These Dreams of You

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Everyone on the sidewalks watches the cab reversing and crashing into the limo over and over. Dimly through the back window, the cab’s passenger grabs her head when she flies into the seat in front of her. At the age of twelve, Parker feels his first grown-up cognition of the fact that sometimes there is no exerting control. Sometimes everything loses control and there’s nothing to be done about it, and things have been out of control for a while now — since before the Chunnel or London, maybe before Sheba.

Though he doesn’t understand the details, Parker knows about the house. He knows about the money. He remembers one afternoon, back in the canyon, the panic in his father’s voice when he hustled the kids into the car to drive down to the bank because Zan just had gone online to discover no money in their account, so he needed to make a deposit before checks started bouncing. Now his mother is missing, his little sister is missing, and though of course Sheba drives him crazy he can’t help being upset that she’s disappeared, as upset in his adolescent way as his father, and it’s annoying, to be upset about Sheba. It just would be better if Sheba weren’t missing because then things wouldn’t be quite so out of control. Everything got harder in all their lives when Sheba came, the boy thinks — why wasn’t I enough, why wasn’t it enough for my mother and father to have me? Why was I so not enough that they had to go halfway around the world to bring Sheba to their house? and it will be half a lifetime before he understands it’s never been that he wasn’t enough, it’s that his parents’ love for him was so great as to set loose within them a terror more than they could bear.