I could see my mother’s face, at the moment it happened,” she said, “I’d know everything.”

“Or your father’s face,” Jimmy said.

Jean turned her back on the house again. This time he took her hand. He drew her to him, held her like a dancer. The wind came up again and it made the tackle on the mast of the sailboat across the canal clang, like a signal that something should be starting or ending.

She touched his forehead, where he’d been cut, knew somehow that it was part of this, that he had already given up something for her.

After a moment, she said, “I have trouble getting close to people.”

“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t anymore,” Jimmy said. “Maybe my friend Angel.”

“Why is that?” she said. “Do you know?”

“No.”

“We should go,” Jean said.

They were next to the seawall.

“Stand up on the wall,” Jimmy said.

She took his hand and stepped up onto the low wall, like the little girl who had lived in that house and been afraid. She walked along, balancing dramatically, happy again for a second, and when she stepped down she went into his arms and kissed him, both of them out of the reach of the past for another second, even though they were this close to it.

NINE

They pulled up to her apartment. The radio was on low.

“Can we just keep on going?” Jean said.

He looked at her.

“I like this song,” she said.

So that was how they came to drive up through Benedict Canyon to Mulholland and then along the crest of the mountains, the lights spread out first on the right, the Valley, then on the left, Hollywood and West Hollywood. They came all the way out to Bel Air, over the 405, dove right down onto Sepulveda, on through the tunnel. Now the hills were dark, the road winding, and the grid of Valley lights only occasionally flashed through gaps in the trees, or the half-moon.

Jimmy steered right into a wide curve where the two lanes became four, just past the first cluster of houses, moving from one pool of orange streetlight onto another.

The radius of the curve opened and then eased into a left. They had the road to themselves and, it seemed for at least a few more seconds, the night.

The windows were down. “I love that smell,” Jean said.

“Manzanita,” Jimmy said.

They were just another man and a woman, falling. Out on a date on a weeknight, all the time in the world.

“You know how sometimes you forget about it?” Jimmy said.

Angel nodded.

“Then you remember.”

And then there was a kid covered in blood right in the road in front of them. Jean called out a wordless sound like a frightened sleeper. Jimmy saw the boy and braked hard and skidded off the road.

He was sixteen or seventeen, in a bright blue snowboarder’s knit cap. He seemed oddly calm, flat, somewhere else already, gone. The blood was from a cut at his hairline and it was still coming, covering his face and now the neck of his Notre Dame High School T-shirt. He just stood in the middle of the street, oblivious to the threat of traffic, slack, careless, as if the worst thing had already happened.

The white Honda Accord was on its roof on the shoulder in a sparkling bed of broken glass, the wheels still turning. Jimmy and Jean got out and Jimmy walked purposefully toward it, left Jean behind beside the Dodge.

She stepped toward the kid still standing in the road.

“Don’t touch him,” Jimmy turned and said to her, calm. “He’s all right.”

She didn’t understand but she did as she was told. There was something about the way he said it that froze her in place.

“Call,” Jimmy said.

The driver was crushed in the frame of the window, hanging half out of the overturned car. Jimmy knelt, put fingers to the boy’s neck, felt for the carotid. He stood. On the passenger side in the front seat another teenager hung upside down in his shoulder belt, covered in blood, too, but moving, alive.

The bloodied kid still standing in the road came out of his daze. He looked at Jean as she got her phone out of the Dodge. He started to say something, but then shook his head and turned away from her.

He walked stiff-legged toward Jimmy and the Accord.

He saw the boy crushed in the window, the dead driver.

“Whoa. Sean? Shit, man, I hit my head . . .”

He saw the front seat passenger, moving, alive.

“Oh, shit, man, Sean and Calley .