HE SOCIAL WORKERS PUT me in the back seat of their compact car and drove me to a diner downtown, near their work, a fake-grand place glittering with beveled mirrors and cheap Chinatown chandeliers. Once we were in the booth (both of them on one side, with me facing) they took clipboards and pens from their briefcases and tried to make me eat some breakfast while they sat sipping coffee and asking questions. It was still dark outside; the city was just waking up. I don’t remember crying, or eating either, though all these years later I can still smell the scrambled eggs they ordered for me; the memory of that heaped plate with the steam coming off it still ties my stomach in knots.

The diner was mostly empty. Sleepy busboys unpacked boxes of bagels and muffins behind the counter. A wan cluster of club kids with smudged eyeliner were huddled in a nearby booth. I remember staring over at them with a desperate, clutching attention—a sweaty boy in a Mandarin jacket, a bedraggled girl with pink streaks in her hair—and also at an old lady in full make-up and a fur coat much too warm for the weather who was sitting by herself at the counter, eating a slice of apple pie.

The social workers—who did everything but shake me and snap their fingers in my face to get me to look at them—seemed to understand how unwilling I was to absorb what they were trying to tell me. Taking turns, they leaned across the table and repeated what I did not want to hear. My mother was dead. She had been struck in the head by flying debris. She had died instantly. They were sorry to be the ones who broke the news, it was the worst part of their job, but they really really needed me to understand what had happened. My mother was dead and her body was at New York Hospital. Did I understand?

“Yes,” I said, in the long pause where I realized they were expecting me to say something. Their blunt, insistent use of the words death and dead was impossible to reconcile with their reasonable voices, their polyester business clothes, the Spanish pop music on the radio and the peppy signs behind the counter (Fresh Fruit Smoothie, Diet Delite, Try Our Turkey Hamburger!).

“¿Fritas?” said the waiter, appearing at our table, holding aloft a big plate of french fries.

Both social workers looked startled; the man of the pair (first names only: Enrique) said something in Spanish and pointed a few tables over, where the club kids were gesturing to him.

Sitting red-eyed in my shock, before my rapidly cooling plate of scrambled eggs, I could scarcely grasp the more practical aspects of my situation. In light of what had happened, their questions about my father seemed so wholly beside the point that I had a hard time understanding why they kept asking so insistently about him.

“So when’s the last time you saw him?” said the Korean lady, who’d asked me several times to call her by her first name (I’ve tried and tried to recall it, and can’t). I can still see her plumpish hands folded on the table, though, and the disturbing shade of her nail polish: an ashen, silvery color, something between lavender and blue.

“A guesstimate?” prompted the man Enrique. “About your dad?”

“Ballpark will do,” the Korean lady said. “When do you think you last saw him?”

“Um,” I said—it was an effort to think—“sometime last fall?” My mother’s death still seemed like a mistake that might be straightened out somehow if I pulled myself together and cooperated with these people.

“October? September?” she said, gently, when I didn’t respond.

My head hurt so badly I felt like crying whenever I turned it, although my headache was the least of my problems. “I don’t know,” I said. “After school started.”

“September, would you say then?” asked Enrique, glancing up as he made a note on his clipboard. He was a tough-looking guy—uneasy in his suit and tie, like a sports coach gone to fat—but his tone conveyed a reassuring sense of the nine-to-five world: office filing systems, industrial carpeting, business as usual in the borough of Manhattan. “No contact or communication since then?”

“Who’s a buddy or close friend who might know how to reach him?” said the Korean lady, leaning forward in a motherly way.

The question startled me. I didn’t know of any such person. Even the suggestion that my father had close friends (much less “buddies”) conveyed a misunderstanding of his personality so profound I didn’t know how to respond.

It was only after the plates had been taken away, in the edgy lull after the meal was finished but no one was getting up to leave, that it crashed down on me where all their seemingly irrelevant questions about my father and my Decker grandparents (in Maryland, I couldn’t remember the town, some semi-rural subdivision behind a Home Depot) and my nonexistent aunts and uncles had so plainly been leading. I was a minor child without a guardian. I was to be removed immediately from my home (or “the environment,” as they kept calling it). Until my father’s parents were contacted, the city would be stepping in.

“But what are you going to do with me?” I asked for the second time, pushing back in my chair, a crackle of panic rising in my voice. It had all seemed very informal when I’d turned off the television and left the apartment with them, for a bite to eat as they’d said. Nobody had said a word about removing me from my home.

Enrique glanced down at his clipboard. “Well, Theo—” he kept pronouncing it Teo, they both did, which was wrong—“you’re a minor child in need of immediate care. We’re going to need to place you in some kind of emergency custody.”

“Custody?” The word made my stomach crawl; it suggested courtrooms, locked dormitories, basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence.

“Well, let’s say care then. And only until your grandpa and grandma—”

“Wait,” I said—overwhelmed at exactly how fast things were spinning out of control, at the false assumption of warmth and familiarity in the way he’d said the words grandpa and grandma.

“We’ll just need to make some temporary arrangements until we reach them,” said the Korean lady, leaning close. Her breath smelled minty but also had the slightest underbite of garlic. “We know how sad you must be, but there’s nothing to worry about. Our job is just to keep you safe until we reach the people who love you and care about you, okay?”

It was too awful to be real. I stared at the two strange faces across the booth, sallow in the artificial lights. Even the proposition that Grandpa Decker and Dorothy were people who cared about me was absurd.

“But what’s going to happen to me?” I said.

“The main concern,” said Enrique, “is that you’re in a capable foster situation for the time being. With someone that’ll work hand in hand with Social Services to implement your care plan.”

Their combined efforts to soothe me—their calm voices and sympathetic, reasonable expressions—made me increasingly frantic. “Stop it!” I said, jerking away from the Korean lady, who had reached over the table and was attempting to clasp my hand in a caring way.

“Look, Teo. Let me explain something. Nobody’s talking about detention or a juvenile facility—”

“Then what?”

“Temporary custody. All that means, is that we take you to a safe place with people who will act as guardians for the state—”

“What if I don’t want to go?” I said, so loudly that people turned to stare.

“Listen,” Enrique said, leaning back and signalling for more coffee. “The city has certified crisis homes for youth in need. Fine places. And right now, that’s just one option we’re looking at. Because in a lot of cases like yours—”

“I don’t want to go to a foster home!”

“Kid, you sure don’t,” the pink-haired club girl said audibly at the next table. Recently, the New York Post had been full of Johntay and Keshawn Divens, the eleven-year-old twins who had been raped by their foster father and starved nearly to death, up around Morningside Heights.

Enrique pretended not to hear this. “Look, we’re here to help,” he said, refolding his hands on the tabletop. “And we’ll also consider other alternatives if they keep you safe and address your needs.”

“You never told me I couldn’t go back to the apartment!”

“Well, city agencies are overburdened—sí, gracias,” he said to the waiter who’d come to refill his cup. “But sometimes other arrangements can be made if we get provisional approval, especially in a situation like yours.”

“What he’s saying?” The Korean lady tapped her fingernail on the Formica to get my attention. “It’s not set in stone you go into the system if there’s somebody who can come stay with you for a little while. Or vice versa.”

“A little while?” I repeated. It was the only part of the sentence that had sunk in.

“Like maybe there’s somebody else we could call, that you might be comfortable staying with for a day or two? Like a teacher, maybe? Or a family friend?”

Off the top of my head, I gave them the telephone number of my old friend Andy Barbour—the first number that came to me, maybe because it was the first phone number besides my own I’d learned by heart. Though Andy and I had been good friends in elementary school (movies, sleepovers, summer classes in Central Park in map and compass skills), I’m still not quite sure why his name was the first to fall out of my mouth, since we weren’t such good friends any more. We’d drifted apart at the start of junior high; I’d hardly seen him in months.

“Barbour with a u,” said Enrique as he wrote the name down. “Who are these people? Friends?”

Yes, I replied, I’d known them all my life, practically. The Barbours lived on Park Avenue. Andy had been my best friend since third grade. “His dad has a big job on Wall Street,” I said—and then I shut up. It had just occurred to me that Andy’s dad had spent some unknown amount of time in a Connecticut mental hospital for “exhaustion.”

“What about the mother?”

“She and my mom are good friends.” (Almost true, but not quite; though they were on perfectly friendly terms, my mother wasn’t nearly rich or connected enough for a social-pages lady like Mrs. Barbour.)

“No, I mean, what does she do for a living?”

“Charity work,” I said, after a disoriented pause. “Like the Antiques Show at the Armory?”

“So she’s a stay-at-home mom?”

I nodded, glad she’d supplied the phrase so handily, which though technically true was not how anyone who knew Mrs. Barbour would ever think to describe her.

Enrique signed his name with a flourish. “We’ll look into it. Can’t promise anything,” he said, clicking his pen and sticking it back in his pocket. “We can certainly drop you over with these folks for the next few hours, though, if they’re who you want to be with.”

He slid out of the booth and walked outside. Through the front window, I could see him walking back and forth on the sidewalk, talking on the phone with a finger in one ear. Then he dialed another number, for a much shorter call. There was a quick stop at the apartment—less than five minutes, just long enough for me to grab my school bag and a few impulsive and ill-considered articles of clothing—and then, in their car again (“Are you buckled up back there?”) I leaned with my cheek to the cold glass and watched the lights go green all up the empty dawn canyon of Park Avenue.

Andy lived in the upper Sixties, in one of the great old white-glove buildings on Park where the lobby was straight from a Dick Powell movie and the doormen were still mostly Irish. They’d all been there forever, and as it happened I remembered the guy who met us at the door: Kenneth, the midnight man. He was younger than most of the other doormen: dead-pale and poorly shaven, often a bit slow on the draw from working nights. Though he was a likable guy—had sometimes mended soccer balls for Andy and me, and dispensed friendly advice on how to deal with bullies at school—he was known around the building for having a bit of a drinking problem; and as he stepped aside to usher us in through the grand doors, and gave me the first of the many God, kid, I’m so sorry looks I would be receiving over the next months, I smelled the sourness of beer and sleep on him.

“They’re expecting you,” he said to the social workers. “Go on up.”

ii.

IT WAS MR. BARBOUR who opened the door: first a crack, then all the way. “Morning, morning,” he said, stepping back. Mr. Barbour was a tiny bit strange-looking, with something pale and silvery about him, as if his treatments in the Connecticut “ding farm” (as he called it) had rendered him incandescent; his eyes were a queer unstable gray and his hair was pure white, which made him seem older than he was until you noticed that his face was young and pink—boyish, even. His ruddy cheeks and his long, old-fashioned nose, in combination with the prematurely white hair, gave him the amiable look of a lesser founding father, some minor member of the Continental Congress teleported to the twenty-first century. He was wearing what appeared to be yesterday’s office clothes: a rumpled dress shirt and expensive-looking suit trousers that looked like he had just grabbed them off the bedroom floor.

“Come on in,” he said briskly, rubbing his eyes with his fist. “Hello there, dear,” he said to me—the dear startling, from him, even in my disoriented state.

Barefoot, he padded ahead of us, through the marble foyer. Beyond, in the richly decorated living room (all glazed chintz and Chinese jars) it felt less like morning than midnight: silk-shaded lamps burning low, big dark paintings of naval battles and drapes drawn against the sun. There—by the baby grand, and a flower arrangement the size of a packing case—stood Mrs. Barbour in a floor-sweeping housecoat, pouring coffee into cups on a silver tray.

As she turned to greet us, I could feel the social workers taking in the apartment, and her. Mrs. Barbour was from a society family with an old Dutch name, so cool and blonde and monotone that sometimes she seemed partially drained of blood. She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room. Like a fashion drawing come to life, she turned heads wherever she went, gliding along obliviously without appearing to notice the turbulence she created in her wake; her eyes were spaced far apart, her ears were small, high-set, and very close to her head, and her body was long-waisted and thin, like an elegant weasel’s. (Andy had these features as well, but in ungainly proportions, without her slinky ermine grace.)

In the past, her reserve (or coldness, depending how you saw it) had sometimes made me uncomfortable, but that morning I was grateful for her sang froid. “Hi there. We’ll be putting you in the room with Andy,” she said to me without beating around the bush. “I’m afraid he’s not up for school yet, though. If you’d like to lie down for a while, you’re perfectly welcome to go to Platt’s room.” Platt was Andy’s older brother, away at school. “You know where it is, of course?”

I said that I did.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Well, then. Tell us what we can do for you.”

I was aware of them all looking at me. My headache was bigger than anything else in the room. In the bull’s-eye mirror above Mrs. Barbour’s head, I could see the whole scene replicated in freakish miniature: Chinese jars, coffee tray, awkward-looking social workers and all.

In the end, it was Mr. Barbour who broke the spell. “Come along, then, let’s get you squared away,” he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder and firmly steering me out of the room. “No—back here, this way—aft, aft. Right back here.”

The only time I’d ever set foot in Platt’s room, several years before, Platt—who was a champion lacrosse player and a bit of a psychopath—had threatened to beat the everliving crap out of Andy and me. When he’d lived at home, he’d stayed in there all the time with the door locked (and, Andy told me, smoked pot). Now all his posters were gone and the room was very clean and empty-looking, since he was away at Groton. There were free weights, stacks of old National Geographics, an empty aquarium. Mr. Barbour, opening and closing drawers, was babbling a bit. “Let’s see what’s in here, shall we? Bedsheets. And… more bedsheets. I’m afraid I never come in here, I do hope you’ll forgive me—ah. Swimming trunks! Won’t be needing those this morning, will we?” Scrabbling around in yet a third drawer, he finally produced some new pyjamas with the tags still on, ugly as hell, reindeer on electric blue flannel, no mystery why they’d never been worn.

“Well then,” he said, running a hand through his hair and cutting his eyes anxiously towards the door. “I’ll leave you now. Hell of a thing that’s happened, good Lord. You must be feeling awfully rough. A good solid sleep will be the best thing in the world for you. Are you tired?” he said, looking at me closely.

Was I? I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma.

“If you’d rather have company? Perhaps if I build a fire in the other room? Tell me what you want.”

At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair—for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too.

“We’re only in the next room if you need us—that is to say, I’ll be leaving soon for work but someone will be here.…” His pale gaze darted around the room, and then returned to me. “Perhaps it’s incorrect of me, but in the circumstances I wouldn’t see the harm in pouring you what my father used to call a minor nip. If you should happen to want such a thing. Which of course you don’t,” he added hastily, noting my confusion. “Quite unsuitable. Never mind.”

He stepped closer, and for an uncomfortable moment I thought he might touch me, or hug me. But instead he clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “In any case. We’re perfectly happy to have you and I hope you’ll make yourself as comfortable as you can. You’ll speak right up if you need anything, won’t you?”

He had hardly stepped out when there was whispering outside the door. Then a knock. “Someone here to see you,” Mrs. Barbour said, and withdrew.

And in plodded Andy: blinking, fumbling with his glasses. It was clear that they had woken him up and hauled him out of bed. With a noisy creak of bedsprings, he sat beside me on the edge of Platt’s bed, looking not at me but at the wall opposite.

He cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. There followed a long silence. Urgently the radiator clanked and hissed. Both his parents had gotten out of there so fast it was like they’d heard the fire alarm.

“Wow,” he said, after some moments, in his eerie flat voice. “Disturbing.”

“Yeah,” I said. And together we sat in silence, side by side, staring at the dark green walls of Platt’s room and the taped squares where his posters had once been. What else was there to say?

iii.

EVEN NOW, TO REMEMBER that time fills me with a choking, hopeless sensation. Everything was terrible. People offered me cold drinks, extra sweaters, food I couldn’t eat: bananas, cupcakes, club sandwiches, ice cream. I said yes and no when I was spoken to, and spent a lot of time staring at the carpet so people wouldn’t see I’d been crying.

Though the Barbours’ apartment was enormous by New York standards, it was on a low floor and practically lightless, even on the Park Avenue side. Though it was never quite night there, or exactly day, still the glow of lamplight against burnished oak gave off an air of conviviality and safety like a private club. Friends of Platt’s called it “the creepatorium” and my father, who’d come there once or twice to pick me up after sleepovers, had referred to it as “Frank E. Campbell’s” after the funeral home. But I found a solace in the massive, opulent, pre-war gloom, which was easy to retreat into if you didn’t feel like talking or being stared at.

People stopped by to see me—my social workers of course, and a pro-bono psychiatrist who’d been sent to me by the city, but also people from my mother’s work (some of whom, like Mathilde, I’d been expert at imitating in order to make her laugh), and loads of friends from NYU and her fashion days. A semi-famous actor named Jed, who sometimes spent Thanksgiving with us (“Your mother was the Queen of the Universe, as far as I was concerned”), and a slightly punked-out woman in an orange coat, named Kika, who told me how she and my mother—dead broke in the East Village—had thrown a wildly successful dinner party for twelve people for less than twenty dollars (featuring, among other things, cream and sugar packets lifted from a coffee bar, and herbs picked surreptitiously from a neighbor’s windowbox). Annette—a fireman’s widow, in her seventies, my mother’s former neighbor down on the Lower East Side—showed up with a box of cookies from the Italian bakery around where she and my mother used to live, the same butter cookies with pine nuts she always brought us when she visited at Sutton Place. Then there was Cinzia, our old housekeeper, who burst into tears when she saw me, and asked me for a picture of my mother to keep in her wallet.

Mrs. Barbour broke up these visits if they dragged on too long, on the grounds that I got tired easily, but also—I suspect—because she couldn’t handle people like Cinzia and Kika monopolizing her living room for indefinite periods of time. After forty-five minutes or so she would come and stand quietly in the door. And if they didn’t take the hint, she would speak up and thank them for coming—perfectly polite, but in such a way that people realized that the time was getting on and rose to their feet. (Her voice, like Andy’s, was hollow and infinitely far away; even when she was standing right next to you she sounded as if she were relaying transmissions from Alpha Centauri.)

Around me, over my head, the life of the household went on. Every day, the doorbell rang many times: housekeepers, nannies, caterers, tutors, the piano instructor, social-pages ladies and tassel-loafer business guys connected with Mrs. Barbour’s charities. Andy’s younger siblings, Toddy and Kitsey, raced through the gloomy halls with their school friends. Often, in the afternoons, perfume-smelling women with shopping bags dropped by for coffee and tea; in the evenings, couples dressed for dinner congregated over wine and fizzy water in the living room, where the flower arrangements were delivered every week from a swanky Madison Avenue florist and the newest issues of Architectural Digest and the New Yorker were fanned just so on the coffee table.

If Mr. and Mrs. Barbour were terribly inconvenienced to have an extra kid dumped on them, at scarcely a moment’s notice, they were graceful enough not to show it. Andy’s mother, with her understated jewelry and her not-quite-interested smile—the kind of woman who could get on the phone with the mayor if she needed a favor—seemed to operate somehow above the constraints of New York City bureaucracy. Even in my confusion and grief, I had a sense that she was managing things behind the scenes, making it all easier for me, shielding me from the rougher aspects of the Social Services machinery—and, I’m now fairly sure, the press. Calls were forwarded from the insistently ringing telephone directly to her cell phone. There were conversations in low voices, instructions to the doormen. After coming in on one of Enrique’s many tireless interrogations about my father’s whereabouts—interrogations that often brought me close to tears; he might as well have been grilling me about the location of missile sites in Pakistan—she sent me out of the room and then in a controlled monotone put a stop to it (“Well I mean, obviously the boy doesn’t know where he is, the mother didn’t know either… yes, I know you’d like to find him but clearly the man doesn’t want to be found, he’s taken measures not to be found… he wasn’t paying child support, he left a lot of debts, he more or less flew town without a word so frankly I’m not quite sure what you mean to accomplish by contacting this stellar parent and fine citizen and… yes, yes, all well and good, but if the man’s creditors can’t run him down and your agency can’t either then I’m not sure what’s to be gained from continuing to badger the child, are you? Can we agree to put a stop to this?”)

Certain elements of the martial law imposed since my arrival had inconvenienced the household: no longer, for instance, were the housemaids permitted to listen to Ten Ten WINS, the news station, while they worked (“No, no,” said Etta the cook, with a warning glance at me, when one of the cleaners tried to turn the radio on) and in the mornings, the Times was taken immediately to Mr. Barbour and not left out for the rest of the family to read. Clearly, this was not the usual custom—“Somebody’s carried the paper off again,” Andy’s little sister Kitsey would wail before falling into guilty silence after a look from her mother—and I soon gathered that the newspaper had begun vanishing into Mr. Barbour’s study because there were things in it that it was thought preferable for me not to see.

Thankfully Andy, who had been my companion in adversity before, understood that the last thing I wanted was to talk. Those first few days, they let him stay home from school with me. In his musty plaid room with the bunk beds, where I had spent many a Saturday night in elementary school, we sat over the chessboard, Andy playing for both of us, since in my fog I scarcely remembered how to move the pieces. “Okay,” he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Right. Are you absolutely sure you want to do that?”

“Do what?”

“Yes, I see,” said Andy, in the wispy, irritating voice which had driven so many bullies to shove him to the sidewalk out in front of our school over the years. “Your rook is in danger, that’s perfectly correct, but I would suggest you take a closer look at your queen—no, no, your queen. D5.”

He had to say my name to get my attention. Over and over, I was reliving the moment where my mother and I had run up the museum steps. Her striped umbrella. Rain peppering and driving in our faces. What had happened, I knew, was irrevocable, yet at the same time it seemed there had to be some way I could go back to the rainy street and make it all happen differently.

“The other day,” said Andy, “somebody, I really believe it was Malcolm whats-his-name or some other supposedly respected writer—anyway, he made a big production the other day in the Science Times of pointing out that there are more potential games of chess than there are grains of sand in the entire world. It’s ridiculous that a science writer for a major newspaper would feel compelled to belabor a fact so obvious.”

“Right,” I said, returning with effort from my thoughts.

“Like who doesn’t know that grains of sand on the planet, however numerous, are finite? It’s absurd that someone would even comment on such a non-issue, you know, like, Breaking News Story! Just throwing it out there, you know, as a supposedly arcane fact.”

Andy and I, in elementary school, had become friends under more or less traumatic circumstances: after we’d been skipped ahead a grade because of high test scores. Everyone now appeared to agree that this had been a mistake for both of us, though for different reasons. That year—bumbling around among boys all older and bigger than us, boys who tripped us and shoved us and slammed locker doors on our hands, who tore up our homework and spat in our milk, who called us maggot and faggot and dickhead (sadly, a natural for me, with a last name like Decker)—during that whole year (our Babylonian Captivity, Andy called it, in his faint glum voice) we’d struggled along side by side like a pair of weakling ants under a magnifying glass: shin-kicked, sucker-punched, ostracized, eating lunch huddled in the most out-of-the-way corner we could find in order to keep from getting ketchup packets and chicken nuggets thrown at us. For almost two years he had been my only friend, and vice versa. It depressed and embarrassed me to remember that time: our Autobot wars and Lego spaceships, the secret identities we’d assumed from classic Star Trek (I was Kirk, he was Spock) in an effort to make a game of our torments. Captain, it would appear that these aliens are holding us captive in some simulacrum of your schools for human children, on Earth.

Before I’d been tossed in with a tight, competitive bunch of older boys, with a label reading “gifted” tied around my neck, I’d never been especially reviled or humiliated at school. But poor Andy—even before he was skipped ahead a grade—had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like ‘noxious’ and ‘chthonic’ in casual conversation. As bright as he was, he was clumsy; his flat voice, his habit of breathing through his mouth due to a chronically blocked nose, gave him the appearance of being mildly stupid instead of excessively smart. Among the rest of his kittenish, sharp-toothed, athletic siblings—racing around between their friends and their sports teams and their rewarding after-school programs—he stood out like a random pastehead who had wandered out onto the lacrosse field by mistake.

Whereas I’d managed to recover, somewhat, from the catastrophe of fifth grade, Andy had not. He stayed home on Friday and Saturday nights; he never got invited to parties or to hang out in the park. As far as I knew, I was still his only friend. And though thanks to his mother he had all the right clothes, and dressed like the popular kids—even wore contact lenses some of the time—no one was fooled: hostile jock types who remembered him from the bad old days still pushed him around and called him “Threepio” for his long-ago mistake of wearing a Star Wars shirt to school.

Andy had never been overly talkative, even in childhood, except in occasional pressured bursts (much of our friendship had consisted of wordlessly passing comic books back and forth). Years of harassment at school had rendered him even more close-tongued and uncommunicative—less apt to employ Lovecraftian vocabulary words, more prone to entomb himself in advanced-placement math and science. Math had never interested me much—I was what they called a high verbal—but while I’d fallen short of my early academic promise, in every area, and had no interest in good grades if I had to work for them, Andy was in AP everything and at the very top of our class. (Certainly he would have been sent off to Groton like Platt—a prospect that had terrified him, as far back as third grade—had not his parents worried with some justification about sending away to school a son so persecuted by his classmates that he had once been nearly suffocated at recess by a plastic bag thrown over his head. And there were other worries as well; the reason I knew about Mr. Barbour’s time in the “ding farm” was that Andy had told me, in his matter-of-fact way, that his parents were afraid he might have inherited something of the same vulnerability, as he put it.)

During his time home from school with me, Andy apologized for having to study, “but unfortunately it’s necessary,” he said, sniffling and wiping his nose on his sleeve. His course load was incredibly demanding (“AP Hell on wheels”) and he couldn’t afford to fall even a day behind. While he labored over what seemed endless amounts of schoolwork (Chem and Calculus, American History, English, Astronomy, Japanese) I sat on the floor with my back against the side of his dresser, counting silently to myself: this time only three days ago she was alive, this time four days, a week. In my mind, I went over all the meals we’d eaten in the days leading up to her death: our last visit to the Greek diner, our last visit to Shun Lee Palace, the last dinner she’d cooked for me (spaghetti carbonara) and the last dinner before that (a dish called chicken Indienne, which she’d learned to make from her mother back in Kansas). Sometimes, to look occupied, I turned through old volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist or an illustrated H. G. Wells he had in his room, but even the pictures were more than I could absorb. Mostly I stared out at the pigeons flapping on the window ledge as Andy filled out endless grids in his hiragana workbook, his knee bouncing under the desk as he worked.

Andy’s room—originally one large bedroom that the Barbours had divided in half—faced Park Avenue. Horns cried in the crosswalk at rush hour and the light burned gold in the windows across the street, dying down around the same time as the traffic began to thin. As the night wore on (phosphorescent in the streetlamps, violet city midnights that never quite faded to black) I turned from side to side, the low ceiling over the bunk pressing down on me so heavily that sometimes I woke convinced I was lying underneath the bed instead of on top of it.

How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.

Light from the street flew in black bands across the floor. Hopelessly, I thought of my bedroom standing empty only a few blocks away: my own narrow bed with the worn red quilt. Glow-in-the-dark stars from the planetarium, a picture postcard of James Whale’s Frankenstein. The birds were back in the park again, the daffodils were up; this time of year, when the weather got nice, sometimes we woke up extra early in the mornings and walked through the park together instead of taking the bus to the West Side. If only I could go back and change what had happened, keep it from happening somehow. Why hadn’t I insisted we get breakfast instead of going to the museum? Why hadn’t Mr. Beeman asked us to come in on Tuesday, or Thursday?

Either the second night after my mother died or the third—some time at any rate after Mrs. Barbour took me to the doctor to get my headache seen to—the Barbours were throwing a big party at the apartment that it was too late for them to cancel. There was whispering, a flurry of activity that I could scarcely take in. “I think,” said Mrs. Barbour when she came back to Andy’s room, “you and Theo might enjoy staying back here.” Despite her light tone, clearly it was not a suggestion but an order. “It’ll be such a bore, and I really don’t think you’ll enjoy yourselves at all. I’ll ask Etta to bring you a couple of plates from the kitchen.”

Andy and I sat side by side on the lower bunk of his bed, eating cocktail shrimp and artichoke canapés from paper plates—or, rather, he ate, while I sat with the plate on my knees, untouched. He had on a DVD, some action movie with exploding robots, showers of metal and flame. From the living room: clinking glasses, smells of candle wax and perfume, every now and then a voice rising brilliantly in laughter. The pianist’s sparkling, up-tempo arrangement of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” seemed to be floating in from an alternate universe. Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.

iv.

AFTER FOUR DAYS, OR maybe it was five, Andy loaded his books in his stretched-out backpack and returned to school. All that day, and the next, I sat in his room with his television turned to Turner Classic Movies, which was what my mother watched when she was home from work. They were showing movies adapted from Graham Greene: Ministry of Fear, The Human Factor, The Fallen Idol, This Gun for Hire. That second evening, while I was waiting for The Third Man to come on, Mrs. Barbour (all Valentino-ed up and on her way out the door to an event at the Frick) stopped by Andy’s room and announced that I was going back to school the next day. “Anybody would feel out of sorts,” she said. “Back here by yourself. It isn’t good for you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Sitting around on my own watching movies was the only thing I’d done since my mother’s death that had felt even vaguely normal.

“It’s high time for you to get back into some sort of a routine. Tomorrow. I know it doesn’t seem so, Theo,” she said when I didn’t answer, “but keeping busy is the only thing in the world that’ll make you feel better.”

Resolutely I stared at the television. I hadn’t been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

“Theo.”

Startled, I looked up at her.

“One foot after the other. There’s no other way to get through this.”

The next day, they were having a World War II spy marathon (Cairo, The Hidden Enemy, Code Name: Emerald) that I really wanted to stay home and see. Instead, I dragged myself out of bed when Mr. Barbour stuck his head in to wake us (“Up and at ’em, hoplites!”) and walked to the bus stop with Andy. It was a rainy day, and cold enough that Mrs. Barbour had forced me into wearing an embarrassing old duffel coat of Platt’s over my clothes. Andy’s little sister, Kitsey, danced ahead of us in her pink raincoat, skipping through puddles and pretending she didn’t know us.

I knew it was going to be horrible and it was, from the second I stepped into the bright hall and smelled the familiar old school smell: citrus disinfectant and something like old socks. Hand-lettered signs in the hallway: sign-up sheets for tennis lab and cooking classes, tryouts for The Odd Couple, field trip to Ellis Island and tickets still available for the Swing into Spring concert, hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on.

The strange thing: the last day I’d been in the building, she was alive. I kept on thinking it, and every time it was new: last time I opened this locker, last time I touched this stupid fucking Insights in Biology book, last time I saw Lindy Maisel putting on lip gloss with that plastic wand. It seemed hardly credible that I couldn’t follow these moments back to a world where she wasn’t dead.

“Sorry.” People I knew said it, and people who had never spoken to me in my life. Other people—laughing and talking in the hallways—fell silent when I walked by, throwing grave or quizzical looks my way. Others still ignored me completely, as playful dogs will ignore an ill or injured dog in their midst: by refusing to look at me, by romping and frolicking around me in the hallways as if I weren’t there.

Tom Cable, in particular, avoided me as assiduously as if I were a girl he’d dumped. At lunch, he was nowhere to be found. In Spanish (he sauntered in well after class started, missing the awkward scene where everyone crowded somberly around my desk to say they were sorry) he didn’t sit by me as usual but up front, slouched down with his legs thrown out to the side. Rain drummed on the windowpanes as we translated our way through a series of bizarre sentences, sentences that would have done Salvador Dalí proud: about lobsters and beach umbrellas, and Marisol with the long eyelashes taking the lime-green taxi to school.

After class, on the way out, I made a point of going up and saying hi as he was getting his books.

“Oh, hey, how’s it going,” he said—distanced, leaning back with a smart-ass arch to the brow. “I heard an’ all.”

“Yeah.” This was our routine: too cool for everyone else, always in on the same joke.

“Tough luck. That really bites.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey—shoulda played sick. Told you! My mom blew up over all that shit too. Hit the fucking ceiling! Well, er,” he said, half-shrugging in the stunned moment that followed this, looking up, down, around, with a who, me? look, like he’d thrown a snowball with a rock in it.

“Anyway. So,” he said in a moving-right-along voice. “What’s with the costume?”

“What?”

“Well”—ironic little back-step, eyeing the plaid duffel coat—“first place, definitely, in the Platt Barbour Look-Alike Contest.”

And despite myself—it was a shock, after days of horror and numbness, an eruptive Tourette’s-like spasm—I laughed.

“Excellent call, Cable,” I said, adopting Platt’s hateful drawl. We were good mimics, both of us, and often conducted entire conversations in other people’s voices: dumb newscasters, whiny girls, wheedling and fatuous teachers. “Tomorrow I’m coming dressed as you.”

But Tom didn’t reply in kind or pick up the thread. He’d lost interest. “Errr—maybe not,” he said, with a half-shrug, a little smirk. “Later.”

“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.”