said. “I want to go home.” He had a whole different voice suddenly.

“No,” Jimmy said.

“I want to see my mother.”

“No.”

“I’ll get out then. I’ll go to them.” He was talking about the cops next to them.

“I meant you can’t. It won’t do any good,” Jimmy said.

“I want to go home.”

It was a quiet street in a residential neighborhood in the Valley, an area called Studio City. There were large trees and sidewalks, old-style white streetlamps, cats watching from under parked cars, artificial Ohio. Jimmy killed the headlights, slowed to a stop. A half-block ahead, there was a cluster of cars around a house, the only one with all the lights on. A dog in a fenced yard next to the car barked three or four times, then stopped.

With the windows down, you could hear the soft roar of the 101 freeway a half mile north, that sound like the ocean, but nervous. Jimmy opened the glove compartment. There was a bottle of water. He snapped the top and handed it to Drew.

Drew was staring at the house.

“How long?” Jimmy said.

“My whole life,” Drew said. That defiant voice was gone. He was a little brother again.

Jimmy just let the engine idle. The sense of the neighborhood was heavy in the air. The trees leaned over to hold it in. They knew the boy here. Drew had probably learned how to ride a bike on this street. Before that, the joints in the sidewalk had made a beat to sing a song to as his father or mother pushed him in a stroller around the block. Maybe the yard in front of that house had carried a balloon sign, now almost too sentimental to think of, that said, “It’s a boy!”

Everything carried its history.

Now it’s a dead boy.

Someone was arriving, a shiny duelie pickup, probably someone who worked at the studios, a gaffer, a grip, a carpenter. They liked duelies. The man got out and rushed toward the house.

“It’s Terry,” Drew said. “My mother’s—” He didn’t finish it.

The front door of Drew’s house opened, throwing an angle of light onto the lawn, and a man from inside stepped out of the doorway and opened his arms to the man coming up the walk.

The front door closed. Shadows crossed on the drapes.

“You could look in the window,” Jimmy said, “but you don’t want to carry that around with you, seeing them this way. You could walk in, but they wouldn’t know you and it would only add to their pain.”

Drew looked at him. “I look the same. How can that be?”

“They wouldn’t know you. To their eyes you have a different face. It’s something that happens inside their heads, the people you leave behind. They have their boy. They’re going to put him in the ground in a day or two.”

Jimmy could hear the breath catch in Drew’s throat.

“But you’re here, in the flesh,” Jimmy said. “With us. To be this second version of yourself.”

“This is wack,” Drew said, his eyes on the house.

“It’s just the way it is,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t design this. I don’t know who did.”

Now Drew was crying.

“You’re here for as long as you’re here, until whatever unfinished business you have is finished. You can try to do some good—or you can be one of those people we saw on the street back there, on Sunset, here to do wrong.”

He didn’t tell the boy that there was a third thing you could be. A Walker. Dead to the world, this world and the other.

“You have a new family now,” Jimmy said, flat and unsentimental, looking straight ahead at the grayed-out trees in the next block.

He heard the door open as Drew bolted from the car.

Jimmy went after him, as once somebody had gone after him.

He caught up to him on the lawn, on the black grass.

“Leave me alone!”

“I’m telling you, there’s nothing you can do,” Jimmy said, loud enough to wake the neighbors. “I know.”

Drew had stopped.

“Come on,” Jimmy said.

The door opened. The man, Terry, had heard the noise, the voices. He came out onto the front step. He tried to make sense of two strangers standing there ten feet away.

“Don’t say his name,” Jimmy said.

Drew turned toward the man. With the door open, there was light on the boy’s face.

“Don’t,” Jimmy said.

“What are you doing?” Terry said.

A woman stepped into view behind him in the doorway.

“Who is it?” she said with the saddest kind of hope.

As the sky turned pink, Jimmy yanked close the blackout drapes in