leave you the hell alone so you can get some sleep.”
Zoe smiled, wreathed in heat. There was Will's face, handsomer now that he had invented a self, settled and sure as a garden devoted to just one crop. There was the frank defiant ugliness of Cassandra, the harsh shine. “You don't have to go,” Zoe said, knowing that whatever she said, they'd go eventually, whether she wanted them to or not.
She'd been dreaming. A fever dream, roiling, shot through with anxious little jolts of terror that seemed to live in the world the way eels live in a rock. She woke up and lay breathing as the room came back, its uneven ceiling and old furniture, its blue window through which a single winter star shone feebly. Jamal had gotten into bed with her. She fought the urge to wake him up and then he woke up on his own, as if he'd heard her thinking. That happened sometimes. She couldn't decide whether it was a virtue or a failing of her motherhood. He opened his eyes and stared at her.
“Hi,” she said. He didn't answer. He'd brought the spaceship with him.
“You okay?” she asked. He nodded. She pulled the quilt up over his chest. The one pale cold star shone through the Window, and Zoe lived through a half-dream in which she and her son were hiding together in a ruin, in the blue shade of a decrepit monument, concealed among echoing marbles and wet tangles of vine while someone or something searched for them. It was so vivid that she put her finger to her lips, cautioning Jamal to keep quiet. Then the dream passed and she saw that she was just a woman in a room with her son, in New York, though the hunted feeling refused to quit. She told Jamal, in a whisper, to go back to sleep and he answered by taking the spaceship and holding it over his head.
“Beam us up,” he said.
1987/ His mother wanted him. He lay under the bed breathing darkness as her voice put his name in the rooms, searching. “Ben? Ben? Benjamin?” He shrank inside his own silence. He wasn't ready to be seen, not now. He had old mistakes buzzing around in him, sour thoughts, a dank poverty of being. She wanted him in his shining condition. He couldn't shine, not now, so he disappeared and let her call his name into rooms that answered only with wallpaper and afternoon light, the mute feminine dignity of furniture. He waited; he felt her perfume as she passed. Please, he said, silently, and finally she went and said to his grandfather, “He's not here, maybe he went down to the beach.” Right, he thought, the beach, and he could see himself there, the golden version, happy and strong, unafraid, holding a shell or the handle of a china cup or some other little gift he'd found. He waited, here, hidden in his sadder version, a boy under a bed who didn't answer his mother's call, and after a minute had passed he crawled out and peered up over the windowsill. There she was, walking toward the beach, looking for him, a thin determined figure in a pale pink skirt, moving with a fierce sense of ownership, as if she were the lost wife of the ocean, on her way back to reclaim her privileges. Mom, he called, silently, and watched as she strode away to find the son she needed, not sad or wrong, waiting with a gift for her.
When she'd gone he let himself climb up onto the bed and lie there, feeling his grandfather's house around him. He loved this house more than any other place. It threw a shadow over its own trees; all its secrets were new and clean. From the bedroom windows you saw the garden and from the garden you saw the firm blue line of the ocean, which seemed, when you stood in the garden, like something immense and simple and unimaginably expensive that had been placed where it was to show off the more complicated beauties of the house. The house had windows of blue and red glass. The house had chandeliers that shivered with precise colorless brilliance, a stone fireplace Ben could stand up in, a room he called the Ice Palace, with thick white carpets and white cloth flowers and white wicker chairs that waited in frozen silence for someone to sit on them so they could produce their