My father’s house is also on Seabeck Island, and both of my parents live here to Minimize the Impact of Divorce. We all used to live together on a street not far from here, but Mom sold the place after she got together with Dino. Dad now lives in the house he grew up in, right on Outlook, one of the nicest streets in town, where a row of Victorians sit overlooking the waters of the Puget Sound. From his porch you can see the ferries gliding to and from Seattle, and he has a front-row seat every March, when some thirty-two thousand gray whales migrate down the coast and a gazillion tourists come to town to watch. Dad bought the house from Nannie, his mother, who now lives at Providence Point Community for Seniors. But Nannie comes over a lot and rearranges things back the way they were when she lived there. She’s been forbidden to empty the dishwasher after she reorganized every kitchen cupboard when Dad was out mowing the lawn. He couldn’t find the cheese grater for two weeks. Once we caught Nannie in the living room, trying to shove the couch back against the window where she’d had it for forty years. She did pretty well, too, for someone who must weigh about eighty pounds—she had it about halfway across the floor.

Mom and Dino bought the house we live in now on Mermaid Avenue (yes, it’s really called that) shortly before they married. It’s bigger than our old house, which was materialistic consolation for about a week or so, until real life set in. The divorce, the wedding, it all happened quickly. So quickly that you sometimes got the feeling that Dino was looking around with no small amount of resentment, wondering how he got from there to here. There being New York City, where he lived with his third wife, to here, a small island in Washington State, tucked far away from the center of the music world, married to a good but not great cellist, with a daughter who didn’t appreciate what an astounding human being he was (i.e., hated his guts). How they got here was a tempestuous affair from what I have heard, although you don’t want to think of your mother that way. It’s okay to think of mothers in the same sentence as lunch box and garden gloves, but not in the same sentence as passionate and tempestuous. I will spare you the gory details of that time, the craziest, messiest kind of hell and chaos you never imagine for your life. Okay, one gory detail—my father, who takes insects outside when he finds them in the house, who rides them out on an envelope or some other handy airborne insect express material and gently lowers them to the ground, actually smashed his fist through his car window at the height of his anger and loss. Glass shards poked from the skin, sent blood down his Dockers.

Not that I blame my mother, not really. First, she’s my mother and I love her and she’s mostly a terrific person. But aside from that, it sounds like Dino chased after her with the determination of those dogs that travel thousands of miles to find their way back home after they tumble out of the back of a pickup. My mother, Daniella Morgan Cavalli, is, after all, a rather beautiful woman. Not in the sexy Barbie way, but like a medieval princess. Long, dark, curly hair. Dark eyes, a serenity that seems mysterious. People look at her, I know that. I have her eyes, I am told, but my hair is brown like my dad’s, and is straight but not long enough to quite hit my shoulders. We both tend toward being full and curved and have to watch what we eat, but I distinctly lack that serenity people seem to find so alluring. She and Dino met when she was substituting for a cellist on maternity leave with the Seattle Symphony, and he appeared as a guest for three nights, performing Amore Trovato (Love Found), written for his third wife. In spite of this, my mother fell for him as if she had been kidnapped and brainwashed, and my father was sure this is what had actually happened. Dino’s charm must have been intense, as prior to then my mother was a practical person who barely sniffed at a sad movie. My mother’s charm mustn’t have been too bad either—Dino stayed for three weeks, went back to New York only long enough to pack up his things. Lesson learned—charm is a one-way ticket to hell. Better to fall in love with a man who is dull as a pancake than one with charm.

Still, if I’m honest, I can’t exactly blame Dino entirely either. Blame is so satisfying that you can forget it’s actually useless. The truth is, there are a thousand reasons my parents aren’t together anymore, and nine hundred ninety-nine of them I don’t even know about or fully understand. I do know, though, that there are essential differences between them that I’ve noticed over the years: my father reads a map, while my mother doesn’t mind getting lost; my father is consistently a believer, while my mother uses religion like some people use vitamins—when they feel an illness coming on. Before he paints a room my father tapes the edges and covers everything as thoroughly as an Egyptian mortician, while my mother’s only preparation for the same job is to put on old jeans and take off her socks so she can tell if she’s stepped in a paint drip. He cuts a peach; she bites it whole. The practicality I thought Mom had was maybe more an adaptive response to living with Dad, rather than her original, true self. Something like those fish that go blind after living in a dark cave.

Whatever the reasons for their split, I now go back and forth between locations, same as a letter with a bad address. I refuse, though, to be a messed up Product of Divorce, which some people think should be stamped on the side of you MADE IN MALAYSIA-style before they stick you in a crate and pack you off to the Land of the Damaged. Broken home, remember? The message being that because a marriage is broken, everything in the home is broken too, including you.

But there is one thing that I would say about the going back and forth, and that is, you wonder if the adults would ever get divorced if they had to be the ones to change homes every week. This is all supposed to be all right, and we are required to be okay about it, but it’s not okay. Not really. We can handle it, don’t get me wrong. But the truth is, it’s not okay. The truth is, you just start to get comfy, when suddenly you’ve got to pack up and remember to bring your book and your favorite earrings and your notes for your paper for Humanities. You’ve got to readjust to your surroundings—the parent, the pet, the step-siblings or lack of them, who has bagels, who runs out of milk, which drawer to reach for when you want a spoon. The truth is that you have a day on either side where it feels as if you’ve just come home from vacation. You’ve got to remember where things left off. Oh yeah, that’s right—my room’s a mess. Oh yeah, that’s right—my CD player’s batteries are dead and I haven’t read my new magazine yet and I’d gotten in a fight with Mom before I left. And the truth is, as soon as you arrive “home” you are too often pulled into the perverse divorce game, Who Do You Love More. It begins with what looks like an innocent question: “How did it go at Mom’s/Dad’s?” It ends with this reverse Sophie’s Choice, where instead of a mother choosing between children, you are asked to choose between parents. If anything, all this divorce stuff made you feel that if you were anywhere near love you ought to don one of those suits those people wear from the Centers for Disease Control.

That’s why I was trying to get thoughts of Ian Waters out of my mind that day I went to my dad’s for the weekend. Real simply, I didn’t want to get hurt by the power of my own emotions. I wasn’t doing a very good job of erasing him from my head. I’d stooped to the lowest depths of thoughts, pictured him kissing me deeply before leaving on a plane for Curtis, me sobbing miserably in an airport chair as his plane pulled away from the doorway. I mean, I knew how this story would have to end, if there was even to be a story at all. It was not an end I wanted to willingly walk toward.

Dad wasn’t home when I got there, so I went out to the porch and sat in the swing and looked out toward the sound. At that time of year you had your occasional humpback, otters, and sea lions, and I watched for the odd shape in the waves, a break in the pattern that meant some creature was there. It was colder than hell outside, and everything was painted in the Northwest’s favorite color, gray. The water was steely, and the sky a soft fuzz, but it was still beautiful out there. A kayaker with a death wish was bobbing around on the water, his boat a vivid red spot in a silver sea. For the millionth, compelling time, I saw those fingers stroke that violin case.

“Look who’s here!” my father called out.

I went inside. My father had one arm around Nannie and the other around a fat bag of groceries.

“He thinks he’s made of money,” Nannie said.

“I bought her a People magazine,” Dad said.

“That’s hard-earned dollars you spent on that trash,” Nannie said. I kissed her cheek, helped her off with her coat, which wasn’t too necessary. She was flinging it off like an alligator wrestler in her eagerness to get to the bag Dad had set on the counter. She fished around inside with one thin arm, plucked out the magazine, squashing a loaf of bread with her elbow in the process.

“I don’t even know who these trollops are,” she said as she eased into a corner of the couch and stuck her nose in the pages.

“Hey, Cass. How about sweet-and-sour chicken?”

“Yum.”

Cooking was one of Dad’s post-divorce hobbies. Before that, his specialty was cornflakes with bananas on them. Now he was really into it. He cooked better than Mom ever had, which was probably the point. He has all of these fancy knives and pots, and various, curious utensils good for only one weird purpose—skinning a grape, say. I could have written a confessional My Father Had a Spring-form Pan. He built a shelf in the kitchen for all of his cookbooks, and Nannie kept bumping her head on it. Who put this thing here? she’d grouse, knowing full well who did it.

We had dinner and watched a movie, some PG thing about misfit boys who go to camp, which ended with the two parents who’d both lost their spouses deciding to marry. Of course there were two white kids (one good, one evil), a black kid, an Asian kid, one fat kid, and one girl with glasses. It was worse than those movies where a dog wins a sports championship.

“Sex, sex, sex,” Nannie said when the happy couple kissed at the end. “That’s all you see in movies anymore.” I guess that’s why we weren’t watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “I’m going to bed.”

“Dishes await,” Dad said after Nannie’s flowered housecoat disappeared slowly up the stairs. “Would you go and check on her? I’m worried that by the time you get there Grandpa’s photo will be up on my nightstand and her Poligrip will be in my medicine cabinet.”

“No problem,” I said.

I trotted upstairs, checked the guest room, but didn’t find Nannie. I went to Dad’s room to see if he was right. I was expecting to catch her red-handed, an unrepentant criminal of living in the past.

That’s when I saw it—part of the cover of Dino’s biography sticking out from under Dad’s bed. It was splayed open to keep his place. I was sure he’d read it before, when all of the awful stuff was happening, but why was he reading it now, three years later? I walked over to his bed, looked underneath. There was a nest of papers, notes in Dad’s handwriting, other books. Composers Speak—Part 2 in the Young Musicians Series, with that famous picture of Dino on the cover, looking sultry and young, during his days in Paris. And there was Culinary History—Authentic Tuscan Recipes. What was he doing, writing the Dino Cookbook? I wrestled with my conscience about sitting down right then and reading those notes. Guilt convinced me that Nannie would fall and break a hip or something if I did, so I left to find her. I saw the light on under the bathroom door.

“Are you okay in there?” I called through the door.

“Yes, thank you,” Nannie said primly.

I waited until she came out and got settled into the guest room bed. She was propped on the pillows as if waiting for visitors when I kissed her cheek and turned off her light.

“What a day,” she said.

“Good night, Nannie,” I said.

“Good night, my special dear,” she said. She was always a little sweeter at night. Maybe it was the nightgown with the bow.

I wanted to go right downstairs and confront Dad about his under-the-bed project, but when I got there he was drying a pan with a kitchen towel and whistling, having such a cheerful father moment, I couldn’t stand the thought of breaking it. His T-shirt was loose over his jeans, and his hair had gone from polite to playful. He looked so happy I decided I didn’t have the heart for a confrontation just yet. It would have to wait.

The next day I went to the movies with a couple of my friends, Sophie Birnbaum and Nat Frasier, Zebe and Brian Malo. Zebe’s real name is Meggie Rawlinson, which sounds like some fifties cheerleader and doesn’t fit her at all. We call her Zebe after her favorite zebra-stripe boots. We try to get together most weekends when there isn’t a play, as everyone but me is in drama. Sophie and Brian usually are the leads and we give them crap because sometimes they have to kiss. They love each other like brother and sister, which apparently means they sometimes want to tear out each other’s throats. Zebe does stage managing, and Nat is happy when he gets more than a couple of lines. Last year, every time we saw him, we’d say “This way, sir,” after his Oscar-winning role as a waiter in The Matchmaker.

It was turning out to be Crappy Movie Weekend, as what we saw was basically one long boob joke. It was all girls in tight shirts with enormous buttlike cleavage and boys falling over their own tongues hanging out their mouths, the kind of thing that makes you wonder if there’s any truth to evolution after all. Sophie got in a fight with Brian when he said that a little lighthearted movie with lots of tits was occasionally refreshing.

“We can help you hold him down,” Zebe said.

“Hey, I don’t want to touch him,” I said. “Stupidity is a disease.”

“I’ll wash my hands afterward,” Zebe said.

When I went back to Dad’s, the house was quiet. It was so quiet that the refrigerator humming was the only noise, and I got that has-a-mass-murderer-been-here-and-now-he’s-in-the-closet-just-waiting-to-jump-out-at-me feeling. Instead, I found that Nannie’s coat was gone, taken back with her to Providence Point, I guessed, and I noticed that a couple of pieces of toast had popped up from the toaster and had long ago grown cold. The coffeepot was on, with no coffee left in the pot, just a burning smear of brown. I always worried that this was how Dad really lived when I wasn’t around, that the good cooking and orderly house were a show put on just for me and dropped the moment I left. I’ve come by unannounced before and saw unopened mail stacked six inches high, and egg yolk permanently wedded to the dishes it was on. That’s the other prominent thing about divorce—you worry about your parents when they are supposed to be worrying about you.

I turned off the coffeepot and went upstairs. I found Dad on his bed, propped up not too differently than his mother the night before, with his glasses on and one toe trying to get a glimpse of the outside world from a hole in his sock. Those notes I had seen the night before were scattered all around him. Maybe it wasn’t disinterest that had let the toast grow cold—maybe he was just excited to get back to his project.

“Knock, knock,” I said.

“Oh, jeez.” Dad startled, gathered up his papers. I’m surprised he didn’t shove them under the pillow, stuff them in his mouth, and swallow them like they do in the spy movies.

“What time is it? You’re early.”

“Nope, right on time,” I said.

“Wow,” he said.

“So what’re you doing?”

“Work.”

“One, you look too guilty for work. Two, there’s one of Dino’s books open in front of you. Unless you got a new job I don’t know about, that’s not work. What’s going on?”

My father sighed. He looked out the window, as if hoping the answer to my question would form in the clouds. I see a giraffe! I see a pirate ship! I see that I’m nosing around on my ex-wife’s new husband to try to catch him doing something horrible!

I moved closer to the bed to see.

“No!” he said. He actually put one arm over his notes, same as those kids who make sure you don’t cheat off them.

“Dad, God.”

“All right,” he said. “Okay! I just had a little feeling about something and I wanted to check it out.”

“What kind of little feeling?”

“About Dino Cavalli.”

“No shit,” I said.

“Cassie, watch your mouth. Is that necessary? I was just thumbing through this book recently and something caught my eye that didn’t add up.”

“You mean you were hunting through it line by line for something that didn’t add up,” I said.

He ignored me, which meant I was right. “I found something. I mean, I think I found something, and I was just checking it out.”

“What did you find?”

“I don’t know if I want to say.”

“What? He’s actually a woman,” I guessed. “A killer. A killer woman.”

“A liar,” my father said.

I sighed. “You should get a girlfriend, Dad. I mean it. It’s been three years, and you haven’t had a date.”

“I’ve had dates. This isn’t about dates. This is important. Your mother’s life. Your life. If he’s lied about one thing, he’s lied about others, mark my words.”

“Marissa what’s her name. She seemed nice. A little Career Barbie but …”

“All right, listen to this,” Dad said. He adjusted his glasses and began to read. “‘My mother would make a simple lunch, gougere, some bread, and then I would practice.’”7

“Goo-zhair. Is that edible? I think our neighbor’s cat had one of those caught in his throat once,” I said.

“It’s a lie.”

“There’s no such food?”

“No, it’s a real food, but it’s a recipe from 1969. He’s claiming he ate it when he was eight or nine, and the man is older than I am. The recipe first appeared in a Moldavi wine recipe book, and the wine itself used in the recipe wasn’t even made until 1968.”

“God, Dad.”

“I know,” he said.

“No! I’m talking about you! What are you doing? So maybe the food wasn’t around. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe they got his age wrong. Maybe a thousand things. What does this prove? You’ve already got plenty of reason not to like him. Shit, in my opinion, Mom has plenty of reasons not to like him, and she still does.”

Dad got up, gathered his papers. He looked pissed at me. “It just may prove what I’ve always known. He’s a fraud. You just wait.”

It’s tough to lip-synch violin playing, but I didn’t say this. I turned and left the room, as I didn’t want to fight with Dad. Anything I said would sound like a defense of Dino, and the Civil War began on less.

“That snake was fucking strong, man,” Zach Rogers said. “A reptile’s muscles you can’t exactly see, you know, through that skin and everything, but I had two encyclopedias on the lid. Two, and he still pushed open the lid and got out. Here’s the psychic-phenomenon-ESPN-shit part. One encyclopedia? It fell open to a page on dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus rex. Biggest badass dude of reptiles in history. Now, that’s almost creepy. What are the odds?”

I was walking home from school with Courtney Powelson, my neighbor, and Zach, though I don’t even think he lived near us. He was just sort of migrating along with us, and I had the feeling he was soon going to look up and wonder where the hell he was. He either had a thing for Courtney or he was so used to seeing me that he forgot we were separate individuals. I had every class period with him, even lunch. It was one of those annoying twists of fate in a supposedly random universe. I’ve noticed that this kind of scheduling cruelty never happens with anyone you actually would want to spend all day, every day, with. No, I got Zach. Zach was weird. Entertaining, okay, but weird. He made me believe in alien life forms who come to live among us to steal our souls and our Hostess Cupcake recipes.

“A dinosaur isn’t a reptile, it’s an amphibian,” Courtney said.

Zach ignored her, which was a good thing, since she was wrong, anyway. Courtney and I walked to school together often, but she usually pretended she didn’t know me when she got there. She was one of the Popular Group, which meant two things: one, she could outfit a small town in Lithuania with the amount of clothes she had (picture innocent Lithuanian children in glittery HOT BABET-shirts) and two, she was destined to marry some jock, have a zillion kids, and thereby assure herself a spot in front of a television forever. Queen of the American Dream. She didn’t often walk home with me, as she was usually doing some after-school activity—the Sexy Dancing in Front of Male Sports Team club or the I Could Play a Sport Myself but Then I’d Have to Get Sweaty club. Her mother should have named her MasterCard, Zebe said once. Courtney and her two brothers bugged the hell out of Dino. “They have the glazed eyes of too much technology,” he said once. “You look in their eyes and see Gillian Island re-runs playing.” Gilligan, he meant. Even though our houses were pretty far apart, you could often hear their TV blasting or the repetitive pounding of video game music. I still walked with her because, okay, I admit it, she was nice away from her friends, and because I was weak when it came to compromising my principles.

“I didn’t even get to the best part yet,” he said. “So the lamp I had shining on him? I stuck it down with duct tape. When this mother got out he climbed up the lamp, and when I found him, there was the snake, stuck on the duct tape, back of his head pinned like this.” Zach threw back his head, did a really good stunned cobra impersonation.

“Hey, that was great,” I said. “You could take that on the road.”

“Eyuw,” Courtney said. She shivered. I’m not kidding. Those kind of girls always shiver.

“I didn’t even try to take it off. I was afraid I might skin him.”

“Hey—perfect ad for the strength of duct tape,” I said.

“Oh, my God,” Courtney said.

“Had to take him to the vet. Luckily he was still alive,” Zach said.

I pictured Zach putting his ear to the little chest to check for a heartbeat, a grateful tear coming to his eye. “How does a vet de-duct tape a snake?” I asked.

“Very carefully,” he said. “Anyway, there’s six encyclopedias on there now, to see if he can beat his record. He’s my Bench-Press Baby.”

“Well, here’s our street.”

I was right earlier, because Zach stopped and looked around. “Where the fuck am I?” he said. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Cool.”

Zach wandered off the direction we came, and I left Courtney to an evening of video fulfillment. At home I let Dog William in, went back out front to get the mail. Up the road came Dino’s car. He parked in the driveway and got out. He had his suit on but wasn’t wearing any shoes. No socks, shoes, nothing. It was October. Way too cold for simple, barefooted pleasure.

“Dino?” I said. “Hey, did you forget something? Or is this a new bohemian phase?”

Now, Dino was usually a pretty distracted guy. But this struck me as a bit beyond his usual absentmindedness. We’re talking shoes. Not exactly something that tends to slip your mind.

This, my friends, is how quickly life can change.

A little kernel of unease planted itself inside my gut. “It doesn’t matter,” Dino said.

He slammed the car door and went inside. Something more was going on here; something was not right. I could feel this wrongness coming off him, just like you feel someone’s anger or joy. I followed him, saw him discard his tie on the floor. He paced into the kitchen, and a moment later paced back out again. I was getting a seriously eerie feeling. An uneasiness that didn’t have a name. It was his agitation. And he had this weird look in his eyes, like he was watching something I couldn’t see.

“He always knows where I am, doesn’t he?” Dino said. “He can see me wherever I am, that bastard.”

Okay, shit. Something freaky was definitely going on. My body tensed in high alert. I wanted Mom home. Creepiness was doing this dance inside my skin.

Dino strode into his office, shut the door with a click. The house was quiet except for Dog William huh, huh, huhing beside me. I was glad for his presence—at least I wasn’t completely alone. I had one of those inexplicable moments where I looked at Dog William and he looked at me, and I decided that dogs really had superior knowledge to humans, held the secrets to the universe, only they couldn’t speak. It’s an idea you quickly discard after you see them chew underwear, but right then I felt better thinking one of us understood what the hell was going on.

And then suddenly the silence was shattered. Sorry for the cliché, but that’s what happened. Shattered, with the sudden frenzy of the violin, the sound of someone sawing open a tree and finding all of life and death pouring out.

“Wow,” I said aloud. “Jesus.”

He didn’t tune first. That was what I realized. Not tuning was like a surgeon not snapping on his gloves. Like, well, going out without first putting on your shoes.

It was the first time he’d played in months and months. But this wasn’t just playing. This was unzipping your skin and spilling out your soul. I had a selfish thought then. Actually, it was kind of a prayer to anyone who might be listening and interested. Please, I begged. Don’t let Dino be crazy when Ian Waters comes.