue to obstruct the proceedings?” he said. “You will have to leave the room.”

“I have no intention of obstructing you,” said Mr. Beeman in the tense silence that followed. “Nothing could be further from my mind, I assure you. Go on, please continue,” he said, with an irritated flick of the hand. “Far be it from me to stop you.”

On the questioning dragged. What direction had the smoke come from? What color was the flash? Who went in and out of the area in the moments prior? Had I noticed anything unusual, anything at all, before or after? I looked at the pictures they showed me—innocent vacation faces, nobody I recognized. Passport photos of Asian tourists and senior citizens, moms and acned teenagers smiling against blue studio backgrounds—ordinary faces, unmemorable, yet all somehow smelling of tragedy. Then we went back to the diagram. Could I maybe just try, just one more time, to pinpoint my location on this map? Here, or here? What about here?

“I don’t remember.” I kept on saying it: partly because I really wasn’t sure, partly because I was frightened and anxious for the interview to come to a close, but also because there was an air of restlessness and distinct impatience in the room; the other adults seemed already to have agreed silently among themselves that I didn’t know anything, and should be left alone.

And then, before I knew it, it was over. “Theo,” said Ray, standing up and placing a meaty hand on my shoulder, “I want to thank you, buddy, for doing what you could for us.”

“That’s okay,” I said, jarred by how abruptly it had all come to an end.

“I know exactly how hard this was for you. Nobody but nobody wants to relive this type of stuff. It’s like—” he made a picture frame with his hands—“we’re putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to figure out what went on in there, and you’ve maybe got some pieces of the puzzle that nobody else has got. You really helped us a lot by letting us talk to you.”

“If you remember anything else,” said Morris, leaning in to give me a card (which Mrs. Barbour quickly intercepted and tucked in her purse), “you’ll call us, won’t you? You’ll remind him, won’t you, miss,” he said to Mrs. Barbour, “to phone us if he has anything else to say? The office number’s right on that card but—” he took a pen from his pocket—“you don’t mind, can I have it back for a second, please?”

Without a word, Mrs. Barbour opened her bag and handed the card back to him.

“Right, right.” He clicked the pen out and scribbled a number on the back. “That’s my cell phone there. You can always leave a message at my office, but if you can’t reach me there, phone me on my cell, all right?”

As everyone was milling around the entrance, Mrs. Swanson floated up and put her arm around me, in the cozy way she had. “Hi there,” she said, confidentially, as if she were my tightest friend in the world. “How’s it going?”

I looked away, made an okay, I guess face.

She stroked my arm like I was her favorite cat. “Good for you. I know that must have been tough. Would you like to go to my office for a few minutes?”

With dismay, I noticed Dave the psychiatrist hovering in the background, and behind him Enrique, hands on hips, with an expectant half-smile on his face.

“Please,” I said, and my desperation must have been audible in my voice, “I want to get back to class.”

She squeezed my arm, and—I noticed—threw a glance at Dave and Enrique. “Sure,” she said. “Where are you this period? I’ll walk you down.”

ix.

BY THEN IT WAS English—last class of the day. We were studying the poetry of Walt Whitman:

Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,

They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again

Vacant faces. The classroom was hot and drowsy in the late afternoon, windows open, traffic noises floating up from West End Avenue. Kids leaned on their elbows and drew pictures in the margins of their spiral notebooks.

I stared out the window, out at the grimy water tank on the roof opposite. The interrogation (as I thought of it) had disturbed me greatly, kicking up a wall of the disjointed sensations that crashed over me at unexpected moments: a choking burn of chemicals and smoke, sparks and wires, the blanched chill of emergency lights, overpowering enough to blank me out. It happened at random times, at school or out on the street—frozen in mid-step as it washed over me again, the girl’s eyes locked on mine in the queer, skewed instant before the world blew apart. Sometimes I’d come to, uncertain what had just been said to me, to find my lab partner in biology staring at me, or the guy whose way I was blocking in front of the cold-drinks case at the Korean market saying look kid, move it, I aint got all day.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?

Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

They had shown me no photographs I recognized of the girl—or of the old man either. Quietly, I put my left hand in my jacket pocket and felt around for the ring. On our vocabulary list a few days before we’d had the word consanguinity: joined in blood. The old man’s face had been so torn up and ruined I couldn’t even say exactly what he’d looked like, and yet I remembered all too well the warm slick feel of his blood on my hands—especially since in some way the blood was still there, I could still smell it and taste it in my mouth, and it made me understand why people talked about blood brothers and how blood bound people together. My English class had read Macbeth in the fall, but only now was it starting to make sense why Lady Macbeth could never scrub the blood off her hands, why it was still there after she washed it away.

x.

BECAUSE, APPARENTLY, SOMETIMES I woke Andy by thrashing and crying out in my sleep, Mrs. Barbour had started giving me a little green pill called Elavil that she explained would keep me from being scared at night. This was embarrassing, especially since my dreams weren’t even full-blown nightmares but only troubled interludes where my mother was working late and stranded without a ride—sometimes upstate, in some burned-out area with junked cars and chained dogs barking in the yards. Uneasily I searched for her in service elevators and abandoned buildings, waited for her in the dark at strange bus stops, glimpsed women who looked like her in the windows of passing trains and just missed grabbing up the telephone when she called me at the Barbours’ house—disappointments and near-misses that thumped me around and woke me with a sharp hiss of breath, lying queasy and sweaty in the morning light. The bad part wasn’t trying to find her, but waking up and remembering she was dead.

With the green pills, even these dreams faded into airless murk. (It strikes me now, though it didn’t then, that Mrs. Barbour was well out of line by giving me unprescribed medication on top of the yellow capsules and tiny orange footballs Dave the Shrink had prescribed me.) Sleep, when it came, was like tumbling into a pit, and often I had a hard time waking up in the morning.

“Black tea, that’s the ticket,” said Mr. Barbour one morning when I was nodding off at breakfast, pouring me a cup from his own well-stewed pot. “Assam Supreme. As strong as Mother makes it. It’ll flush the medication right out of your system. Judy Garland? Before shows? Well, my grandmother told me that Sid Luft used to always phone down to the Chinese restaurant for a big pot of tea to knock all the barbs out of her system, this was London, I believe, the Palladium, and strong tea was the only thing that did the trick, sometimes they’d have a hard time waking her up, you know, just getting her out of bed and dressed—”

“He can’t drink that, it’s like battery acid,” said Mrs. Barbour, dropping in two sugar cubes and pouring in a heavy slug of cream before she handed the cup over to me. “Theo, I hate to keep harping on this, but you really must eat something.”

“Okay,” I said sleepily, but without moving to take a bite of my blueberry muffin. Food tasted like cardboard; I hadn’t been hungry in weeks.

“Would you rather have cinnamon toast? Or oatmeal?”

“It’s completely ridiculous that you won’t let us have coffee,” said Andy, who was in the habit of buying himself a huge Starbucks on the way to school and on the way home every afternoon, without his parents’ knowledge. “You’re very behind the times on this.”

“Possibly,” Mrs. Barbour said coldly.

“Even half a cup would help. It’s unreasonable for you to expect me to go into Advanced Placement Chemistry at 8:45 in the morning with no caffeine.”

“Sob, sob,” said Mr. Barbour, without looking up from the paper.

“Your attitude is very unhelpful. Everyone else is allowed to drink it.”

“I happen to know that’s not true,” said Mrs. Barbour. “Betsy Ingersoll told me—”

“Maybe Mrs. Ingersoll doesn’t let Sabine drink coffee, but it would take a whole lot more than a cup of coffee to get Sabine Ingersoll into Advanced Placement anything.”

“That’s uncalled for, Andy, and very unkind.”

“Well, it’s only the truth,” said Andy coolly. “Sabine is as dumb as a post. I suppose she may as well safeguard her health since she has so little else going for her.”

“Brains aren’t everything, darling. Would you eat an egg if Etta poached you one?” Mrs. Barbour said, turning to me. “Or fried? Or scrambled? Or whatever you like?”

“I like scrambled eggs!” Toddy said. “I can eat four!”

“No you can’t, pal,” said Mr. Barbour.

“Yes I can! I can eat six! I can eat the whole box!”

“It’s not as if I’m asking for Dexedrine,” Andy said. “Although I could get it at school if I felt like it.”

“Theo?” said Mrs. Barbour. Etta the cook, I noticed, was standing in the door. “What about that egg?”

“Nobody ever asks us what we want for breakfast,” Kitsey said; and even though she said it in a very loud voice, everyone pretended not to hear.

xi.

ONE SUNDAY MORNING, I climbed up to the light from a weighty and complicated dream, nothing of it left but a ringing in my ears and the ache of something slipped from my grasp and fallen into a crevasse where I would not see it again. Yet somehow—in the midst of this profound sinking, snapped threads, fragments lost and untrackable—a sentence stood out, ticking across the darkness like a news crawler at the bottom of a TV screen: Hobart and Blackwell. Ring the green bell.

I lay staring at the ceiling, not wanting to stir. The words were as clear and crisp as if someone had handed them to me typed on a slip of paper. And yet—most wonderfully—an expanse of forgotten memory had opened up and floated to the surface with them, like one of those paper pellets from Chinatown that bloom and swell into flowers when dropped into a glass of water.

Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming? Not long before my mother died, I’d woken convinced that a (nonexistent) schoolteacher named Mrs. Malt had put ground glass in my food because I had no discipline—in the world of my dream, a perfectly logical series of events—and I’d lain in a muddle of worry for two or three minutes before I came to my senses.

“Andy?” I said, and then leaned over and peered at the lower bunk, which was empty.

After lying wide-eyed for several moments, staring at the ceiling, I climbed down and retrieved the ring from the pocket of my school jacket and held it up to the light to look at the inscription. Then, quickly, I put it away and dressed. Andy was already up with the rest of the Barbours, at breakfast—Sunday breakfast was a big deal for them, I could hear them all in the dining room, Mr. Barbour rambling on indistinctly as he sometimes did, holding forth a bit. After pausing in the hall, I walked the other way, to the family room, and got the White Pages in its needlepoint cover from the cabinet under the telephone.

Hobart and Blackwell. There it was—clearly a business, though the listing didn’t say what sort. I felt a bit dizzy. Seeing the name in black and white gave me a strange thrill, as of unseen cards falling into place.

The address was in the Village, West Tenth Street. After some hesitation, and with a great deal of anxiety, I dialed the number.

As the phone rang, I stood fiddling with a brass carriage clock on the table in the family room, chewing my lower lip, looking at the framed prints of water birds over the telephone table: Noddy Tern, Townsend’s Cormorant, Common Osprey, Least Water Rail. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to explain who I was or ask what I needed to know.

“Theo?”

I jumped, guiltily. Mrs. Barbour—in gossamer-gray cashmere—had come in, coffee cup in hand.

“What are you doing?”

The phone was still ringing away on the other end. “Nothing,” I said.

“Well, hurry up. Your breakfast is getting cold. Etta’s made French toast.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll be right there,” just as a mechanical voice from the phone company came on the line and told me to try my call again later.

I joined the Barbours, preoccupied—I had hoped that at least a machine would pick up—and was surprised to see none other than Platt Barbour (much bigger and redder in the face than the last time I’d seen him) in the place where I usually sat.

“Ah,” said Mr. Barbour—interrupting himself mid-sentence, blotting his lips with his napkin and jumping up—“here we are, here we are. Good morning. You remember Platt, don’t you? Platt, this is Theodore Decker—Andy’s friend, remember?” As he was speaking, he had wandered off and returned with an extra chair, which he wedged in awkwardly for me at the sharp corner of the table.

As I sat down on the outskirts of the group—three or four inches lower than everyone else, in a spindly bamboo chair that didn’t match the others—Platt met my gaze without much interest and looked away. He had come home from school for a party, and he looked hung over.

Mr. Barbour had sat down again and resumed talking about his favorite topic: sailing. “As I was saying. It all boils down to lack of confidence. You’re unsure of yourself on the keelboat, Andy,” he said, “and there’s just no darn reason you should be, except you’re short of experience on single-hand sailing.”

“No,” said Andy, in his faraway voice. “The problem essentially is that I despise boats.”

“Horsefeathers,” said Mr. Barbour, winking at me as if I were in on the joke, which I wasn’t. “I don’t buy that ho-hum attitude! Look at that picture on the wall in there, down in Sanibel two springs ago! That boy wasn’t bored by the sea and the sky and the stars, no sir.”

Andy sat contemplating the snow scene on the maple syrup bottle while his father rhapsodized in his dizzying, hard-to-follow way about how sailing built discipline and alertness in boys, and strength of character as in mariners of old. In past years, Andy had told me, he hadn’t minded going on the boat quite so much because he’d been able to stay down in the cabin, reading and playing card games with his younger siblings. But now he was old enough to help crew—which meant long, stressful, sun-blinded days toiling on deck alongside the bullying Platt: ducking beneath the boom, completely disoriented, doing his best to keep from getting tangled in the lines or knocked overboard as their father shouted orders and rejoiced in the salt spray.

“God, remember the light on that Sanibel trip?” Andy’s father pushed back in his chair and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Wasn’t it glorious? Those red and orange sunsets? Fire and embers? Atomic, almost? Pure flame just ripping and pouring out of the sky? And remember that fat, smacking moon with the blue mist around it, off Hatteras—is it Maxfield Parrish I’m thinking of, Samantha?”

“Sorry?”

“Maxfield Parrish? That artist I like? Does those very grand skies, you know—” he threw his arms out—“with the towering clouds? Excuse me there, Theo, didn’t mean to knock you in the snoot.”

“Constable does clouds.”

“No, no, that’s not who I mean, this painter is much more satisfying. Anyway—my word, what skies we had out on the water that night. Magical. Arcadian.”

“Which night was that?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember! It was absolutely the highlight of the trip.”

Platt—slouched back in his chair—said maliciously: “The highlight of Andy’s trip was when we stopped for lunch that time at the snack bar.”

Andy said, in a thin voice: “Mother doesn’t care for sailing either.”

“Not madly, no,” said Mrs. Barbour, reaching for another strawberry. “Theo, I really do wish you would eat at least a small bite of your breakfast. You can’t go on starving yourself like this. You’re starting to look very peaked.”

Despite Mr. Barbour’s impromptu lessons from the flag chart in his study, I had not found much to engage me in the topic of sailing, either. “Because the greatest gift my own father ever gave to me?” Mr. Barbour was saying very earnestly. “Was the sea. The love for it—the feel. Daddy gave me the ocean. And it’s a tragic loss for you, Andy—Andy, look at me, I’m talking to you—it’s a terrible loss if you’ve made up your mind to turn your back on the very thing that gave me my freedom, my—”

“I have tried to like it. I have a natural hatred of it.”

“Hatred?” Astonishment; dumbfoundment. “Hatred of what? Of the stars and the wind? Of the sky and the sun? Of liberty?”

“Insofar as any of those things have to do with boating, yes.”

“Well—” looking around the table, including me in the appeal—“now he’s just being pigheaded. The sea—” to Andy—“deny it all you may but it’s your birthright, it’s in your blood, back to the Phoenicians, the ancient Greeks—”

But as Mr. Barbour went on about Magellan, and celestial navigation, and Billy Budd (“I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank/And his cheek it was the budding pink”), I found my own thoughts drifting back to Hobart and Blackwell: wondering who Hobart and Blackwell were, and what exactly they did. The names sounded like a pair of musty old lawyers, or even stage magicians, business partners shuffling about in candle-lit darkness.

It seemed a hopeful sign that the telephone number was still in service. My own home phone had been disconnected. As soon as I could decently slip away from breakfast and my untouched plate, I went back to the telephone in the family room, with Irenka flustering around and running the vacuum and dusting the bric-a-brac all around me, and Kitsey across the room on the computer, determined not to even look at me.

“Who are you calling?” said Andy—who, in the manner of all his family, had come up behind me so quietly that I didn’t hear him.

I might not have told him anything, except I knew that I could trust him to keep his mouth shut. Andy never talked to anybody, certainly not his parents.

“These people,” I said quietly—stepping back a little bit, so I was out of the sight line of the doorway. “I know it sounds weird. But you know that ring I have?”

I explained about the old man, and I was trying to think how to explain about the girl, too, the connection I’d felt with her and how much I wanted to see her again. But Andy—predictably—had already leapt ahead, away from personal aspects to the logistics of the situation. He eyed the White Pages, open on the telephone table. “Are they in the city?”

“West Tenth.”

Andy sneezed, and blew his nose; spring allergies had hit him very hard. “If you can’t get them on the phone,” he said, folding up his handkerchief and putting it in his pocket, “why don’t you just go down there?”

“Really?” I said. It seemed creepy not to call first, just show up. “You think so?”

“That’s what I would do.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t remember me.”

“If they see you in person, they’ll be more likely to remember,” said Andy reasonably. “Otherwise you could just be any weirdo calling and pretending. Don’t worry,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, “I won’t tell anybody if you don’t want me to.”

“A weirdo?” I said. “Pretending what?”

“Well, I mean, you get lots of strange people calling you here,” said Andy flatly.

I was silent, not knowing how to absorb this.

“Besides, they’re not picking up, what else are you going to do? You won’t be able to get down there again until next weekend. Also, is this a conversation you want to have—” he cast his eyes down the hallway, where Toddy was jumping up and down in some kind of shoes that had springs on them, and Mrs. Barbour was interrogating Platt about the party at Molly Walterbeek’s.

He had a point. “Right,” I said.

Andy pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “I’ll go with you if you want.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. Andy, I knew, was doing Japanese Experience for extra credit that afternoon—a study group at the Toraya teahouse, then on to see the new Miyazaki at Lincoln Center; not that Andy needed extra credit but class outings were as much as he had of a social life.

“Well here,” he said, digging around in his pocket and coming up with his cell phone. “Take this with you. Just in case. Here—” he was punching stuff on the screen—“I’ve taken off the security code for you. Good to go.”

“I don’t need this,” I said, looking at the sleek little phone with an anime still of Virtual Girl Aki (naked, in porny thigh-high boots) on the lock screen.

“Well, you might. Never know. Go ahead,” he said, when I hesitated. “Take it.”

xii.

AND SO IT WAS that around half past eleven, I found myself riding down to the Village on the Fifth Avenue bus with the street address of Hobart and Blackwell in my pocket, written on a page from one of the monogrammed notepads Mrs. Barbour kept by the telephone.

Once I got off the bus at Washington Square, I wandered for about forty-five minutes looking for the address. The Village, with its erratic layout (triangular blocks, dead-end streets angling this way and that) was an easy place to get lost, and I had to stop and ask directions three times: in a news shop full of bongs and gay porn magazines, in a crowded bakery blasting opera, and of a girl in white undershirt and overalls who was outside washing the windows of a bookstore with a squeegee and bucket.

When finally I found West Tenth—which was deserted—I walked along, counting the numbers. I was on a slightly shabby part of the street that was mainly residential. A group of pigeons strutted ahead of me on the wet sidewalk, three abreast, like small officious pedestrians. Many of the numbers weren’t clearly posted, and just as I was wondering if I’d missed it and ought to double back, I suddenly found myself looking at the words Hobart and Blackwell painted in a neat, old-fashioned arch upon the window of a shop. Through the dusty windows I saw Staffordshire dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystal, tarnished silver, antique chairs and settees upholstered in sallow old brocade, an elaborate faience birdcage, miniature marble obelisks atop a marble-topped pedestal table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos. It was just the kind of shop my mother would have liked—packed tightly, a bit dilapidated, with stacks of old books on the floor. But the gates were pulled down and the place was closed.

Most of the stores didn’t open until noon, or one. To kill some time I walked over to Greenwich Street, to the Elephant and Castle, a restaurant where my mother and I ate sometimes when we were downtown. But the instant I stepped in, I realized my mistake. The mismatched china elephants, even the ponytailed waitress in a black T-shirt who approached me, smiling: it was too overwhelming, I could see the corner table where my mother and I had eaten lunch the last time we were there, I had to mumble an excuse and back out the door.

I stood on the sidewalk, heart pounding. Pigeons flew low in the sooty sky. Greenwich Avenue was almost empty: a bleary male couple who looked like they’d been up fighting all night; a rumple-haired woman in a too-big turtleneck sweater, walking a dachshund toward Sixth Avenue. It was a little weird being in the Village on my own because it wasn’t a place where you saw many kids on the street on a weekend morning; it felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic. Everybody looked hung over or as if they had just rolled out of bed.

Because nothing much was open, because I felt a bit lost and I didn’t know what else to do, I began to wander back over in the direction of Hobart and Blackwell. To me, coming from uptown, everything in the Village looked so little and old, with ivy and vines growing on the buildings, herbs and tomato plants in barrels on the street. Even the bars had handpainted signs like rural taverns: horses and tomcats, roosters and geese and pigs. But the intimacy, the smallness, also made me feel shut out; and I found myself hurrying past the inviting little doorways with my head down, very aware of all the convivial Sunday-morning lives unrolling around me in private.

The gates on Hobart and Blackwell were still down. I had the feeling that the shop hadn’t been open in a while; it was too cold, too dark; there was no sense of vitality or interior life like the other places on the street.

I was looking in the window and trying to think what I should do next when suddenly I saw motion, a large shape gliding at the rear of the shop. I stopped, transfixed. It moved lightly, as ghosts are said to move, without looking to either side, passing quickly before a doorway into darkness.

Then it was gone. With my hand to my forehead, I peered into the murky, crowded depths of the shop, and then knocked on the glass.

Hobart and Blackwell. Ring the green bell.

A bell? There wasn’t a bell; the entrance to the shop was enclosed by an iron gate. I walked to the next doorway—number 12, a modest apartment building—and then back to number 8, a brownstone. There was a stoop, going up to the first floor, but this time, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: a narrow doorwell, tucked halfway between number 8 and number 10, half-hidden by a rack of old-fashioned tin garbage cans. Four or five steps led down to an anonymous-looking door about three feet below the level of the sidewalk. There was no label, no sign—but what caught my eye was a flash of kelly green: a flag of green electrical tape, pasted beneath a button in the wall.

I went down the stairs; I rang the bell and rang it, wincing at the hysterical buzz (which made me want to run away) and taking deep breaths for courage. Then—so suddenly I started back—the door opened, and I found myself gazing up at a large and unexpected person.

He was six foot four or six five, at least: haggard, noble-jawed, heavy, something about him suggesting the antique photos of Irish poets and pugilists that hung in the midtown pub where my father liked to drink. His hair was mostly gray, and needed cutting, and his skin an unhealthy white, with such deep purple shadows around his eyes that it was almost as if his nose had been broken. Over his clothes, a rich paisley robe with satin lapels fell almost to his ankles and flowed massively around him, like something a leading man might wear in a 1930s movie: worn, but still impressive.

I was so surprised that all my words left me. There was nothing impatient in his manner, quite the opposite. Blankly he looked at me, with dark-lidded eyes, waiting for me to speak.

“Excuse me—” I swallowed; my throat was dry. “I don’t want to bother you—”

He blinked, mildly, in the silence that followed, as if of course he understood this perfectly, would never dream of suggesting such a thing.

I fumbled in my pocket; I held out the ring to him, on my open palm. The man’s large, pallid face went slack. He looked at the ring, and then at me.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

“He gave it to me,” I said. “He told me to bring it here.”

He stood and looked at me, hard. For a moment, I thought he was going to tell me he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then, without a word, he stepped back and opened the door.

“I’m Hobie,” he said, when I hesitated. “Come in.”

Chapter 4.

Morphine Lollipop

i.

A WILDERNESS OF GILT, gleaming in the slant from the dust-furred windows: gilded cupids, gilded commodes and torchieres, and—undercutting the old-wood smell—the reek of turpentine, oil paint, and varnish. I followed him through the workshop along a path swept in the sawdust, past pegboard and tools, dismembered chairs and claw-foot tables sprawled with their legs in the air. Though a big man he was graceful, “a floater,” my mother would have called him, something effortless and gliding in the way he carried himself. With my eyes on the heels of his slippered feet, I followed him up some narrow stairs and into a dim room, richly carpeted, where black urns stood on pedestals and tasseled draperies were drawn against the sun.

At the silence, my heart went cold. Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe, the exact, suffocating feel of our apartment when Mrs. Barbour took me back to Sutton Place to get some things I needed. It was a stillness I knew; this was how a house closed in on itself when someone had died.

All at once I wished I hadn’t come. But the man—Hobie—seemed to sense my misgiving, because he turned quite suddenly. Though he wasn’t a young man he still had something of a boy’s face; his eyes, a childish blue, were clear and startled.

“What’s the matter?” he said, and then: “Are you all right?”

His concern embarrassed me. Uncomfortably I stood in the stagnant, antique-crowded gloom, not knowing what to say.

He didn’t seem to know what to say either; he opened his mouth; closed it; then shook his head as if to clear it. He seemed to be around fifty or sixty, poorly shaven, with a shy, pleasant, large-featured face neither handsome nor plain—a man who would always be bigger than most of the other men in the room, though he also seemed unhealthy in some clammy, ill-defined way, with black-circled eyes and a pallor that made me think of the Jesuit martyrs depicted in the church murals I’d seen on our school trip to Montreal: large, capable, death-pale Europeans, staked and bound in the camps of the Hurons.

“Sorry, I’m in a bit of a tip.…” He was looking around with a vague, unfocused urgency, as my mother did when she’d misplaced something. His voice was rough but educated, like Mr. O’Shea my History teacher who’d grown up in a tough Boston neighborhood and ended up going to Harvard.

“I can come back. If that’s better.”

At this he glanced at me, mildly alarmed. “No, no,” he said—his cufflinks were out, the cuff fell loose and grubby at the wrist—“just give me a moment to collect myself, sorry—here,” he said distractedly, pushing the straggle of gray hair out of his face, “here we go.”

He was leading me towards a narrow, hard-looking sofa, with scrolled arms and a carved back. But it was tossed with pillow and blankets and we both seemed to notice at the same time that the tumble of bedding made it awkward to sit.

“Ah, sorry,” he murmured, stepping back so fast we almost bumped into each other, “I’ve set up camp in here as you can see, not the best arrangement in the world but I’ve had to make do since I can’t hear properly with all the goings-on…”

Turning away (so that I missed the rest of the sentence) he sidestepped a book face-down on the carpet and a teacup ringed with brown on the inside, and ushered me instead to an ornate upholstered chair, tucked and shirred, with fringe and a complicated button-studded seat—a Turkish chair, as I later learned; he was one of the few people in New York who still knew how to upholster them.

Winged bronzes, silver trinkets. Dusty gray ostrich plumes in a silver vase. Uncertainly, I perched on the edge of the chair and looked around. I would have preferred to be on my feet, the easier to leave.

He leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees. But instead of saying a word he only looked at me and waited.

“I’m Theo,” I said in a rush, after much too long a silence. My face was so hot I felt about to burst into flames. “Theodore Decker. Everybody calls me Theo. I live uptown,” I added doubtfully.

“Well, I’m James Hobart, but everyone calls me Hobie.” His gaze was bleak and disarming. “I live downtown.”

At a loss I glanced away, unsure if he was making fun.

“Sorry.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Don’t mind me. Welty—” he glanced at the ring in his palm—“was my business partner.”

Was? The moon-dial clock—whirring and cogged, chained and weighted, a Captain Nemo contraption—burred loudly in the stillness before gonging on the quarter hour.

“Oh,” I said. “I just. I thought—”

“No. I’m sorry. You didn’t know?” he added, looking at me closely.

I looked away. I had not realized how much I’d counted on seeing the old man again. Despite what I’d seen—what I knew—somehow I’d still managed to nurture a childish hope that he’d pulled through, miraculously, like a murder victim on TV who after the commercial break turns out to be alive and recovering quietly in the hospital.

“And how do you happen to have this?”

“What?” I said, startled. The clock, I noticed, was way off: ten a.m., ten p.m., nowhere even near the correct time.

“You said he gave it to you?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Yes. I—” The shock of his death felt new, as if I’d failed him a second time and it was happening all over again from a completely different angle.

“He was conscious? He spoke to you?”

“Yes,” I began, and then fell silent. I felt miserable. Being in the old man’s world, among his things, had brought the sense of him back very strongly: the dreamy underwater mood of the room, its rusty velvets, its richness and quiet.

“I’m glad he wasn’t alone,” said Hobie. “He would have hated that.” The ring was closed in his fingers and he put his fist to his mouth and looked at me.

“My. You’re just a cub, aren’t you?” he said.

I smiled uneasily, not sure how I was meant to respond.

“Sorry,” he said, in a more businesslike tone that I could tell was meant to reassure me. “It’s just—I know it was bad. I saw. His body—” he seemed to grasp for words—“before they call you in, they clean them up as best they can and they tell you that it won’t be pleasant, which of course you know but—well. You can’t prepare yourself for something like that. We had a set of Mathew Brady photographs come through the shop a few years ago—Civil War stuff, so gruesome we had a hard time selling it.”

I said nothing. It was not my habit to contribute to adult conversation apart from a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when pressed, but all the same I was transfixed. My mother’s friend Mark, who was a doctor, had been the one who’d gone in to identify her body and no one had had very much to say to me about it.

“I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh?” He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. “Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had a lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves.”

“24,000 men died at Shiloh in two days,” I blurted.

His eyes reverted to me in alarm.

“50,000 at Gettysburg. It was the new weaponry. Minié balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before World War I. Most people don’t know that.”

I could see he had no idea what to do with this.

“You’re interested in the Civil War?” he said, after a careful pause.

“Er—yes,” I said brusquely. “Kind of.” I knew a lot about Union field artillery, because I’d written a paper on it so technical and fact-jammed that the teacher had made me write it again, and I also knew about Brady’s photographs of the dead at Antietam: I’d seen the pictures online, pin-eyed boys black with blood at the nose and mouth. “Our class spent six weeks on Lincoln.”

“Brady had a photography studio not far from here. Have you ever seen it?”

“No.” There had been a trapped thought about to emerge, something essential and unspeakable, released by the mention of those blank-faced soldiers. Now it was all gone but the image: dead boys with limbs akimbo, staring at the sky.

The silence that followed this was excruciating. Neither of us seemed to know how to move forward. At last Hobie recrossed his legs. “I mean to say—I’m sorry. To press you,” he said falteringly.

I squirmed. Coming downtown, I’d been so filled with curiosity that I’d failed to anticipate that I might be expected to answer any questions myself.

“I know it must be difficult to talk about. It’s just—I never thought—”

My shoes. It was interesting how I’d never really looked at my shoes. The toe scuffs. The frayed laces. We’ll go to Bloomingdale’s Saturday and buy you a new pair. But that had never happened.

“I don’t want to put you on the spot. But—he was aware?”

“Yes. Sort of. I mean—” his alert, anxious face made some remote part of me want to burst out with all kinds of stuff he didn’t need to know and it wasn’t right to tell him, splattered insides, ugly repetitive flashes that broke in on my thoughts even while I was awake.

Murky portraits, china spaniels on the mantelpiece, golden pendulum swinging, tockety-tock, tockety-tock.

“I heard him calling.” Rubbing my eye. “When I woke up.” It was like trying to explain a dream. You couldn’t. “And I went over to him and I was with him and—it wasn’t that bad. Or, not like you’d think,” I added, since this had come out sounding like the lie it was.

“He spoke to you?”

Swallowing hard, I nodded. Dark mahogany; potted palms.

“He was conscious?”

Again I nodded. Bad taste in my mouth. It wasn’t something you could summarize, stuff that didn’t make sense and didn’t have a story, the dust, the alarms, how he’d held my hand, a whole lifetime there just the two of us, mixed-up sentences and names of towns and people I hadn’t heard of. Broken wires sparking.

His eyes were still on me. My throat was dry and I felt a bit sick. The moment wasn’t moving on to the next moment like it was supposed to and I kept waiting for him to ask more questions, anything, but he didn’t.

At last he shook his head as if to clear it. “This is—” He seemed as confused as I was; the robe, the gray hair loose gave him the look of a crownless king in a costume play for children.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head again. “This is all so new.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, you see, it’s just—” he leaned forward and blinked, quick and agitated—“It’s all very different from what I was told, you see. They said he died instantly. Very, very emphatic on that point.”

“But—” I stared, astonished. Did he think I was making it up?

“No, no,” he said hastily, putting a hand up to reassure me. “It’s just—I’m sure it’s what they say to everyone. ‘Died instantly’?” he said bleakly, when still I stared at him. “ ‘Perfectly painless’? ‘Never knew what hit him’?”

Then—all at once—I did see, the implications slithering in on me with a chill. My mother too had “died instantly.” Her death had been “perfectly painless.” The social workers had harped on it so insistently that I’d never thought to wonder how they could be quite so sure.

“Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him going that way,” Hobie said, in the abrupt silence that had fallen. “The flash of lightning. Falling over unawares. Had a sense, you do sometimes, that it wasn’t like they said, you know?”

“Sorry?” I said, glancing up, disoriented by the vicious new possibility I’d stumbled into.

“A goodbye at the gate,” said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. “That’s what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku—he wouldn’t have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. ‘A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.’ ”

He had lost me. In the shadowy room, a single blade of sun pierced between the curtains and struck across the room, where it caught and blazed up in a tray of cut glass decanters, casting prisms that flickered and shifted this way and that and wavered high on the walls like paramecia under a microscope. Though there was a strong smell of wood smoke, the fireplace was burnt-out and black looking and the grate choked with ashes, as if the fires hadn’t been lit in a while.

“The girl,” I said timidly.

His glance came back to me.

“There was a girl too.”

For a moment, he did not seem to understand. Then he sat back in his chair and blinked rapidly as if water had been flicked in his face.

“What?” I said—startled. “Where is she? She’s okay?”

“No—” rubbing the bridge of his nose—“no.”

“But she’s alive?” I could hardly believe it.

He raised his eyebrows in a way that I understood to mean yes. “She was lucky.” But his voice, and his manner, seemed to say the opposite.

“Is she here?”

“Well—”

“Where is she? Can I see her?”

He sighed, with something that looked like exasperation. “She’s meant to be quiet and not have visitors,” he said, rummaging in his pockets. “She’s not herself—it’s hard to know how she’ll react.”

“But she’s going to be all right?”

“Well, let us hope so. But she’s not out of the woods yet. To employ the highly unclear phrase the doctors insist on using.” He’d taken cigarettes from the pocket of his bathrobe. With uncertain hands he lit one then with a flourish threw the pack on the painted Japanese table between us.

“What?” he said, waving the smoke from his face, when he caught me staring at the crumpled packet, French, like people smoked in old movies. “Don’t tell me you want one too.”

“No thank you,” I said, after an uneasy silence. I was pretty sure he was joking although I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure.

He, in return, was blinking at me sharply through the tobacco haze with a sort of worried look, as though he had just realized some crucial fact about me.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” he said unexpectedly.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the boy, aren’t you? Whose mother died in there?”

I was too stunned to say anything for a moment.

“What,” I said, meaning how do you know, but I couldn’t quite get it out.

Uncomfortably, he rubbed an eye and sat back suddenly, with the fluster of a man who’s spilled a drink on the table. “Sorry. I don’t—I mean—that didn’t come out right. God. I’m—” vaguely he gestured as if to say I’m exhausted, not thinking straight.

Not very politely, I looked away—blindsided by a queasy, unwelcome swell of emotion. Since my mother’s death, I had cried hardly at all and certainly not in front of anyone—not even at her memorial service, where people who barely knew her (and one or two who had made her life Hell, such as Mathilde) were sobbing and blowing their noses all around me.

He saw I was upset; started to say something; reconsidered.

“Have you eaten?” he said unexpectedly.

I was too surprised to answer. Food was the last thing on my mind.

“Ah, I thought not,” he said, rising creakily to his big feet. “Let’s go rustle up something.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, so rudely I was sorry. Since my mother’s death, all anyone seemed to think of was shovelling food down my throat.

“No, no, of course not.” With his free hand he fanned away a cloud of smoke. “But come along, please. Humor me. You’re not vegetarian, are you?”

“No!” I said, offended. “Why would you think that?”

He laughed—short, sharp. “Easy! Lots of her friends are veg, so is she.”

“Oh,” I said faintly, and he looked down at me with a sort of lively, unhurried amusement.

“Well, just so you know, I’m not a vegetarian either,” he said. “I’ll eat any old sort of ridiculous thing. So I suppose we’ll manage all right.”

He pushed open a door, and I followed him down a crowded hallway lined with tarnished mirrors and old pictures. Though he was walking ahead of me fast, I was anxious to linger and look: family groupings, white columns, verandahs and palm trees. A tennis court; a Persian carpet spread on a lawn. Male servants in white pyjamas, solemnly abreast. My eye landed on Mr. Blackwell—beaky and personable, dapperly dressed in white, back hunched even in youth. He was lounging by a seaside retaining wall in some palmy locale; beside him—atop the wall, hand on his shoulder and standing a head taller—smiled a kindergarten-aged Pippa. As tiny as she was, the resemblance sounded: her coloring, her eyes, her head cocked at the same angle and hair as red as his.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” I said—at the same instant I realized it couldn’t possibly be her. This photo, with its faded colors and outmoded clothes, had been taken long before I was born.

Hobie turned, came back to look. “No,” he said quietly, hands behind his back. “That’s Juliet. Pippa’s mother.”

“Where is she?”

“Juliet—? Dead. Cancer. Six years last May.” And then, seeming to realize he’d spoken too curtly: “Welty was Juliet’s big brother. Half brother, rather. Same father—different wives—thirty years apart. But he brought her up like his own child.”

I stepped in for a closer look. She was leaning against him, cheek inclined sweetly against the sleeve of his jacket.

Hobie cleared his throat. “She was born when their father was in his sixties,” he said quietly. “Far too old to interest himself in a small child, particularly since he’d had no weakness for children to start with.”

A door in the opposite side of the hallway stood ajar; he pushed it open and stood looking into darkness. On tiptoe, I craned behind, but almost immediately he backed away and clicked the door shut.

“Is that her?” Though it had been too dark to see very much, I had caught the unfriendly glow of animal eyes, an unnerving greenish sheen from across the room.

“Not now.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.

“What’s that in there with her?” I whispered—lingering by the doorway, reluctant to move along. “A cat?”

“Dog. The nurse doesn’t approve, but she wants him in the bed with her and honestly, I can’t keep him out—he scratches at the door and whines—Here, this way.”

Moving slowly, creakily, with an old person’s forward-leaning quality, he pushed open a door into a crowded kitchen with a ceiling skylight and a curvaceous old stove: tomato red, with svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship. Books stacked on the floor—cookbooks, dictionaries, old novels, encyclopedias; shelves closely packed with antique china in half a dozen patterns. Near the window, by the fire escape, a faded wooden saint held up a palm in benediction; on the sideboard alongside a silver tea set, painted animals straggled two by two into a Noah’s Ark. But the sink was piled with dishes, and on the countertops and windowsills stood medicine bottles, dirty cups, alarming drifts of unopened mail, and plants from the florist’s dry and brown in their pots.

He sat me down at the table, pushing away Con Ed bills and back issues of Antiques magazine. “Tea,” he said, as if remembering an item on a grocery list.

As he busied himself at the stove, I stared at the coffee rings on the tablecloth. Restlessly, I pushed back in my chair and looked around.

“Er—” I said.

“Yes?”

“Can I see her later?”

“Maybe,” he said, with his back to me. Whisk beat against blue china bowl: tap tap tap. “If she’s awake. She’s in a good deal of pain and the medicine makes her sleepy.”

“What happened to her?”

“Well—” His tone was both brisk and subdued and I recognized it at once since it was much the tone I employed when people asked about my mother. “She’s had a bad crack on the head, a skull fracture, to tell you the truth she was in a coma for a while and her left leg was broken in so many pieces she came near to losing it. ‘Marbles in a sock,’ ” he said, with a mirthless laugh. “That’s what the doctor said when he looked at the x-ray. Twelve breaks. Five surgeries. Last week,” he said, half-turning, “she had the pins out, and she begged so to come home they said she could. As long as we had a nurse part time.”

“Is she walking yet?”

“Goodness, no,” he said, bringing his cigarette up for a drag; he was somehow managing to cook with one hand and smoke with the other, like some tugboat captain or lumber camp cook in an old movie. “She can hardly sit up more than half an hour.”

“But she’ll be fine.”

“Well, that’s what we hope,” he said, in what did not seem an overly hopeful tone. You know,” he said, glancing back at me, “if you were in there too, it’s remarkable that you’re okay.”

“Well.” I never knew how to respond when people commented, as they often did, on my being “okay.”

Hobie coughed, and put out the cigarette. “Well.” I could see, from his expression, that he knew he’d disturbed me, and was sorry. “I suppose they spoke to you too? The investigators?”

I looked at the tablecloth. “Yes.” The less said about this, I felt, the better.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I found them very decent—very informed. This one Irishman—he’d seen a lot of these things, he was telling me about suitcase bombs in England and in the Paris airport, some sidewalk café thing in Tangier, you know, dozens dead and the person right next to the bomb isn’t hurt at all. He said they see some pretty strange effects, you know, in older buildings especially. Enclosed spaces, uneven surfaces, reflective materials—very unpredictable. Just like acoustics, he said. The blast waves are like sound waves—they bounce and deflect. Sometimes you have shop windows broken miles off. Or—” he pushed the hair out of his eyes with his wrist—“sometimes, closer to hand, there’s what he called a shielding effect. Things very close to the detonation remain intact—the unbroken teacup in the blown-out IRA cottage or what have you. It’s the flying glass and debris that kills most people, you know, often at pretty far range. A pebble or a piece of glass at that speed is as good as a bullet.”

I traced my thumb along the flower pattern of the tablecloth. “I—”

“Sorry. Maybe not the right thing to talk about.”

“No no,” I said hurriedly; it was actually a huge relief to hear someone speak directly, and in an informed way, about what most people tied themselves in knots to avoid. “That’s not it. It’s just—”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering. How’d she get out?”

“Well, it was a stroke of luck. She was trapped under a lot of rubbish—the firemen wouldn’t have found her if one of the dogs hadn’t alerted. They worked partway in, jacked up the beam—I mean, the amazing thing too, she was awake, talked to them the whole time, though she doesn’t remember a bit of it. The miracle of it was they got her out before the call came to evacuate—how long were you knocked out, did you say?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, you were lucky. If they’d had to go off and leave her there, still pinned, which I understand did happen to some people—Ah, here we go,” he said as the kettle whistled.

The plate of food, when he set it before me, was nothing to look at—puffy yellow stuff on toast. But it smelled good. Cautiously, I tasted it. It was melted cheese, with chopped-up tomato and cayenne pepper and some other things I couldn’t figure out, and it was delicious.

“Sorry, what is this?” I said, taking another careful bite.

He looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, it doesn’t really have a name.”

“It’s good,” I said, slightly astonished how hungry I really was. My mother had made a cheese-on-toast very similar which we ate sometimes on Sunday nights in winter.

“You like cheese? I should have thought to ask.”

I nodded, mouth too full to answer. Even though Mrs. Barbour was always pressing ice cream and sweets on me, somehow it felt as if I’d hardly eaten a normal meal since my mother died—at least, not the kind of meals that had been normal for us, stir fry or scrambled eggs or macaroni and cheese from the box, while I sat on the kitchen step-ladder and told her about my day.

As I ate, he sat across the table with his chin in his big white hands. “What are you good at?” he asked rather suddenly. “Sports?”

“Sorry?”

“What are you interested in? Games and all that?”

“Well—video games. Like Age of Conquest? Yakuza Freakout?”

He seemed nonplussed. “What about school, then? Favorite subjects?”

“History, I guess. English too,” I said when he didn’t answer. “But English is going to be really boring for the next six weeks—we stopped doing literature and went back to the grammar book and now we’re diagramming sentences.”

“Literature? English or American?”

“American. Right now. Or we were. American history too, this year. Although it’s been really boring lately. We’re just getting off the Great Depression but it’ll be good again once we get to World War II.”

It was the most enjoyable conversation I’d had in a while. He asked me all kinds of interesting questions, like what I’d read in literature and how middle school was different from elementary school; what was my hardest subject (Spanish) and what was my favorite historical period (I wasn’t sure, anything but Eugene Debs and the History of Labor, which we’d spent way too much time on) and what did I want to be when I grew up? (no clue)—normal stuff, but still it was refreshing to converse with a grown-up who seemed interested in me apart from my misfortune, not prying for information or running down a checklist of Things to Say to Troubled Kids.

We’d gotten off on the subject of writers—from T. H. White and Tolkien to Edgar Allan Poe, another favorite. “My dad says Poe’s a second-rate writer,” I said. “That he’s the Vincent Price of American Letters. But I don’t think that’s fair.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Hobie, seriously, pouring himself a cup of tea. “Even if you don’t like Poe—he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century. I mean—honestly, I don’t care as much for him as I did when I was a boy, but even if you don’t like him you can’t dismiss him as a crank.”

“My dad did. He used to go around reciting ‘Annabel Lee’ in a stupid voice, to make me mad. Because he knew I liked it.”

“Your dad’s a writer then.”

“No.” I didn’t know where he’d gotten that. “An actor. Or he was.” Before I was born, he’d played guest roles on several TV shows, never the star but the star’s spoiled playboy friend or corrupt business partner who gets killed.

“Would I have heard of him?”

“No. Now he works in an office. Or he did.”

“And what’s he doing now, then?” he asked. He had slipped the ring over his little finger, and from time to time he twisted it between thumb and forefinger of his other hand, as if to make sure it was still there.

“Who knows? He ditched us.”

To my surprise, he laughed. “Good riddance?”

“Well—” I shrugged—“I don’t know. Sometimes he was okay. We’d watch sports and cop shows and he’d tell me how they did the special effects with the blood and all. But, it’s like—I don’t know. Like, sometimes he was drunk when he came to pick me up from school?” I hadn’t really talked about this with Dave the Shrink or Mrs. Swanson or anyone. “I was scared to tell my mother but then one of the other mothers told her. And then—” it was a long story, I was feeling embarrassed, I wanted to cut it short—“he got his hand broken in a bar, he was fighting somebody in a bar, he had this bar he liked to go to every day only we didn’t know that’s where he was because he said he was working late, and he had this whole set of friends we didn’t know about and they sent him postcards when they went on vacation to places like the Virgin Islands? to our home address? which was how we found out about it? and my mother tried to make him go to AA but he wouldn’t go. Sometimes the doormen used to come and stand in the hall outside the apartment and make a lot of noise so he could hear them—so he knew they were out there, you know? So he didn’t get too out of hand.”

“Out of hand?”

“There was a lot of yelling and stuff. It was mostly him doing it. But—” uncomfortably aware that I’d said more than I meant to—“it was mainly him making a bunch of noise. Like—oh, I don’t know, like when he had to stay with me, when she had to work? He was always in a really bad mood. I couldn’t talk to him when he was watching news or sports, that was the rule. I mean—” I paused, unhappily, feeling I’d talked myself into a corner. “Anyway. That was a long time ago.”

He sat back in his chair and looked at me: a big, self-contained, guarded man, though his eyes were the worried blue of boyishness.

“And now?” he said. “Do you like the people you’re staying with?”

“Um—” I paused, with full mouth, at a loss how to explain the Barbours. “They’re nice, I guess.”

“I’m glad. I mean, I can’t say I know Samantha Barbour, although I’ve done some work for her family in the past. She has a good eye.”

At this, I stopped eating. “You know the Barbours?”

“Not him. Her. Though his mother was quite a collector—I gather it all went to the brother, though, due to some family quarrel. Welty would have been able to tell you more about it. Not that he was a gossip,” he added hastily, “Welty was very discreet, buttoned up to here, but people confided in him, he was that sort, you know? Strangers opened up to him—clients, people he hardly knew, he was the kind of man people liked to entrust with their sadnesses.

“But yes.” He folded his hands. “Every art dealer and antiquario in New York knows Samantha Barbour. She was a Van der Pleyn before she married. Not a great buyer, though Welty saw her at auction sometimes, and she certainly has some pretty things.”

“Who told you I was staying with the Barbours?”

He blinked, rapidly. “It was in the paper,” he said. “You didn’t see it?”

“The paper?”

“The Times. You didn’t read it? No?”

“There was something in the paper about me?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “Not about you. About children who had lost family members in the museum. Most of them were tourists. There was one little girl… a baby, really… diplomat’s child from South America—”

“What did they say about me in the paper?”

He made a face. “Oh, an orphan’s plight… charity-minded socialite steps in… that kind of thing. You can imagine.”

I stared into my plate, feeling embarrassed. Orphan? Charity?

“It was a very nice piece. I gather you protected one of her sons from bullies?” he said, lowering his large gray head to catch my eye. “At school? The other gifted boy who was put ahead?”

I shook my head. “Sorry?”

“Samantha’s son? Whom you defended from a group of older boys at school? Took beatings for him—that kind of thing?”

Again I shook my head—completely bewildered.

He laughed. “Such modesty! You shouldn’t be embarrassed.”

“But—it wasn’t like that,” I said, baffled. “We both got picked on and beaten up. Every day.”

“So the story said. Which made it all the more remarkable that you stood up for him. A broken bottle?” he said, when I didn’t respond. “Someone was trying to cut Samantha Barbour’s son with a broken bottle, and you—”

“Oh, that,” I said, embarrassed. “That was nothing.”

“You were cut yourself. When you tried to help him.”

“That’s not how it happened! Cavanaugh jumped on both of us! There was a piece of broken glass on the sidewalk.”

Again he laughed—a big man’s laugh, rich and rough and at odds with his carefully cultivated voice. “Well, however it happened,” he said, “you’ve certainly tipped up in an interesting family.” Standing, he went to the cupboard, where he retrieved a bottle of whiskey and poured a couple of fingers in a not-very-clean glass.

“Samantha Barbour doesn’t seem the warmest and most welcoming of hearts—at least that’s not the impression,” he said. “Yet she seems to do an awful lot of good in the world with the foundations and fundraising, doesn’t she?”

I kept quiet as he put the bottle back in the cupboard. Above, through the skylight, the light was gray and opalescent; a fine rain peppered at the glass.

“Are you going to open the shop again?” I said.

“Well—” he sighed. “Welty handled all that end of it—the clients, the sales. Me—I’m a cabinet maker, not a businessman. Brocanteur, bricoleur. Barely set foot up there—I’m always below stairs, sanding and polishing. Now he’s gone—well, it’s still very new. People calling for things he sold, things still being delivered I never knew he bought, don’t know where the paperwork is, don’t know who any of it’s for… there are a million things I need to ask him, I’d give anything if I could talk to him for five minutes. Particularly—well, particularly as regards Pippa. Her medical care and—well.”

“Right,” I said, aware how lame I sounded. We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother’s funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn’t work.

“He was a lovely man. Not many like him. Gentle, charming. People always felt sorry for him because of his back, though I’ve never met anyone so naturally gifted with a happy disposition, and of course the customers loved him… outgoing fellow, very sociable, always was… ‘the world won’t come to me,’ he used to say, ‘so I must go to it’—”

Quite suddenly, Andy’s iPhone chimed: text message coming in.

Hobie—glass halfway to his mouth—started, violently. “What was that?”

“Wait a second,” I said, digging in my pocket. The text was from Phil Lefkow, one of the kids in Andy’s Japanese class: Hi Theo, Andy here, are you ok? Hastily, I switched the phone off and stuck it back in my pocket.

“Sorry?” I said. “What were you saying?”

“I forget.” He stared into space for a moment or two, then shook his head. “I never thought I’d see this again,” he said, looking down at the ring. “So like him to ask you to bring it here—to put it in my hand. I—well, I didn’t say anything but I thought for sure someone had pocketed it at the morgue—”

Again the phone chimed its annoying, high-pitched note. “Gosh, sorry!” I said, scrambling for it. Andy’s text read:

Just making sure your not being killed!!!!

“Sorry,” I said—holding the button down, just to make sure—“it really is off this time.”

But he only smiled, and looked into his glass. Rain tapped and dripped at the skylight, casting watery shadows that streamed down the wall. Too shy to say anything, I waited for him to pick up the thread again—and when he didn’t, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was.

I pushed my plate aside. “Thank you,” I said dutifully, eyes wandering round the room, “that was really good”—speaking (as had become my habit) for my mother’s benefit, in case she was listening.

“Oh, how polite!” he said—laughing at me but not unkindly, in a way that felt friendly. “Do you like it?”

“What?”

“My Noah’s Ark.” He nodded at the shelf. “You were looking at it over there, I thought.” The worn wooden animals (elephants, tigers, oxen, zebras, all the way down to a tiny pair of mice) stood patiently in line, waiting to board.

“Is it hers?” I asked, after a fascinated silence; for the animals were so lovingly positioned (the big cats ignoring each other; the male peacock turned away from his hen to admire his reflection in the toaster) I could imagine her spending hours arranging them and trying to get them exactly right.

“No—” his hands came together on the table—“it was one of the first antiques I ever bought, thirty years ago. In an American Folk sale. I’m not a great one for the folk art, never have been—this piece, not of the first quality, doesn’t fit with anything else I own, and yet isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?”

I pushed back in my chair, unable to keep my feet still. “Can I see her now?” I said.

“If she’s awake—” he pursed his lips—“well, don’t see the harm. But only for a minute, mind.” When he stood, his bulky, stoop-shouldered height took me by surprise all over again. “I warn you, though—she’s a bit muddled. Oh—” he turned in the doorway—“and best not to bring up Welty if you can help it.”

“She doesn’t know?”

“Oh yes—” his voice was brisk—“she knows, but sometimes when she hears it she gets upset all over again. Asks when it happened and why nobody told her.”

ii.

WHEN HE OPENED THE door, the shades were down, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, which was aromatic and perfume-smelling, with an undertone of sickness and medicine. Over the bed hung a framed poster from the movie The Wizard of Oz. A scented candle guttered in a red glass, among trinkets and rosaries, sheet music, tissue-paper flowers and old valentines—along with what looked like hundreds of get-well cards strung up on ribbons, and a bunch of silver balloons hovering ominously at the ceiling, metallic strings hanging down like jellyfish stingers.

“Someone here to see you, Pip,” said Hobie, in a loud and cheerful tone.

I saw the coverlet stir. An elbow went up. “Umn?” said a sleepy voice.

“It’s so dark, my dear. Won’t you let me open the curtains?”

“No, please don’t, the light hurts my eyes.”

She was smaller than I remembered, and her face—a blur in the gloom—was very white. Head shaven, all but a single lock in front. As I drew closer, a bit fearfully, I saw a glint of metal at her temple—a barrette or hairpin, I thought, before I made out the steel medical staples in a vicious coil above one ear.

“I heard you in the hallway,” she said, in a small, raspy voice, looking from me to Hobie.

“Heard what, pigeon?” said Hobie.

“Heard you talking. Cosmo did too.”

At first I didn’t see the dog, and then I did—a gray terrier curled alongside her, amidst the pillows and stuffed toys. When he raised his head, I saw from his grizzled face and cataract-clouded eyes that he was very old.

“I thought you were asleep, pigeon,” Hobie was saying, reaching out to scratch the dog’s chin.

“You always say that, but I’m always awake. Hi,” she said, looking up at me.

“Hi.”

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Theo.”

“What’s your favorite piece of music?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and then, so as not to appear stupid: “Beethoven.”

“That’s great. You look like somebody who would like Beethoven.”

“I do?” I said, feeling overwhelmed.

“I meant that in a nice way. I can’t listen to music. Because of my head. It’s completely horrible. No,” she said to Hobie, who was clearing books and gauze and Kleenex packets out of the bedside chair so I could sit down in it, “let him sit here. You can sit here,” she said to me, shifting over slightly in the bed to make room.

After a glance back at Hobie to make sure it was okay, I sat down, gingerly, with one hip, careful not to disturb the dog, who raised his head and glared.

“Don’t worry, he won’t bite. Well, sometimes he bites.” She looked at me with drowsy eyes. “I know you.”

“You remember me?”

“Are we friends?”

“Yes,” I said without thinking, and then glanced back at Hobie, embarrassed I’d lied.

“I forgot your name, I’m sorry. I remember your face though.” Then—stroking the dog’s head—she said: “I didn’t remember my room when I came home. I remembered my bed, and all my stuff, but the room was different.”

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw the wheelchair in the corner, the bottles of medicine on the table by her bed.

“What Beethoven do you like?”

“Uh—” I was staring at her arm, resting atop the coverlet, the tender skin on the inside of her arm with a Band-Aid in the crook of the elbow.

She was pushing up in bed—looking past me, to Hobie, silhouetted in the bright doorway. “I’m not supposed to talk too much, am I?” she said.

“No, pigeon.”

“I don’t think I’m too tired. But I can’t tell. Do you get tired during the day?” she asked me.

“Sometimes.” After my mother’s death, I had developed a tendency to fall asleep in class and conk out in Andy’s room after school. “I never used to.”

“I do, too. I feel sleepy all the time now. I wonder why? I think it’s so boring.”

Hobie—I noticed, looking back at the lighted doorway—had stepped away for a moment. Although it was very unlike me, for some strange reason I had been itching to reach out and take her hand, and now that we were alone, I did.

“You don’t mind, do you?” I asked her. Everything seemed slow like I was moving through deep water. It was very strange to be holding somebody’s hand—a girl’s hand—and yet oddly normal. I had never done anything of the sort before.

“Not at all. I think it’s nice.” Then, after a brief pause—during which I could hear the little terrier snoring—she said: “You don’t mind if I close my eyes for a few seconds, do you?”

“No,” I said, running a thumb over her knuckles, tracing the bones.

“I know it’s rude, but I just absolutely have to.”

I looked down at her shaded eyelids, chapped lips, pallor and bruises, the ugly hashmark of metal over one ear. The strange combination of what was exciting about her, and what wasn’t supposed to be, made me feel light-headed and confused.

Guilty, I glanced back, and noticed Hobie standing in the door. After tiptoeing out to the hall again, I closed the door quietly behind me, grateful that the hall was so dark.

Together, we walked back through to the parlor. “How does she seem to you?” he said, in a voice so low I could hardly hear him.

What was I supposed to say to that? “Okay, I guess.”

“She’s not herself.” He paused, unhappily, with his hands dug deep into the pockets of the bathrobe. “That is—she is, and she isn’t. She doesn’t recognize a lot of people who were close to her, speaks to them very formally, and yet sometimes she’s very open with strangers, very chatty and familiar, people she’s never seen before, treats them like old friends. Quite common, I’m told.”

“Why isn’t she supposed to listen to music?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, she does, sometimes. But sometimes, late in the day especially, it tends to upset her—she thinks she has to practice, that she has to prepare a piece for school, she gets distraught. Very difficult. As far as playing on some amateur level, that’s perfectly possible someday, or so they tell me—”

Quite suddenly, the doorbell rang, startling us both.

“Ah,” said Hobie—looking distressed, glancing at what I noticed was an extremely beautiful old wristwatch, “that’ll be her nurse.”

We looked at each other. We weren’t finished talking; there was so much still to say.

Again the doorbell rang. Down the hall, the dog was barking. “She’s early,” said Hobie—hurrying through, looking a bit desperate.

“Can I come back? To see her?”

He stopped. He seemed appalled that I had even asked. “But of course you can come back,” he said. “Please come back—”

Again the doorbell.

“Any time you like,” said Hobie. “Please. We’re always glad to see you.”

iii.

“SO, WHAT HAPPENED DOWN there?” said Andy as we were dressing for dinner. “Was it weird?” Platt had left to catch the train back to school; Mrs. Barbour had a supper with the board of some charity; and Mr. Barbour was taking the rest of us out to dinner at the Yacht Club (where we only went on nights when Mrs. Barbour had something else to do).

“He knew your mother, the guy.”

Andy, knotting his necktie, made a face: everybody knew his mother.

“It was a little weird,” I said. “But it’s good I went. Here,” I said, fishing in my jacket pocket, “thanks for your phone.”

Andy checked it for messages, then switched it off and slipped it in his pocket. Pausing, with his hand still in the pocket, he looked up, not straight at me.

“I know things are bad,” he said unexpectedly. “I’m sorry everything is so fucked up for you now.”

His voice—as flat as the robot voice on an answering machine—kept me for a moment from realizing quite what he’d said.

“She was awfully nice,” he said, still without looking at me. “I mean—”

“Yeah, well,” I muttered, not anxious to continue the conversation.

“I mean, I miss her,” Andy said, meeting my eye with a sort of half-terrified look. “I never knew anybody that died before. Well, my grandpa Van der Pleyn. Never anybody I liked.”

I said nothing. My mother had always had a soft spot for Andy, patiently drawing him out about his home weather station, teasing him about his Galactic Battlegrounds scores until he went bright red with pleasure. Young, playful, fun-loving, affectionate, she had been everything his own mother wasn’t: a mother who threw Frisbees with us in the park and discussed zombie movies with us and let us lie around in her bed on Saturday mornings to eat Lucky Charms and watch cartoons; and it had annoyed me sometimes, a little, how goofy and exhilarated he was in her presence, trotting behind her babbling about Level 4 of whatever game he was on, unable to tear his eyes from her rear end when she was bending to get something from the fridge.

“She was the coolest,” said Andy, in his faraway voice. “Do you remember when she took us on the bus to that horror-fan convention way out in New Jersey? And that creep named Rip who kept following us around trying to get her to be in his vampire movie?”

He meant well, I knew. But it was almost unbearable for me to talk about anything to do with my mother, or Before, and I turned my head away.

“I don’t think he was even a horror person,” Andy said, in his faint, annoying voice. “I think he was some kind of fetishist. All that dungeon stuff with the girls strapped to the laboratory tables was pretty much straight-up bondage porn. Do you remember him begging her to try on those vampire teeth?”

“Yeah. That was when she went up to talk to the security guard.”

“Leather pants. All those piercings. I mean, who knows, maybe he really was making a vampire film but he was definitely a huge perv, did you notice that? Like, that sneaky smile? And the way he kept trying to look down her top?”

I gave him the finger. “Come on, let’s go,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

“Oh, yes?” I’d lost nine or ten pounds since my mother died—enough weight that Mrs. Swanson (embarrassingly) had started weighing me in her office, on the scale she used for girls with eating disorders.

“What, you’re not?”

“Yeah, but I thought you were watching your weight. So you’d fit in your prom dress.”

“Fuck you,” I said good-naturedly as I opened the door—and walked straight into Mr. Barbour, who had been standing right outside, whether eavesdropping or about to knock it was hard to say.

Mortified, I began to stammer—swearing was seriously against the rules at the Barbours’ house—but Mr. Barbour didn’t seem greatly perturbed.

“Well, Theo,” he said dryly, looking over my head, “I’m certainly glad to hear that you’re feeling better. Come along now, and let’s go get a table.”

iv.

DURING THE NEXT WEEK, everyone noticed that my appetite had improved, even Toddy. “Are you done with your hunger strike?” he asked me curiously, one morning.

“Toddy, eat your breakfast.”

“But I thought that was what it was called. When people don’t eat.”

“No, a hunger strike is for people in prison,” Kitsey said coolly.

“Kitten,” said Mr. Barbour, in a warning tone.

“Yes, but he ate three waffles yesterday,” said Toddy, looking eagerly between his uninterested parents in an attempt to engage them. “I only ate two waffles. And this morning he ate a bowl of cereal and six pieces of bacon, but you said five pieces of bacon was too much for me. Why can’t I have five pieces, too?”

v.

“WELL, HELLO THERE, GREETINGS,” said Dave the psychiatrist as he closed the door and took a seat across from me in his office: kilim rugs, shelves filled with old textbooks (Drugs and Society; Child Psychology: A Different Approach); and beige draperies that parted with a hum when you pushed a button.

I smiled, awkwardly, eyes going all around the room, potted palm tree, bronze statue of the Buddha, everywhere but him.

“So.” The faint traffic drone floating up from First Avenue made the silence between us seem vast, intergalactic. “How’s everything today?”

“Well—” I dreaded my sessions with Dave, a twice-weekly ordeal not incomparable to dental surgery; I felt guilty for not liking him more since he made such an effort, always asking what movies I enjoyed, what books, burning me CDs, clipping articles from Game Pro he thought I’d be interested in—sometimes he even took me over to EJ’s Luncheonette for a hamburger—and yet whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I’d been pushed onstage in a play where I didn’t know the lines.

“You seem a little distracted today.”

“Um…” It had not escaped me that a number of the books on Dave’s shelves had titles with the word sex in them: Adolescent Sexuality, Sex and Cognition, Patterns of Sexual Deviance and—my favorite: Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction. “I’m okay, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“No, I’m fine. Things are good.”

“Oh yeah?” Dave leaned back in his chair, Converse sneaker bobbing. “That’s great.” Then: “Why don’t you bring me up to speed a little bit on what’s been going on?”

“Oh—” I scratched my eyebrow, looked away—“Spanish is still pretty difficult—I have another make-up test, I’ll probably take that Monday. But I got an A on my Stalingrad paper. So it looks like that’ll bring my B minus in history up to a B.”

He was quiet so long, looking at me, that I began to feel cornered and started casting around for something else to say. Then: “Anything else?”

“Well—” I looked at my thumbs.

“How has your anxiety been?”

“Not so bad,” I said, thinking how uneasy it made me that I didn’t know a thing about Dave. He was one of those guys who wore a wedding ring that didn’t really look like a wedding ring—or maybe it wasn’t a wedding ring at all and he was just super-proud of his Celtic heritage. If I’d had to guess, I would have said he was newly married, with a baby—he gave off a glazed vibe of exhausted young fatherhood, like he might have to get up and change diapers in the night—but who knew?

“And your medication? What about the side effects?”

“Uh—” I scratched my nose—“better I guess.” I hadn’t even been taking my pills, which made me so tired and headachey I’d started spitting them down the plughole of the bathroom sink.

Dave was quiet for a moment. “So—would it be out of line to say that you’re feeling better generally?”

“I guess not,” I said, after a silence, staring at the wall hanging behind his head. It looked like a lopsided abacus made of clay beads and knotted rope, and I had spent what felt like a massive portion of my recent life staring at it.

Dave smiled. “You say that like it’s something to be ashamed of. But feeling better doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten about your mother. Or that you loved her any less.”

Resenting this supposition, which had never occurred to me, I looked away from him and out the window, at his depressing view of the white brick building across the street.

“Do you have any idea why you might be feeling better?”

“No, not really,” I said curtly. Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention—laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab—made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

“Where did you go just now?” said Dave, attempting to catch my eye.

“Sorry?”

“What were you just thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh yeah? Pretty hard to think about absolutely nothing.”

I shrugged. Aside from Andy, I’d told no one about going down on the bus to Pippa’s house, and the secret colored everything, like the afterglow of a dream: tissue-paper poppies, dim light from a guttering candle, the sticky heat of her hand in mine. But though it was the most resonant and real-seeming thing that had happened in a long time, I didn’t want to spoil it by talking about it, especially not with him.

We sat there for another long moment or two. Then Dave leaned forward with a concerned expression and said: “You know, when I ask you where you go during these silences, Theo, I’m not trying to be a jerk or put you on the spot or anything.”

“Oh, sure! I know,” I said uneasily, picking at the tweed upholstery on the arm of the sofa.

“I’m here to talk about whatever you want to talk about. Or—” creak of wood as he shifted in his chair—“we don’t have to talk at all! Only I wonder if you have something on your mind.”

“Well,” I said, after another never-ending pause, resisting the temptation to peek sideways at my watch. “I mean I just”—how many more minutes did we have? Forty?

“Because I hear, from some of the other adults in your life, that you’ve had a noticeable upswing of late. You’ve been participating in class more,” he said, when I didn’t answer. “Engaging socially. Eating normal meals again.” In the stillness, an ambulance siren floated up faintly from the street. “So I guess I’m wondering if you could help me understand what’s changed.”

I shrugged, scratched the side of my face. How were you supposed to explain this kind of thing? It seemed stupid to try. Even the memory was starting to seem vague and starry with unreality, like a dream where the details get fainter the harder you try to grasp them. What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn’t tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right. Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century painting. Rugs worn to threads, painted Japanese fans and antique valentines flickering in candlelight, Pierrots and doves and flower-garlanded hearts. Pippa’s face pale in the dark.

vi.

“LISTEN,” I SAID TO Andy several days later, as we were coming out of Starbucks after school, “can you cover for me this afternoon?”

“Certainly,” said Andy, taking a greedy swallow of his coffee. “How long?”

“Don’t know.” Depending on how long it took me to change trains at Fourteenth Street, it might take forty-five minutes to get downtown; the bus, on a weekday, would be even longer. “Three hours?”

He made a face; if his mother was at home, she would ask questions. “What shall I tell her?”

“Tell her I had to stay late at school or something.”

“She’ll think you’re in trouble.”

“Who cares?”

“Yes, but I don’t want her to phone school to check on you.”

“Tell her I went to a movie.”

“Then she’ll ask why I didn’t go too. Why don’t I say you’re at the library.”

“That’s so lame.”

“All right, then. Why don’t we tell her that you have a terribly pressing engagement with your parole officer. Or that you stopped in to have a couple of Old Fashioneds at the bar of the Four Seasons.”

He was imitating his father; the impression was so dead-on, I laughed. “Fabelhaft,” I replied, in Mr. Barbour’s voice. “Very funny.”

He shrugged. “The main branch is open tonight until seven,” he said, in his own bland and faint-ish voice. “But I don’t have to know which branch you went to, if you forget to tell me.”

vii.

THE DOOR OPENED QUICKER than I’d expected, while I was staring down the street and thinking of something else. This time, he was clean-shaven, smelling of soap, with his long gray hair neatly combed back and tucked behind his ears; and he was just as impressively dressed as Mr. Blackwell had been when I’d seen him.

His eyebrows came up; clearly he was surprised to see me. “Hello!”

“Have I come at a bad time?” I said, eyeing the snowy cuff of his shirt, which was embroidered with a tiny cypher in Chinese red, block letters so small and stylized they were nearly invisible.

“Not at all. As a matter of fact I was hoping you’d stop by.” He was wearing a red tie with a pale yellow figure; black oxford brogues; a beautifully tailored navy suit. “Come in! Please.”

“Are you going somewhere?” I said, regarding him timidly. The suit made him seem a different person, less melancholy and distracted, more capable—unlike the Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled aspect of an elegant but mistreated polar bear.

“Well—yes. But not now. Quite frankly, we’re in a bit of a tip. But no matter.”

What did that mean? I followed him inside—through the forest of the workshop, table legs and unsprung chairs—and up through the gloomy parlor into the kitchen, where Cosmo the terrier was pacing fretfully back and forth and whimpering, his toenails clicking on the slate. When we came in, he took a few steps backwards and glared up at us aggressively.

“Why’s he in here?” I asked, kneeling to stroke his head, and then pulling my hand back when he shied away.

“Hmn?” said Hobie. He seemed preoccupied.

“Cosmo. Doesn’t he like to be with her?”

“Oh. Her aunt. She doesn’t want him in there.” He was filling the teakettle at the sink; and—I noticed—the kettle shook in his hands as he did it.

“Aunt?”

“Yes,” he said, putting the kettle on to boil, then stooping to scratch the dog’s chin. “Poor little toad, you don’t know what to make of it, do you? Margaret’s got very strong opinions on the subject of dogs in the sickroom. No doubt she’s right. And here you are,” he said, glancing over his shoulder with an odd bright look. “Washing up on the strand again. Pippa’s been talking of you ever since you were here.”

“Really?” I said, delighted.

“ ‘Where’s that boy.’ ‘There was a boy here.’ She told me yesterday that you were coming back and presto,” he said, with a warm and young-sounding laugh, “here you are.” He stood, knees creaking, and wiped the back of his wrist against his knobbly white brow. “If you wait a bit, you can go in and see her.”

“How is she doing?”

“Much better,” he said, crisply, without looking at me. “Lots of goings-on. Her aunt is taking her to Texas.”

“Texas?” I said, after a stunned pause.

“Afraid so.”

“When?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“No!”

He grimaced—a twinge that vanished the moment I saw it. “Yes, I’ve been packing her up to go,” he said, in a cheerful voice that did not match the flash of unhappiness that he’d let slip. “People have been in and out. Friends from school—in fact, this is the first quiet moment we’ve had in a while. It’s been quite a busy week.”

“When is she coming back?”

“Well—not for a while, actually. Margaret’s taking her down there to live.”

“Forever?”

“Oh no! Not forever,” he said, in a voice that made me realize that forever was exactly what he meant. “It’s not as if anyone’s leaving the planet,” he added, when he saw my face. “Certainly I’ll be going down to see her. And certainly she’ll be back for visits.”

“But—” I felt like the ceiling had collapsed on top of me. “I thought she lived here. With you.”

“Well, she did. Until now. Although I’m sure she’ll be much better off down there,” he added, without conviction. “It’s a big change for us all, but in the long run I’m sure it’s all for the best.”

I could tell he didn’t believe a word of what he was saying. “But why can’t she stay here?”

He sighed. “Margaret is Welty’s half sister,” he said. “His other half sister. Pippa’s nearest relative. Blood, in any case, which I am not. She thinks that Pippa will be better off in Texas, now that she’s well enough to move.”

“I wouldn’t want to live in Texas,” I said, taken aback. “It’s too hot.”

“I don’t think the doctors are as good there either,” said Hobie, dusting his hands off. “Although Margaret and I disagree about that.”

He sat down, and looked at me. “Your glasses,” he said. “I like them.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t want to talk about my new eyeglasses, an unwelcome development, although they did actually help me to see better. Mrs. Barbour had picked out the frames for me at E. B. Meyrowitz after I’d failed an eye test with the school nurse. They were round tortoiseshell, a little too grown-up and expensive-looking, and adults had been going a little too far out of their way to assure me how great they looked.

“How are things uptown?” said Hobie. “You can’t imagine the stir your visit has caused. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of coming uptown to see you myself. The only reason I didn’t was that I hated to leave Pippa since she’s going away so soon. This has all happened very fast, you see. The business with Margaret. She’s like their father, old Mr. Blackwell—she gets something in her head and off she goes, it’s done.”

“Is he going to Texas too? Cosmo?”

“Oh no—he’ll be fine here. He’s lived here in this house since he was twelve weeks old.”

“Won’t he be unhappy?”

“I hope not. Well—quite honestly—he’ll miss her. Cosmo and I get on fairly well, though he’s been in a terrible slump since Welty died. He was Welty’s dog really, he’s only taken up with Pippa quite recently. These little terriers like Welty always had aren’t always so crazy about children, you understand—Cosmo’s mother Chessie was a holy terror.”

“But why does Pippa have to move down there?”

“Well,” he said, rubbing his eye, “it’s really the only thing that makes sense. Margaret is the technical nearest of kin. Though Margaret and Welty scarcely spoke while Welty was alive—not in recent years, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Well—” I could tell he didn’t want to explain it. “It’s all very complicated. Margaret was quite against Pippa’s mother, you see.”

Just as he said this, a tall, sharp-nosed, capable-looking woman walked into the room, the age of a young-ish grandmother, with a thin, patrician-harpy face and iron-rust hair going gray. Her suit and shoes reminded me of Mrs. Barbour, only they were a color that Mrs. Barbour would never have worn: lime green.

She looked at me; she looked at Hobie. “What is this?” she said coldly.

Hobie exhaled audibly; he looked exasperated. “Never mind, Margaret. This is the boy who was with Welty when he died.”

She peered over her half-glasses at me—and then laughed sharply, a high self-conscious laugh.

“But hello,” she said—all charm all of a sudden, holding out to me her thin red hands covered with diamonds. “I’m Margaret Blackwell Pierce. Welty’s sister. Half sister,” she corrected herself, with a glance over my shoulder at Hobie, when she saw my eyebrows go down. “Welty and I had the same father, you see. My mother was Susie Delafield.”

She said the name as if it ought to mean something. I looked at Hobie to see what he thought about it. She saw me doing it, and glanced at him sharply before she returned her attention—all sparkle—to me.

“And what an adorable little boy you are,” she said to me. Her long nose was slightly pink at the end. “I’m awfully glad to meet you. James and Pippa have been telling me all about your visit—the most extraordinary thing. We’ve all been abuzz about it. Also—” she clasped my hand—“I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart for returning my grandfather’s ring to me. It means an awful lot to me.”

Her ring? Again, in confusion, I looked at Hobie.

“It would have meant a lot to my father, as well.” There was a deliberate, practiced quality to her friendliness (“buckets of charm,” as Mr. Barbour would have said); and yet her coppery tang of resemblance to Mr. Blackwell, and Pippa, drew me in despite myself. “You know how it was lost before, don’t you?”

The kettle whistled. “Would you like some tea, Margaret?” said Hobie.

“Yes please,” she replied briskly. “Lemon and honey. A tiny bit of scotch in it.” To me, in a more friendly voice, she said: “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid we have some grown-up business to attend to. We’re to meet with the lawyer shortly. As soon as Pippa’s nurse arrives.”

Hobie cleared his throat. “I don’t see any harm if—”

“May I go in and see her?” I said, too impatient for him to finish the sentence.

“Of course,” said Hobie quickly, before Aunt Margaret could intervene—turning expertly away to evade her annoyed expression. “You remember the way, don’t you? Just through there.”

viii.

THE FIRST THING SHE said to me was: “Will you please turn off the light?” She was propped in bed with the earbuds to her iPod in, looking blinded and disoriented in the light from the overhead bulb.

I switched it off. The room was emptier, cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. A thin spring rain was hitting at the windowpanes; outside, in the dark courtyard, the foamy white blossoms of a flowering pear were pale against wet brick.

“Hello,” she said, folding her hands a little tighter on the coverlet.

“Hi,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound quite so awkward.

“I knew it was you! I heard you talking in the kitchen.”

“Oh, yeah? How’d you know it was me?”

“I’m a musician! I have very sharp ears.”

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dim, I saw that she seemed less frail than she had on my previous visit. Her hair had grown back in a bit and the staples were out, though the puckered line of the wound was still visible.

“How do you feel?” I said.

She smiled. “Sleepy.” The sleep was in her voice, rough and sweet at the edges. “Do you mind sharing?”

“Sharing what?”

She turned her head to the side and removed one of the earbuds, and handed it to me. “Listen.”

I sat down by her on the bed, and put it in my ear: aethereal harmonies, impersonal, piercing, like a radio signal from Paradise.

We looked at each other. “What is it?” I said.

“Umm—” she looked at the iPod—“Palestrina.”

“Oh.” But I didn’t care what it was. The only reason I was even hearing it was because of the rainy light, the white tree at the window, the thunder, her.

The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. “You don’t have to talk,” she said. “If you don’t feel like it.” Her eyelids were heavy and her voice was drowsy and like a secret. “People always want to talk but I like being quiet.”

“Have you been crying?” I said, looking at her a bit more closely.

“No. Well—a little.”

We sat there, not saying anything, and it didn’t feel clumsy or weird.

“I have to leave,” she said presently. “Did you know?”

“I know. He told me.”

“It’s awful. I don’t want to go.” She smelled like salt, and medicine, and something else, like the chamomile tea my mother bought at Grace’s, grassy and sweet.

“She seems nice,” I said, cautiously. “I guess.”

“I guess,” she echoed gloomily, trailing a fingertip along the border of the coverlet. “She said something about a swimming pool. And horses.”

“That should be fun.”

She blinked, in confusion. “Maybe.”

“Do you ride?”

“No.”

“Me neither. My mother did though. She loved horses. She always stopped to talk to the carriage horses on Central Park South. Like—” I didn’t know how to say it—“it was almost like they’d talk to her. Like, they’d try to turn their heads, even with their blinkers on, to where she was walking.”

“Is your mother dead too?” she said timidly.

“Yes.”

“My mother’s been dead for—” she stopped and thought—“I can’t remember. She died after my spring holidays from school one year, so I had spring holidays off and the week after spring holidays too. And there was a field trip we were supposed to go on, to the Botanical Gardens, and I didn’t get to go. I miss her.”

“What’d she die of?”

“She got sick. Was your mother sick too?”

“No. It was an accident.” And then—not wanting to venture more upon this subject: “Anyway, she loved horses a lot, my mother. When she was growing up she had a horse she said got lonely sometimes? and he liked to come right up to the house and put his head in at the window to see what was going on.”

“What was his name?”

“Paintbox.” I’d loved it when my mother told me about the stables back in Kansas: owls and bats in the rafters, horses nickering and blowing. I knew the names of all her childhood horses and dogs.

“Paintbox! Was he all different colors?”

“He was spotted, sort of. I’ve seen pictures of him. Sometimes—in the summer—he’d come and look in on her while she was having her afternoon nap. She could hear him breathing, you know, just inside the curtains.”

“That’s so nice! I like horses. It’s just—”

“What?”

“I’d rather stay here!” All at once she seemed close to tears. “I don’t know why I have to go.”

“You should tell them you want to stay.” When did our hands start touching? Why was her hand so hot?

“I did tell them! Except everyone thinks it’ll be better there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said fretfully. “Quieter, they said. But I don’t like the quiet, I like it when there’s lots of stuff to hear.”

“They’re going to make me leave, too.”

She pushed up on her elbow. “No!” she said, looking alarmed. “When?”

“I don’t know. Soon, I guess. I have to go live with my grandparents.”

“Oh,” she said longingly, falling back on the pillow. “I don’t have any grandparents.”

I threaded my fingers through hers. “Mine aren’t very nice.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I said, in as normal a voice as I could, though my heart was pounding so hard that I could feel my pulse jumping in my finger-tips. Her hand, in mine, was velvety and fever-hot, just the slightest bit sticky.

“Don’t you have any other family?” Her eyes were so dark in the wan light from the window that they looked black.

“No. Well—” Did my father count? “No.”

There followed a long silence. We were still connected by the earbuds: one in her ear, one in mine. Seashells singing. Angel choirs and pearls. Things had gotten way too slow all of a sudden; it was as if I’d forgotten how to breathe properly; over and over I found myself holding my breath, then exhaling raggedly and too loud.

“What did you say this music was?” I asked, just for something to say.

She smiled sleepily, and reached for a pointed, unappetizing-looking lollipop that lay atop a foil wrapper on her nightstand.

“Palestrina,” she said, around the stick in her mouth. “High mass. Or something. They’re all a lot alike.”

“Do you like her?” I said. “Your aunt?”

She looked at me for several long beats. Then she put the lollipop carefully back on the wrapper and said: “She seems nice. I guess. Only I don’t really know her. It’s weird.”

“Why do you? Have to go?”

“It’s about money. Hobie can’t do anything—he isn’t my real uncle. My pretend uncle, she calls him.”

“I wish he was your real uncle,” I said. “I want you to stay.”

Suddenly she sat up, and put her arms around me, and kissed me; and all the blood rushed from my head, a long sweep, like I was falling off a cliff.

“I—” Terror struck me. In a daze, by reflex, I reached to wipe the kiss away—only this wasn’t soggy, or gross, I could feel a trace of it glowing all along the back of my hand.

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I don’t want to, either.”

“Do you remember seeing me?”

“When?”

“Right before.”

“No.”

“I remember you,” I said. Somehow my hand had found its way to her cheek, and clumsily I pulled it back and forced it to my side, making a fist, practically sitting on it. “I was there.” It was then I realized that Hobie was in the door.

“Hello, old love.” And though the warmth in the voice was mostly for her, I could tell a little was for me. “I told you he’d be back.”

“You did!” she said, pushing herself up. “He’s here.”

“Well, will you listen to me next time?”

“I was listening to you. I just didn’t believe you.”

The hem of a sheer curtain brushed a windowsill. Faintly, I heard traffic singing on the street. Sitting there on the edge of her bed, it felt like the waking-up moment between dream and daylight where everything merged and mingled just as it was about to change, all in the same, fluid, euphoric slide: rainy light, Pippa sitting up with Hobie in the doorway, and her kiss (with the peculiar flavor of what I now believe to have been a morphine lollipop) still sticky on my lips. Yet I’m not sure that even morphine would account for how lightheaded I felt at that moment, how smilingly wrapped-up in happiness and beauty. Half-dazed, we said our goodbyes (there were no promises to write; it seemed she was too ill for that) and then I was in the hallway, with the nurse there, Aunt Margaret talking loud and bewilderingly and Hobie’s reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn’t felt a touch like that since my mother died—friendly, steadying in the midst of confusing events—and, like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nobody will hurt me here.

“Ah,” cried Aunt Margaret, “are you crying? Do you see that?” she said to the young nurse (nodding, smiling, eager to please, clearly under her spell). “How sweet he is! You’ll miss her, won’t you?” Her smile was wide and assured of itself, of its own rightness. “You’ll have to come down and visit, absolutely you will. I’m always happy to have guests. My parents… they had one of the biggest Tudor houses in Texas…”

On she prattled, friendly as a parrot. But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavor of Pippa’s kiss—bittersweet and strange—stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

ix.

I HATED TO THINK of her leaving. I couldn’t stand thinking of it. On the day she was going, I woke feeling heartsick. Looking at the sky over Park Avenue, blue-black and threatening, a roiling sky straight from a painting of Calvary, I imagined her looking out at the same dark sky from her airplane window; and—as Andy and I walked to the bus stop, the downcast eyes and the sober mood on the street seemed to reflect and magnify my sadness at her departure.

“Well, Texas is boring, all right,” said Andy, between sneezes; his eyes were pink and streaming from pollen so he looked even more like a lab rat than usual.

“You went there?”

“Yes—Dallas. Uncle Harry and Aunt Tess lived there for a while. There’s nothing to do but go to the movies and you can’t walk anywhere, people have to drive you. Also they have rattlesnakes, and the death penalty, which I think is primitive and unethical in ninety-eight per cent of cases. But it’ll probably be better for her there.”

“Why?”

“The climate, primarily,” said Andy, swiping his nose with one of the pressed cotton handkerchiefs he plucked every morning from the stack in his drawer. “Convalescents do better in warm weather. That’s why my grandpa Van der Pleyn moved to Palm Beach.”

I was silent. Andy, I knew, was loyal; I trusted him, I valued his opinion, and yet his conversation sometimes made me feel as though I was talking to one of those computer programs that mimic human response.

“If she’s in Dallas she should definitely go to the Nature and Science Museum. Although I think she’ll find it small and somewhat dated. The IMAX I saw there wasn’t even 3-D. Also they ask for extra money to get into the planetarium, which is ridiculous considering how inferior it is to Hayden.”

“Huh.” Sometimes I wondered exactly what it might take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere.

x.

HAD ANYONE EVER FELT so lonely? Back at the Barbours’, amidst the clamor and plenitude of a family that wasn’t mine, I now felt even more alone than usual—especially since, as the end of the school year neared, it wasn’t clear to me (or Andy either, for that matter) if I would be accompanying them to their summer house in Maine. Mrs. Barbour, with her characteristic delicacy, managed to skirt the topic even in the midst of the cardboard boxes and open suitcases that were appearing all over the house; Mr. Barbour and the younger siblings all seemed excited but Andy regarded the prospect with frank horror. “Sun and fun,” he said contemptuously, pushing his glasses (like mine, only a lot thicker) up on the bridge of his nose. “At least with your grandparents you’ll be on dry land. With hot water. An Internet connection.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“Well, if you do have to go with us, see how you like it. It’s like Kidnapped. The part where they sell him into slavery on that boat.”

“What about the part where he has to go to his creepy relative in the middle of nowhere that he doesn’t even know?”

“Yes, I was thinking that,” said Andy seriously, turning in his desk chair to look at me. “Although at least they aren’t scheming to kill you—it’s not as if there’s an inheritance at stake.”

“No, there’s certainly not.”

“Do you know what my advice to you is?”

“No, what?”

“My advice,” said Andy, scratching his nose with the eraser of his pencil, “is to work as hard as you possibly can when you get to your new school in Maryland. You’ve got an advantage—you’re ahead a year. That means you’ll graduate when you’re seventeen. If you apply yourself, you can be out of there in four years, maybe even three, with a scholarship anywhere you want to go.”

“My grades aren’t that good.”

“No,” said Andy seriously, “but only because you don’t work. Also I think it fair to assume that your new school, wherever it is, won’t be quite as demanding.”

“I pray to God not.”

“I mean—public school,” said Andy. “Maryland. No disrespect to Maryland. I mean, they do have the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins, to say nothing of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Definitely it’s a state with some serious NASA commitment. You tested in what percentile back in junior high?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me. My point is, you can finish with good marks when you’re seventeen—maybe sixteen, if you bear down hard—and then you can go to college wherever you want.”

“Three years is a long time.”

“It is to us. But in the scheme of things—not at all. I mean,” said Andy reasonably, “look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet.”

“Those people aren’t poor. I saw Villiers’s father on the cover of the Economist.”

“No, but they’re as dumb as a set of sofa cushions. I mean—Sabine can barely put one foot in front of the other. If her family didn’t have money and she had to manage on her own, she’d have to be, I don’t know, a prostitute. Longstreet—he’d probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.”

“You’re depressing me.”

“All I’m saying is—you’re smart. And grownups like you.”

“What?” I said doubtfully.

“Sure,” said Andy, in his wan, irritating voice. “You remember names, do the eye-contact stuff, shake hands when you’re supposed to. At school they all tie themselves in knots for you.”

“Yeah, but—” I didn’t want to say it was because my mother was dead.

“Don’t be stupid. You get away with murder. You’re smart enough to figure it out on your own.”

“Why haven’t you figured out this sailing business then?”

“Oh, I’ve figured it out, all right,” said Andy grimly, returning to his hiragana workbook. “I’ve figured that I have four summers of Hell, at absolute worst. Three if Daddy lets me go to early college when I’m sixteen. Two if I bite the bullet junior year and go to that summer program at the Mountain School and learn organic farming. And after that, I’m never setting foot on a boat again.”

xi.

“IT’S DIFFICULT TO TALK to her on the phone, alas,” said Hobie. “I wasn’t anticipating that. She doesn’t do well at all.”

“Doesn’t do well?” I said. Scarcely a week had passed, and though I’d had no thought of returning to see Hobie somehow I was down there again: sitting at his kitchen table and eating my second dish of what had, upon first glance, appeared to be a black lump of flowerpot mud but was actually some delicious mess of ginger and figs, with whipped cream and tiny, bitter slivers of orange peel on top.

Hobie rubbed his eye. He’d been repairing a chair in the basement when I’d arrived. “It’s all very frustrating,” he said. His hair was tied back from his face; his glasses were around his neck on a chain. Under his black work smock, which he’d removed and hung on a peg, he was wearing old corduroys stained with mineral spirit and beeswax, and a thin-washed cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbow. “Margaret said she cried for three hours after she got off the telephone with me on Sunday night.”

“Why can’t she just come back?”

“Honestly, I wish I knew how to make things better,” said Hobie. Capable-looking and morose, his knobbly white hand flat on the table, there was something in the set of his shoulder that suggested a good-natured draft horse, or maybe a workman in the pub at the end of a long day. “I’d thought I might fly down and see about her, but Margaret says no. That she won’t settle in properly if I’m hovering about.”

“I think you should go anyway.”

Hobie raised his eyebrows. “Margaret’s hired a therapist—someone famous, apparently, who uses horses to work with injured children. And yes, Pippa loves animals, but even if she was perfectly well she wouldn’t want to be outdoors and riding horses the whole time. She’s spent most of her life in music lessons and practice halls. Margaret’s full of enthusiasm about the music program at her church but an amateur children’s choir can hardly hold much interest for her.”

I pushed the glass dish—scraped clean—aside. “Why did Pippa not know her before?” I said timidly, and then, when he didn’t answer: “Is it about money?”

“Not so much. Although—yes. You’re right. Money always has something to do with it. You see,” he said, leaning forward with his big, expressive hands on the table, “Welty’s father had three children. Welty, Margaret, and Pippa’s mother, Juliet. All with different mothers.”

“Oh.”

“Welty—the eldest. And I mean—eldest son, you’d think, wouldn’t you? But he contracted a tuberculosis of the spine when he was about six, when his parents were up in Aswan—the nanny didn’t recognize how serious it was, he was taken to the hospital too late—he was a very bright boy, so I understand, personable too, but old Mr. Blackwell wasn’t a man tolerant of weakness or infirmity. Sent him to America to live with relatives and barely gave him another thought.”

“That’s awful,” I said, shocked at the unfairness of this.

“Yes. I mean—you’ll get quite a different picture from Margaret, of course—but he was a hard man, Welty’s father. At any rate, after the Blackwells were expelled from Cairo—expelled isn’t the best term, perhaps. When Nasser came in, all the foreigners had to leave Egypt—Welty’s father was in the oil business, luckily for him he had money and property elsewhere. Foreigners weren’t allowed to take money or anything of much value out of the country.

“At any rate.” He reached for another cigarette. “I’ve gone off track a little. The point is that Welty scarcely knew Margaret, who was a good twelve years younger. Margaret’s mother was Texan, an heiress, with plenty of money of her own. That was the last and longest of old Mr. Blackwell’s marriages—the great love affair, to hear Margaret tell it. Prominent couple in Houston—lots of drinking and chartered airplanes, African safaris—Welty’s father loved Africa, even after he had to leave Cairo, he could never stay away.

“At any rate—” The match flared up, and he coughed as he exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Margaret was their father’s princess, apple of his eye, all that. But still and all, throughout the marriage, he carried on with coat check girls, waitresses, the daughters of friends—and at some point, when he was in his sixties, he fathered a baby with a girl who cut his hair. And that baby was Pippa’s mother.”

I said nothing. In second grade there had been a huge fuss (documented, daily, in the gossip pages of the New York Post) when the father of one of my classmates had a baby with a woman not Eli’s mother, which had meant that a lot of the mothers took sides and stopped speaking to each other out in front of school while they were waiting to pick us up in the afternoons.

“Margaret was in college, at Vassar,” said Hobie fitfully. Though he was speaking to me as if I were a grownup (which I liked), he didn’t seem particularly comfortable with the subject. “I think she didn’t speak to her father for a couple of years. Old Mr. Blackwell tried to pay the hairdresser off but his cheapness got the better of him, his cheapness where his dependents were concerned, anyway. And so you see Margaret—Margaret and Pippa’s mother Juliet never even met, except in the courtroom, when Juliet was practically still a babe in arms. Welty’s father had grown to hate the hairdresser so much that he’d made it plain in the will that neither she nor Juliet was to get a cent, apart from whatever mingy child support was required by law. But Welty—” Hobie stubbed out his cigarette—“Old Mr. Blackwell had some second thoughts where Welty was concerned, and did the right thing by him in the will. And throughout all this legal fracas, which went on for years, Welty grew to be terribly disturbed by how the baby was shunted off and neglected. Juliet’s mother didn’t want her; none of the mother’s relatives wanted her; old Mr. Blackwell had certainly never wanted her, and Margaret and her mother, frankly, would have been happy enough to see her on the street. And, in the meantime, there was the hairdresser, leaving Juliet alone in the apartment when she went to work… bad situation all around.

“Welty had no obligation to put his foot in but he was an affectionate man, without family, and he liked children. He invited Juliet here for a holiday when she was six years old, or ‘JuleeAnn’ as she was then—”

“Here? In this house?”

“Yes, here. And when the summer was over and it was time to send her back and she was crying about having to leave and the mother wasn’t answering her telephone, he cancelled the plane tickets and phoned around to see about enrolling her in first grade. It was never an official arrangement—he was afraid to rock the boat, as they say—but most people assumed she was his child without inquiring too deeply. He was in his mid-thirties, plenty old enough to be her father. Which, in all the essential respects, he was.

“But, no matter,” he said, looking up, in an altered tone. “You said you wanted to look around the workshop. Would you like to go down?”

“Please,” I said. “That would be great.” When I’d found him down there working on his up-ended chair, he’d stood and stretched and said he was ready for a break but I hadn’t wanted to come upstairs at all, the workshop was so rich and magical: a treasure cave, bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, with the light filtering down from the high windows, fretwork and filigree, mysterious tools I didn’t know the names of, and the sharp, intriguing smells of varnish and beeswax. Even the chair he’d been working on—which had goat’s legs in front, with cloven hooves—had seemed less like a piece of furniture than a creature under enchantment, like it might up-end itself and hop down from his work bench and trot away down the street.

Hobie reached for his smock and put it back on. For all his gentleness, his quiet manner, he was built like a man who moved refrigerators or loaded trucks for a living.

“So,” he said, leading me downstairs. “The shop-behind-the-shop.”

“Sorry?”

He laughed. “The arrière-boutique. What the customers see is a stage set—the face that’s displayed to the public—but down here is where the important work happens.”

“Right,” I said, looking down at the labyrinth at the foot of the stairs, blond wood like honey, dark wood like poured molasses, gleams of brass and gilt and silver in the weak light. As with the Noah’s Ark, each species of furniture was ranked with its own kind: chairs with chairs, settees with settees; clocks with clocks, desks and cabinets and highboys standing in stiff ranks opposite. Dining tables, in the middle, formed narrow, mazelike paths to be edged around. At the back of the room a wall of tarnished old mirrors, hung frame to frame, glowed with the silvered light of old ballrooms and candlelit salons.

Hobie looked back at me. He could see how pleased I was. “You like old things?”

I nodded—it was true, I did like old things, though it was something I’d never realized about myself before.

“It must be interesting for you at the Barbours’, then. I expect that some of their Queen Anne and Chippendale is as good as anything you’ll see in a museum.”

“Yes,” I said, hesitantly. “But here it’s different. Nicer,” I added, in case he didn’t understand.

“How so?”

“I mean—” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to collect my thoughts—“down here, it’s great, so many chairs with so many other chairs… you see the different personalities, you know? I mean, that one’s kind of—” I didn’t know the word—“well, silly almost, but in a good way—a comfortable way. And that one’s more nervous sort of, with those long spindly legs—”

“You have a good eye for furniture.”

“Well—” compliments threw me, I was never sure how to respond except to act like I hadn’t heard—“when they’re lined up together you see how they’re made. At the Barbours’—” I wasn’t sure how to explain it—“I don’t know, it’s more like those scenes with the taxidermy animals at the Natural History Museum.”

When he laughed, his air of gloom and anxiety evaporated; you could feel his good-nature, it radiated off him.

“No, I mean it,” I said, determined to plow on and make my point. “The way she has it set up, a table on its own with a light on it, and all the stuff arranged so you’re not supposed to touch it—it’s like those dioramas they place around the yak or whatever, to show its habitat. It’s nice, but I mean—” I gestured at the chair backs lined against the wall. “That one’s a harp, that one’s like a spoon, that one—” I imitated the sweep with my hand.

“Shield back. Although, I’ll tell you, the nicest detail on that one is the tasselled splats. You may not realize it,” he said, before I could ask what a splat was, “but it’s an education in itself seeing that furniture of hers every day—seeing it in different lights, able to run your hand along it when you like.” He fogged his glasses with his breath, wiped them with a corner of his apron. “Do you need to head back uptown?”

“Not really,” I said, though it was getting late.

“Come along then,” he said. “Let’s put you to work. I could use a hand with this little chair down here.”

“The goat foot?”

“Yes, the goat’s foot. There’s another apron on the peg—I know, it’s too big, but I just coated this thing with linseed oil and I don’t want you to spoil your clothes.”

xii.

DAVE THE SHRINK HAD mentioned more than once that he wished I would develop a hobby—advice I resented, as the hobbies he suggested (racquetball, table tennis, bowling) all seemed incredibly lame. If he thought a game or two of table tennis was going to help me get over my mother, he was completely out to lunch. But—as evidenced by the blank journal I’d been given by Mr. Neuspeil, my English teacher; Mrs. Swanson’s suggestion that I start attending art classes after school; Enrique’s offer to take me down to watch basketball at the courts on Sixth Avenue; and even Mr. Barbour’s sporadic attempts to interest me in chart markers and nautical flags—a lot of adults had the same idea.

“But what do you like to do in your spare time?” Mrs. Swanson had asked me in her spooky, pale gray office that smelled like herb tea and sagebrush, issues of Seventeen and Teen People stacked high on the reading table and some kind of silvery Asian chime music floating in the background.

“I don’t know. I like to read. Watch movies. Play Age of Conquest II and Age of Conquest: Platinum Edition. I don’t know,” I said again, when she kept on looking at me.

“Well, all those things are fine, Theo,” she said, looking concerned. “But it would be nice if we could find some group activity for you. Something with teamwork, something you could do with other kids. Have you ever thought about taking up a sport?”

“No.”

“I practice a martial art called Aikido. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s a way of using the opponent’s own movements as a form of self-defense.”

I looked away from her and at the weathered-looking panel board of Our Lady of Guadalupe hanging behind her head.

“Or perhaps photography.” She folded her turquoise-ringed hands on her desk. “If you’re not interested in art classes. Although I have to say, Mrs. Sheinkopf showed me some of the drawings you did last year—that series of rooftops, you know, water towers, the views from the studio window? Very observant—I know that view and you caught some really interesting line and energy, I think kinetic was the word she used, really nice quickness about it, all those intersecting planes and the angle of the fire escapes. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not so much what you do—I just wish that we could find a way for you to be more connected.”

“Connected to what?” I said, in a voice that came out sounding far too nasty.

She looked nonplussed. “To other people! And—” she gestured at the window—“the world around you! Listen,” she said, in her gentlest, most hypnotically-soothing voice, “I know that you and your mother had an incredibly close bond. I spoke to her. I saw the two of you together. And I know exactly how much you must miss her.”

No you don’t, I thought, staring her insolently in the eye.

She gave me an odd look. “You’d be surprised, Theo,” she said, leaning back in her shawl-draped chair, “what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You’re the one who has to watch for the open door.”

Though I knew she meant well, I’d left her office head down, tears of anger stinging my eyes. What the hell did she know about it, the old bat? Mrs. Swanson had a gigantic family—about ten kids and thirty grandkids, to judge from the photos on her wall; Mrs. Swanson had a huge apartment on Central Park West and a house in Connecticut and zero idea what it was like for a plank to snap so it was all gone in a minute. Easy enough for her to sit back comfortably in her hippie armchair and ramble about extracurricular activities and open doors.

And yet, unexpectedly, a door had opened, and in a most unlikely quarter: Hobie’s workshop. “Helping” with the chair (which had basically involved me standing by while Hobie ripped the seat up to show me the worm damage, slapdash repairs, and other hidden horrors under the upholstery) had rapidly turned into two or three oddly absorbing afternoons a week, after school: labeling jars, mixing rabbit-skin glue, sorting through boxes of drawer fittings (“the fiddly bits”) or sometimes just watching him turn chair legs on the lathe. Though the upstairs shop stayed dark, with the metal gates down, still, in the shop-behind-the-shop, the tall-case clocks ticked, the mahogany glowed, the light filtered in a golden pool on the dining room tables, the life of the downstairs menagerie went on.

Auction houses all over the city called him, as well as private clients; he restored furniture for Sotheby’s, for Christie’s, for Tepper, for Doyle. After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, he taught me the pore and luster of different woods, their colors, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents—“sometimes, when you’re not sure what you have, it’s easiest just to take a sniff”—spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood. Saws and counter-sinks, rasps and rifflers, bent blades and spoon blades, braces and mitre-blocks. I learned about veneers and gilding, what a mortise and tenon was, the difference between ebonized wood and true ebony, between Newport and Connecticut and Philadelphia crest rails, how the blocky design and close-cropped top of one Chippendale bureau rendered it inferior to another bracket-foot of the same vintage with its fluted quarter columns and what he liked to call the “exalted” proportions of the drawer ratio.

Downstairs—weak light, wood shavings on the floor—there was something of the feel of a stable, great beasts standing patiently in the dim. Hobie made me see the creaturely quality of good furniture, in how he talked of pieces as “he” and “she,” in the muscular, almost animal quality that distinguished great pieces from their stiff, boxy, more mannered peers and in the affectionate way he ran his hand along the dark, glowing flanks of his sideboards and lowboys, like pets. He was a good teacher and very soon, by walking me through the process of examination and comparison, he’d taught me how to identify a reproduction: by wear that was too even (antiques were always worn asymmetrically); by edges that were machine-cut instead of hand-planed (a sensitive fingertip could feel a machine edge, even in poor light); but more than that by a flat, dead quality of wood, lacking a certain glow: the magic that came from centuries of being touched and used and passed through human hands. To contemplate the lives of these dignified old highboys and secretaries—lives longer and gentler than human life—sank me into calm like a stone in deep water, so that when it was time to go I walked out stunned and blinking into the blare of Sixth Avenue, hardly knowing where I was.

More than the workshop (or the “hospital,” as Hobie called it) I enjoyed Hobie: his tired smile, his elegant big-man’s slouch, his rolled sleeves and his easy, joking manner, his workman’s habit of rubbing his forehead with the inside of his wrist, his patient good humor and his steady good sense. But though our talk was casual and sporadic there was never anything simple about it. Even a light “How are you” was a nuanced question, without it seeming to be; and my invariable answer (“Fine”) he could read easily enough without my having to spell anything out. And though he seldom pried, or questioned, I felt he had a better sense of me than the various adults whose job it was to “get inside my head” as Enrique liked to put it.

But—more than anything—I liked him because he treated me as a companion and conversationalist in my own right. It didn’t matter that sometimes he wanted to talk about his neighbor who had a knee replacement or a concert of early music he’d seen uptown. If I told him something funny that happened at school, he was an attentive and appreciative audience; unlike Mrs. Swanson (who froze and looked startled when I made a joke) or Dave (who chuckled, but awkwardly, and always a beat too late), he liked to laugh, and I loved it when he told me stories of his own life: raucous late-marrying uncles and busybody nuns of his childhood, the third-rate boarding school on the Canadian border where his teachers had all been drunks, the big house upstate that his father kept so cold there was ice on the inside of the windows, gray December afternoons reading Tacitus or Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic. (“I loved history, always. The road not taken! My grandest boyhood ambition was to be a professor of history at Notre Dame. Although what I do now is just a different way of working with history, I suppose.”) He told me about his blind-in-one-eye canary rescued from a Woolworth’s who woke him singing every morning of his boyhood; the bout of rheumatic fever that kept him in bed for six months; and the queer little antique neighborhood library with frescoed ceilings (“torn down now, alas”) where he’d gone to get away from his house. About Mrs. De Peyster, the lonely old heiress he’d visited after school, a former Belle of Albany and local historian who clucked over Hobie and fed him Dundee cake ordered from England in tins, who was happy to stand for hours explaining to Hobie every single item in her china cabinet and who had owned, among other things, the mahogany sofa—rumored to have belonged to General Herkimer—that got him interested in furniture in the first place. (“Although I can’t quite picture General Herkimer lounging on that decadent old Grecian-looking article.”) About his mother, who had died shortly after his three-days-old sister, leaving Hobie an only child; and about the young Jesuit father, a football coach, who—telephoned by a panicky Irish housemaid when Hobie’s father was beating Hobie “to flinders practically” with a belt—had dashed to the house, rolled up his sleeves, and punched Hobie’s father to the ground. (“Father Keegan! He was the one who came to the house that time when I had rheumatic fever, to give me communion. I was his altar boy—he knew what the story was, he’d seen the stripes on my back. There’ve been so many priests lately naughty with the boys, but he was so good to me—I always wonder what happened to him, I’ve tried to find him and I can’t. My father telephoned the archbishop and next thing you knew, done and dusted, they’d shipped him off to Uruguay.”) It was all very different from the Barbours’, where—despite the general atmosphere of kindness—I was either lost in the throng or else the uncomfortable subject of formal inquiry. I felt better knowing he was only a bus ride away, a straight shot down Fifth Avenue; and in the night when I woke up jarred and panicked, the explosion plunging through me all over again, sometimes I could lull myself back to sleep by thinking of his house, where without even realizing it you slipped away sometimes into 1850, a world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, copper pots and baskets of turnips and onions in the kitchen, candle flames leaning all to the left in the draft of an opened door and tall parlor windows billowing and swagged like ball gowns, cool quiet rooms where old things slept.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to explain my absences, however (dinnertime absences, often), and Andy’s powers of invention were being taxed. “Shall I go up there with you and talk to her?” said Hobie one afternoon when we were in the kitchen eating a cherry tart he’d bought at the farmers’ market. “I’m happy to go up and meet her. Or maybe you’d like to ask her here.”

“Maybe,” I said, after thinking about it.

“She might be interested to see that Chippendale chest-on-chest—you know, the Philadelphia, the scroll-top. Not to buy—just to look at. Or, if you’d like, we could invite her out to lunch at La Grenouille—” he laughed “—or even some little joint down here that might amuse her.”

“Let me think about it,” I said; and went home early on the bus, brooding. Quite apart from my chronic duplicity with Mrs. Barbour—constant late nights at the library, a nonexistent history project—it would be embarrassing to admit to Hobie that I’d claimed Mr. Blackwell’s ring was a family heirloom. Yet, if Mrs. Barbour and Hobie were to meet, my lie was sure to emerge, one way or another. There seemed no way around it.

“Where have you been?” said Mrs. Barbour sharply, dressed for dinner but without her shoes on, emerging from the back of the apartment with her gin and lime in her hand.

Something in her manner made me sense a trap. “Actually,” I said, “I was downtown visiting a friend of my mother’s.”

Andy turned to stare at me blankly.

“Oh yes?” said Mrs. Barbour suspiciously, with a sideways glance at Andy. “Andy was just telling me that you were working at the library again.”

“Not tonight,” I said, so easily that it surprised me.

“Well, I must say I’m relieved to hear that,” said Mrs. Barbour coolly. “Since the main branch is closed on Mondays.”

“I didn’t say he was at the main branch, Mother.”

“I think you might actually know him,” I said, anxious to draw fire from Andy. “Know of him, anyway.”

“Who?” said Mrs. Barbour, her gaze coming back to me.

“The friend I was visiting. His name is James Hobart. He runs a furniture shop downtown—well, doesn’t run it. He does the restorations.”

She brought her eyebrows down. “Hobart?”

“He works for lots of people in the city. Sotheby’s, sometimes.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I gave him a call, then?”

“No,” I said defensively. “He said we should all go out to lunch. Or maybe you’d like to come down to his shop sometime.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Barbour, after a beat or two of surprise. Now she was the one thrown off-balance. If Mrs. Barbour ever went south of Fourteenth Street, for any reason whatsoever, I didn’t know about it. “Well. We’ll see.”

“Not to buy anything. Just to look. He has some nice things.”

She blinked. “Of course,” she said. She seemed strangely disoriented—something fixed and distracted about the eyes. “Well, lovely. I’m sure I would enjoy meeting him. Have I met him?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“In any case. Andy, I’m sorry. I owe you an apology. You too, Theo.”

Me? I didn’t know what to say. Andy—sucking furtively at the side of his thumb—gave a one-shouldered shrug as she spun out of the room.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him quietly.

“She’s upset. It’s nothing to do with you. Platt’s home,” he added.

Now that he mentioned it, I was aware of muffled music emanating from the rear of the apartment, a deep, subliminal thump. “Why?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Something happened at school.”

“Something bad?”

“God knows,” he said tonelessly.

“He’s in trouble?”

“I assume so. No one will talk about it.”

“But what happened?”

Andy made a face: who knows. “He was here when we got home from school—we heard his music. Kitsey was excited and ran back to tell him hello but he screamed and slammed the door in her face.”

I winced. Kitsey idolized Platt.

“Then Mother came home. She’s been back in his room. Then she was on the telephone for a while. I slightly think Daddy’s on his way home now. They were supposed to have dinner with the Ticknors tonight but I think that’s been cancelled.”

“What about supper?” I said, after a brief pause. Normally on school nights we ate in front of the television while doing our homework—but with Platt home, Mr. Barbour on his way, and the evening’s plans abandoned, it was starting to look more like a family dinner in the dining room.

Andy straightened his glasses, in the fussy, old-womanish way he had. Although my hair was dark and his was light, I was only too aware how the identical eyeglasses Mrs. Barbour had chosen for us made me look like Andy’s egghead twin—especially since I’d overheard some girl at school calling us “the Goofus Brothers” (or maybe “the Doofus brothers”—whatever, it wasn’t a compliment).

“Let’s walk over to Serendipity and get a hamburger,” he said. “I’d really rather not be here when Daddy gets home.”

“Take me, too,” said Kitsey unexpectedly, galloping in and stopping just short of us, flushed and breathless.

Andy and I looked at each other. Kitsey didn’t even like to be seen standing in line next to us at the bus stop.

“Please,” she wailed, looking back and forth between us. “Toddy’s doing soccer practice, I have my own money, I don’t want to be by myself with them, please.”

“Oh, come on,” I said to Andy, and she flashed me a grateful look.

Andy put his hands in his pockets. “All right, then,” he said to her expressionlessly. They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor.

“Get your stuff. Go,” he said, when she still stood there staring. “I’m not waiting for you. And don’t forget your money because I’m not paying for you either.”

xiii.

I DIDN’T GO DOWN to Hobie’s for the next few days, out of loyalty to Andy, although I was greatly tempted in the atmosphere of tension that hung over the household. Andy was right: it was impossible to figure out what Platt had done, since Mr. and Mrs. Barbour behaved as if absolutely nothing were wrong (only you could tell that something was) and Platt himself wouldn’t say a word, only sat sullenly at meals with his hair hanging in his face.

“Believe me,” said Andy, “it’s better when you’re around. They talk, and make more of an effort to be normal.”

“What do you think he did?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“Sure you do.”

“Well, yes,” said Andy, relenting. “But I really don’t have the foggiest.”

“Do you think he cheated? Stole? Chewed gum in chapel?”

Andy shrugged. “The last time he was in trouble, it was for hitting somebody in the face with a lacrosse stick. But that wasn’t like this.” And then, out of the blue: “Mother loves Platt the best.”

“You think?” I said evasively, though I knew very well this was true.

“Daddy loves Kitsey best. And Mother loves Platt.”

“She loves Toddy a lot too,” I said, before realizing quite how this sounded.

Andy grimaced. “I would think I’d been switched at birth,” he said. “If I didn’t look so much like Mother.”

xiv.

FOR SOME REASON, DURING this strained interlude (possibly because Platt’s mysterious trouble reminded me of my own) it occurred to me that maybe I ought to tell Hobie about the painting, or—at the very least—broach the subject in some oblique manner, to see what his reaction would be. The difficulty was how to bring it up. It was still in the apartment, exactly where I’d left it, in the bag I’d brought out of the museum. When I’d seen it leaning against the sofa in the front room, on the dreadful afternoon I’d gone back in to get some school things I needed, I’d walked right past it, skirting it as assiduously as I would have a grasping bum on the sidewalk, and all the time feeling Mrs. Barbour’s cool pale eye on my back, on our apartment, on my mother’s things, as she stood in the door with her arms folded.

It was complicated. Every time I thought of it my stomach squirmed, so that my first instinct was to slam the lid down hard and think of something else. Unfortunately, I’d waited so long to say anything to anybody that it was starting to feel like it was too late to say anything at all. And the more time I spent with Hobie—with his crippled Hepplewhites and Chippendales, the old things he took such diligent care of—the more I felt it was wrong to keep silent. What if someone found the picture? What would happen to me? For all I knew, the landlord might have gone into the apartment—he had a key—but even if he did go in, I didn’t think he would necessarily happen upon it. Yet I knew I was tempting fate by leaving it there while I put off deciding what to do.

It wasn’t that I minded giving it back; if I could have returned it magically, by wishing, I would have done it in a second. It was just that I couldn’t think how to return it in a way that wouldn’t endanger either me or the painting. Since the museum bombing, there were notices all over the city saying that packages left unattended for any reason would be destroyed, which did away with most of my brilliant ideas for returning it anonymously. Any suspicious suitcase or parcel would be blown up, no questions asked.

Of all the adults I knew, there were only two I considered taking into my confidence: Hobie, or Mrs. Barbour. Of these, Hobie seemed by far the more sympathetic and less terrifying prospect. It would be much easier to explain to Hobie how I had happened to take the painting out of the museum in the first place. That it was a mistake, sort of. That I’d been following Welty’s instruction; that I’d had a concussion. That I hadn’t fully considered what I was doing. That I hadn’t meant to let it sit around so long. Yet in my homeless limbo, it seemed insane to step up and admit to what I knew a lot of people were going to view as very serious wrongdoing. Then, by coincidence—just as I was realizing I really couldn’t wait much longer before I did something—I happened to see a tiny black and white photo of the painting in the business section of the Times.

Due perhaps to the unease that had overtaken the household in the wake of Platt’s disgrace, the newspaper now occasionally found its way out of Mr. Barbour’s study, where it dis-assembled itself and re-appeared a page or two at a time. These pages, awkwardly folded, were scattered near a napkin-wrapped glass of club soda (Mr. Barbour’s calling card) on the coffee table in the living room. It was a long, boring article, toward the back of the section, having to do with the insurance industry—about the financial difficulties of mounting big art shows in a troubled economy, and especially the difficulty in insuring travelling artworks. But what had caught my eye was the caption under the photo: The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius’s 1654 masterpiece, destroyed.

Without thinking, I sat down in Mr. Barbour’s chair and began scanning the dense text for any further mention of my painting (already I’d begun to think of it as mine; the thought slid into my head as if I’d owned it all my life)

Questions of international law come into play in cultural terrorism such as this, which has sent a chill through the financial community as well as the artistic world. “The loss of even one of these pieces is impossible to quantify,” said Murray Twitchell, a London-based insurance-risk analyst. “Along with the twelve pieces lost and presumed destroyed, another 27 works were badly damaged, although restoration, for some, is possible.” In what may seem a futile gesture to many, the Art Loss Database

The story was continued on the next page; but just then Mrs. Barbour came into the room and I had to put the newspaper down.

“Theo,” she said. “I have a proposal for you.”

“Yes?” I said, warily.

“Would you like to come up to Maine with us this year?”

For a moment I was so overjoyed that I went completely blank. “Yes!” I said. “Wow. That’d be great!”

Even she couldn’t help but smile, a bit. “Well,” she said, “Chance will certainly be happy to put you to work on the boat. It seems that we’re going out somewhat earlier this year—well, Chance and the children will be going early. I’ll be staying in the city to take care of some things, but I’ll be up in a week or two.”

I was so happy I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“We’ll see how you like sailing. Perhaps you’ll like it better than Andy does. Let us hope so, at any rate.”

“You think it’s going to be fun,” said Andy gloomily, when I ran back to the bedroom (ran, not walked) to give him the good news. “But it’s not. You’ll hate it.” All the same, I could tell exactly how pleased he was. And that night—before bed—he sat down with me on the edge of the bottom bunk to talk about what books we would bring, what games, and what the symptoms of seasickness were, so that I could get out of helping on deck, if I felt like it.

xv.

THIS TWO-FOLD NEWS—good on both fronts—left me limp and dazed with relief. If my painting was destroyed—if that was the official story—there was plenty of time to decide what to do. By the same magic, Mrs. Barbour’s invitation seemed to extend beyond the summer and far into the horizon, as if the entire Atlantic Ocean lay between me and Grandpa Decker; the lift was dizzying, and all I could do was exult in my reprieve. I knew that I should give the painting to either Hobie or Mrs. Barbour, throw myself on their mercy, tell them everything, beg them to help me—in some bleak, lucid corner of my mind I knew I would be sorry if I didn’t—but my mind was too full of Maine and sailing to think about anything else; and it was starting to occur to me that it might even be smart to keep the painting for a while, as a sort of insurance for the next three years, against having to go live with Grandpa Decker and Dorothy. It is a hallmark of my stunning naïveté that I thought I might even be able to sell it, if I had to. So I kept quiet, looked at maps and chart markers with Mr. Barbour, and let Mrs. Barbour take me to Brooks Brothers to buy some deck shoes and some light cotton sweaters to wear on the water when it got cool at night. And said nothing.

xvi.

“TOO MUCH EDUCATION, WAS my problem,” said Hobie. “Or so my father thought.” I was in the workshop with him and helping sort through endless pieces of old cherry-wood, some redder, some browner, all salvaged from old furniture, to get the exact shade he needed to patch the apron of the tall-case clock he was working on. “My father had a trucking company” (this I already knew; the name was so famous that even I was familiar with it), “and in the summers and over Christmas vacation he had me loading trucks—I’d have to work up to driving one, he said. The men on the loading docks all went dead silent the moment I walked out there. Boss’s son, you know. Not their fault, because my father was a holy bastard to work for. Anyway he had me doing that from fourteen, after school and on weekends—loading boxes in the rain. Sometimes I worked in the office too—dismal, dingy place. Freezing in winter and hot as blazes in summer. Shouting over the exhaust fans. At first, it was only in the summers and over Christmas vacation. But then, after my second year of college, he announced he wasn’t paying my tuition any more.”