39

It was stupid, of course, to try to go down a mine shaft without a light. You would think an anthropology professor had enough sense to procure a flashlight, no matter how difficult that might have proved to be under the circumstances, before attempting to crawl down a black hole. But no. Here he was.

The gray light from the clouds extended just a few feet into the shaft, and after that it was all black. But he continued. This was where he believed he was being led. As long as the slope was gradual, he could take it slowly, step by step, feeling his way amid the rocks and clutter. In a sense, there was no point to it. What was he, a grown man, doing groping his way down an abandoned mine shaft, an empty hole, in the middle of nowhere? He was looking for his son. He was also, he knew, looking for himself. And in that respect, he had already achieved something—he felt more lucid than he had in days, maybe in weeks, perhaps ever.

Nothing existed in the world but him and this darkness. It was as if he were sprouting, as if he had been planted in this very spot where his feet searched for purchase on the hard, damp ground. For most of his life he had maintained a rigid certainty regarding objective reality that even now he steadfastly clung to…but maybe he was starting to grant reality some wiggle room. Or maybe it was just that objective reality encompassed more than he had bargained for. Here in the total blackness where, if he stood completely still, he could imagine that he existed only as a form of consciousness, he could see how life stretched out in space and time to encompass everything. The individual was the universal and the universal was the individual, no difference between the two, each wrapping itself inside out with the other—a black hole could be right here in this small town in Idaho, it could form inside a human heart, and the farthest galaxies in space existed only because people had discovered them.

The problem with this wealth of lucidity was that it didn’t accomplish much. It wasn’t getting him his life back. It wasn’t helping to find Dewey or Julia. He was just standing here, in a hole in the ground, in the dark. Or was it dark? His eyes were confused, no two ways about it. In the absence of any light, the synapses were apt to play tricks on you, but he could see a red glow far off in his vision. He shut his eyes and the red scar cut through the space behind his sight, growing sharper the tighter his eyes were closed. When he opened his eyes again, the light was brighter, closer, as if he had coaxed it into coming near. He held out his hand and could begin to see his fingers. The light widened like an iris, and soon he clearly saw a figure, a bearded man wearing a miner’s cap, bent somewhat at the waist, clambering up the incline with an oil lamp in his hand. In what seemed to be mere seconds, the man was positioned in front of him, breathing heavily, wiping his forehead with his free hand.

“You’re Diamond,” Tonio said.

The man chuckled, then wiped his face, then chuckled again. “Yes, Mr. Addison, I’m Diamond. I’m still Diamond.”

The man stood there looking at him in the lamplight. Tonio wasn’t sure whether it was an effect of the lamp, or the sharpness of the light in contrast with the utter blackness of the mine shaft, but Diamond’s blue eyes appeared almost glacial in their depths, as if the lenses were layered inward.

“Come, Mr. Addison,” Diamond said. “It’s the middle of the night. This is no place to be. Come with me.” And he started shuffling back toward the entrance.

“But I came here for a reason,” Tonio told him. “And it’s warm. I haven’t been warm…” And he shook his head trying to remember for how long.

“I know,” Diamond said. “Believe me, I know it’s easy to get confused.” He was still moving back toward the mine entrance. Tonio reached out and grabbed his shirtsleeve, which was oily and cold to the touch. Diamond turned on him reproachfully, his icy eyes forming hard crystals in the orange lamplight.

“I understand who you are,” Tonio said, even though he wasn’t sure how. “But I came here because I believe something has been leading me to this place. I came here because I believe I’ll see my son.”

Diamond’s eyes softened. The pupils narrowed and the irises flattened out, adjusting to the light like those of a nocturnal animal. “Mr. Addison,” he said, “I appreciate the sentiment. You’re a fine man. I’d sooner work for you than any pit boss I ever had. But I’m telling you that you’re mistaken here.”

“I’m not mistaken,” Tonio said. “I’m more certain right now than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Diamond blinked his strange eyes, pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket, and wiped the back of his neck. It was warmer here than it had any reason to be.

“Of what?” Diamond asked him.

“That I’m supposed to be here.”

Diamond lowered the lamp to his side and his face was lit weirdly from below, one eye glistening in the light, the other dull and dark. “It’s my job to keep people from passing through.”

“Your job?” Tonio said. “You work here?”

“I’ve worked here a long time,” Diamond said. “You know that. It’s dangerous here. It’s my job to protect people, to keep them from passing through. This place is too close to things.”

“This place,” Tonio said. His sense of well-being had evaporated. He felt suddenly as if he’d been confronting obstacles like Diamond all his life. “What about that crazy hotel?” he said. “What about that place?”

“The hotel is Mr. Tiffany’s affair. It belongs to him.”

“Well, who does this place belong to? It’s an abandoned mine shaft. Who says I can’t come in here?”

The suggestion of a smile took shape in a corner of Diamond’s mouth, but his eyes, or at least the one Tonio could see, looked tired. He pulled off his cap and ran his fingers back through his hair. “‘All our dreams are true’?” He put his cap back on and held up the lamp and peered into Tonio’s face.

“Right,” Tonio said. “I saw the sign.”

Diamond shook his head and lowered the oil lamp again. “I’d say the sign is about equal parts promise and warning. If you…” His cheeks, which had been drawn up tightly, suddenly loosened and fell, and his mouth opened. His eyes were trained over Tonio’s shoulder. “It’s too late now,” he said. “You won’t be able to leave, Mr. Addison.”

Tonio turned to find another light meandering down from the entrance, this one obviously a flashlight beam, steady and strong and white against the walls. The shaft was now lit from two directions, Tonio situated in the middle, so that he was almost blinded no matter which way he turned. He held up a hand against the flashlight beam, and he discerned the shadowy form of the intruder, a smallish person who appeared to be carrying a rifle in his left hand. He was being tricked in some way, cornered, trapped—but Diamond’s expression indicated that he was just as confused as Tonio.

Together they watched the figure assume a certain size, take on a certain shape, and Tonio’s breath left him so fast that he could barely stay on his feet. He managed to set himself in motion, his legs like an old man’s, uncooperative and shaky, but still he stumbled ahead. For just a moment he saw clearly the curly head of hair and the familiar gait before the flashlight struck the ground and threw a wobbly light on the rocky wall. And then he was grasping him tight, his own son, Dewey.

These strange few days dissolved and faded, and he knew that in this moment he had reached his objective, that he had found both Dewey and himself, because the only self he knew anymore lived inside this boy, was sparked to life by their connection. When you wanted something, when you waited for it and wouldn’t let it go, when you fought so hard in your own mind that the absence of the desired object became impossible, then the desired object returned to you, or you forced your way to it, because it contained a true part of yourself. The best part of him was in this boy. With this boy he had shot baskets in the driveway, with this boy he had collected shells. This boy he had pulled in the wagon, and when the wagon tipped, and the boy scraped his chin, and he could see in those eyes the look of pain and betrayal, it was he, Tonio, who had soothed the wound and made it better.

He had thought just minutes earlier that he was making discoveries about the world, but, it turned out, there were only a few things he really knew in it, and one of them was the feel of this child in his arms. He lowered himself to his knees, and Dewey’s hand patted his hair.

“Is Mom with you?” Dewey said.

He could feel his son’s heartbeat, how it fluttered with hope. “No,” he said. “We’ll find her. I thought maybe she was with you.”

They stayed like that for a while in the warm cave with the flashlight shining against the wall. He breathed in and out against Dewey’s wool sweater and he could feel Dewey breathing back. It was some time before he realized that Diamond was gone.

It didn’t matter. There was no reason that Diamond should be there. But the shaft seemed darker than before, and peering over Dewey’s shoulder in the dim light he saw that the iron gate was closed. He stood and grasped Dewey’s shoulder for a moment and walked resolutely to the cave entrance, stumbling a little over the rocks, and then Dewey was behind him with the light. The gate was shut all the way and there was no handle and no lock on the inside of the door.

He pushed and shoved and prodded for all he was worth. He banged until his fists were sore and he shouted until he was hoarse, until his lungs ached with the pressure of shouting, until the mine shaft seemed to burst with the accumulated noise. He shouted until Dewey grew alarmed at all the shouting, and then he shouted some more, but no one came.

Finally he sat down, exhausted, and Dewey sat down with him. Now that, for the first time since they’d arrived here, he couldn’t get at the snow, he was very thirsty.

He thought to turn off the flashlight. It was dark and quiet and beyond the iron door no doubt the snow still fell outside. Someone was chopping wood somewhere, a steady thock, thock, thock. People still existed in the outside world, even if they paid no attention.

“It’s a big mine,” Dewey said. “There’s another entrance somewhere.”

“We’ll find it,” he said. “I hope this flashlight has good batteries.”

“It does,” Dewey said. “It belonged to Hector Jones’s dad. He made sure it had good batteries.”

“Who?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Dewey said, and with that he took the flashlight from his father’s hand and turned on the beam and stood up and wiped off his pants. “Let’s go, Dad,” he said.

Tonio stood up and brushed himself off. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go find Mom. Let’s get out of here.”

They made their way down the shaft. Dewey stopped to pick up the gun where he’d dropped it. He handed Tonio the flashlight.

“It’s just a pellet gun,” Dewey said.

The shaft followed a gentle curve downward and to the right, and the ground was drier and the footing better the farther along they went. Tonio asked Dewey questions: Yes, he had been staying in the hotel. Yes, by himself. There wasn’t any food or running water, so he had been eating and using the restroom at the diner. Hugh and Lorraine were very nice and looked after him. They made sure he washed up in the kitchen sink and brushed his teeth. Yes, he’d seen his father watching him from a window. He’d seen his mother, too. He’d seen his father in the street. He’d seen a lot of strange things. No, one of the strange things was not Uncle Robbie, whom he hadn’t seen at all. He was fine, really, he was fine. He just wanted to find his mother and go home.

While Tonio listened, he thought about how this was exactly the thing that he’d wanted, to find his son, and how he had almost everything he wanted now, except that he, too, wanted to find his wife and go home, and he also wished he could hold his son’s hand, the way he used to do when they crossed the busy streets in downtown Charleston. But Dewey had recently warned him against that, saying he was too old for it now. So they walked along with Dewey holding the pellet gun and Tonio holding the flashlight. He could see Dewey in the flashlight beam. His face was dirty and his hair was a mess and the sweater drooped from him comically and he had to constantly push up the sleeves, but his face and eyes looked sharper, with a new kind of calm and determination. Julia would be proud. Tonio had always been interested in Dewey thinking like a grown man, but it was Julia who had wanted him to conduct himself like one.

Soon they reached a place where the shaft forked, the path to the left angling off in a level track while the one to the right descended sharply.

“It’s this way,” Tonio said.

“How do you know?” Dewey said.

“I just do.”

“Like you just know it,” Dewey said. “Like for no reason.”

“Right,” he said, and shrugged.

“I feel that way sometimes, too,” Dewey said. “Like I know things here. This is a weird place.”

Tonio nodded. “It is a very weird place.”

They had come upon a cave-in or an excavation, a pile of rocks knee-high and halfway across the path. They stopped and sat for a moment. Tonio set the flashlight carefully on the rocks. They had never had a language for their emotions. People remarked on the way they talked with each other, how each understood what the other meant, how each knew what the other would say. He had taught his son all he knew to teach, but he regretted now that one of the things he’d taught him might have been his own reticence. He wanted to talk now not about what he knew but what he felt.

“I’m sorry, Dewey,” he said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen when I left the hotel.”

“I know,” Dewey said.

With a trembling hand, Tonio balanced the flashlight so it angled up toward Dewey’s face.

Dewey drew back and held his hand in front of his eyes. “Stop, Dad,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“I just want to see you for a second,” he said.

Dewey relaxed. He was used to his father’s eccentricities. He inspected the ceiling of the shaft, and Tonio knew, because it was the kind of thing he always knew about his son, that Dewey was wondering how the ceiling had been cut so square with the wall. Normally, he would have attempted to say something about nineteenth-century hard-rock mining techniques.

“I love you, Dewey,” he said instead.

“I love you, too, Dad,” Dewey answered him. And when they began to walk again, his son reached out and took his hand.

Tonio shined the light on the tunnel walls. There was nothing to see and nothing to hear, except that somewhere deep beneath the sound of water dripping there was at this level of the mine a steady movement of air, a wafting in and out, a suspiration. Dewey stared back and forth at the path ahead and the path behind, as if listening to the sound.

The air had been getting steadily warmer, but Dewey’s shoulders shook, as if he had a chill. “I see her sometimes. I found her fingerprints.”

And he too could see Julia then, standing in the driveway of their house in Mount Pleasant, a pair of hedge clippers in her gloved hand, assessing the status of her azaleas. How had they never understood each other better? Why had they wasted so much time?

“I see her in the hotel, but she’s not there,” Dewey said. He sucked in a couple of hard breaths. “I see you sometimes, too, but you’re not the same.”

“I’m here,” he said. “Look at us. Both of us. We’re here.”

“Sometimes I don’t even know if I’m alive,” Dewey said. Tonio shined the flashlight on Dewey’s face, which was streaked with tears or sweat. “Don’t, Dad,” Dewey said, and he shined the light away. “How do you even know you’re alive in this weird place?”

“I know I’m alive because I’m with you,” he said.

They walked on in silence, keeping to the right when the path forked once more, and soon it became more level though it still didn’t seem that they were getting nearer an entrance.

“What about Mom?” Dewey said after a while. “How do we know she’s okay?”

He didn’t know how to answer this question himself, but he thought hard about it while they walked. He tried his best to corner his own feeling and make it speak, make it give his son, make it give both of them, something to hope for when logic failed. “Did you see the sign at the mine entrance?” he said.

“Hugh showed it to me. It’s a stupid sign.”

“Maybe not if you think of it the right way.”

“How do you know what’s the right way?” Dewey asked.

He wanted to say, Because it’s my sign, I made it with my own hands, but it sounded too strange, and he wasn’t sure he could explain to Dewey what he meant. “I’m just saying what I think,” he said. “What I think it means is that if you dream something, or you wish for something, that thing is already real.”

Dewey didn’t say anything in response and they walked along with the sound of their footsteps echoing. From somewhere below the passageway, farther down in the mine, there came a noise that sounded like an engine laboring.

“Let me tell you a story,” Tonio said. “When I was about your age, maybe a little bit younger, my mother and father planned a surprise for me on Halloween.”

“Halloween is fun,” Dewey said. “This is starting off to be a good story.”

“You have to understand, though, that your grandparents weren’t very good with surprises. They didn’t understand children.” He thought about Robbie, and how Robbie had to grow up there with them, too, when they were much older and probably understood children even less. “My father was a judge, you know.”

“I know,” Dewey said.

“Very proper, very stern.”

“I know,” Dewey said. “He’s pretty stern now.”

“But he loves you,” Tonio said. “He loved me, too, but he wouldn’t show it. I didn’t know he loved me when I was a child.”

“I always knew you loved me,” Dewey said.

Tonio stopped walking for a moment, and he put his hand on his son’s head, felt the matted hair, and then he started walking again. “Good,” he said, and he took a deep breath, the musty air making him cough a little. “So it was Halloween, and it was before school, and I was at the table eating breakfast.”

“What did you eat?” Dewey said.

“I don’t remember.”

“But generally what did you eat? I mean, what in general did you like to eat for breakfast as a kid?”

“That’s a good question, Doozer,” he said. “I don’t really remember. I don’t think it matters now.”

“Everything matters now,” Dewey said.

He looked down at his son, who seemed to have grown taller in the last week. “Let’s say cereal, then. I think I liked to eat cereal as a kid.”

“Okay,” Dewey said. He reached out his hand and ran it along the tunnel wall. “Ew,” he said, and wiped his hand on his sweater.

“I wouldn’t touch that,” Tonio said. “Dripstone formation. Bacteria. It’s what happens where water gets in. It also might mean we’re getting closer.”

They walked along hearing their footsteps and that sound like the hollow whistle of a distant machine beneath them. “I know what that is,” Dewey said.

“Dripstone,” he asked, “or that sound in the air?”

“Both,” Dewey said. He was looking at his feet.

Tonio knew the sound, too. He’d heard it before somewhere. It wasn’t a good sound and it didn’t foretell good things. “So,” he said, “Halloween. I’d had a dream…Don’t you have a coat to wear?”

“It’s wet,” Dewey said, and wiped his nose on his sweater sleeve. “It’s hard to keep things dry here.” He kept walking without looking up.

“I’d had a dream the night before, probably because I watched a scary movie.”

“Because it was the night before Halloween,” Dewey said.

“Right,” Tonio said. “It was the first time I’d had the dream, but I’ve had it many times since. I was walking in the dark, and there was something burning somewhere, and no matter which way I went the fire kept getting closer. Soon I had walked into the middle of the fire, but before it burned me, everything went black and the fire suddenly went out and there in its place was the biggest diamond I’d ever seen.”

“So it turned out to be a good dream.”

“Sort of. The next morning I was eating breakfast, and my mother and father rushed into the kitchen. They were both smiling for some reason, which was unusual. Normally only one of them would smile at a time. My mother said, ‘Come quick, Anthony, we found treasure in the hall closet!’ So I ran to the hall closet and I opened the door and there it was, glowing in the dark, the biggest diamond I’d ever seen.”

“Really?”

Tonio pointed the light back the way they had come but there was nothing to see. It seemed as though the noise kept getting closer. “No, not really. It was a glass candle my mother had lit to try to set the mood. The treasure turned out to be two tickets to an Egyptian exhibition at the museum.”

“That’s it?” Dewey said. He pulled his hand away from Tonio’s and wiped it on his pants and then held Tonio’s hand again.

“But when I opened the closet door, I saw the diamond. It was like an illusion that disappeared when I stared at it too long.”

Dewey stopped walking. Tonio pulled up beside him and shined the light ahead in the tunnel. The shaft felt hollow like a mouth and you could hear steady dripping from the ceiling now and behind it there was that humming or rasping noise from down below. Dewey stared straight ahead but his face was blank.

“What?” Tonio said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m just listening.”

“To what?” he asked. “My story or that noise?”

“Both,” Dewey said. “Go on telling it.”

Something in his son’s voice made him pause for a moment. “You sure?”

“Yes,” Dewey said mechanically. “Finish telling me about the diamond.”

“Well,” he said, a little uncertainly, searching his son’s face, which was pale and glistening in the oblique beam of the flashlight. “There’s not that much more to tell. At the same time, my mother and father shouted ‘Happy Halloween!,’ and then my mother picked up an envelope from behind the candle and gave it to me. The envelope had the tickets in it. I was just mad about the diamond.”

They had started walking again and Dewey seemed to have gotten back into the rhythm of the story. “Your parents were really weird,” he said.

“Right,” Tonio said, “but my point has nothing to do with that.”

They had reached another fork and to the left was a rubble-strewn path and an old lift going down to even lower subterranean levels. The rasping noise had grown louder, and Tonio had to stop talking while they veered away and into a tunnel that rose slightly upward.

“The point is this,” he said, and he stopped, and he knelt down so that he was looking directly into Dewey’s eyes, at his dirty face and greasy hair. “Have you not been able to take a shower?”

“Like I said, Hugh and Lorraine make me wash up in the kitchen.”

“Who are Hugh and Lorraine again? Never mind for now.” He put his hand on Dewey’s shoulder. “The point is this. What I remember after all these years is that, when I opened the closet door, I saw a sparkling diamond, the biggest one in the world. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Dewey said. “I think so.”

“I can still see the diamond as if it were actually there, and I’ve dreamed about it ever since. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t actually happen. What matters now is that I stored it that way in my memory. It’s in my memory the same way as…I don’t know, the time when we surprised you with the hamster.”

“So what are you saying?” Dewey said. A note of panic had crept into his voice. “That I should just be happy remembering Mom?”

He pulled Dewey in closer, as if he were afraid he might fly away. “No, what I’m saying is that I believe Mom is okay someplace and that she’s trying to find us.” Unexpectedly, a vision of Julia in the hotel alone, seated on the edge of the bed, surrounded by suitcases, troubled him. He adjusted his glasses on his nose and continued. “And we have to keep trying to find her. We have to keep on believing that we’ll find her for however long it takes. I know that’s not logical, and I’m not saying that all the things I tried to teach you before were wrong—I’m just saying that maybe I haven’t paid enough attention to my subjective experience of the world.” He thought about that, everything he’d stored up inside him, all this time, all these years. He had been afraid of it, how strongly he felt about the life he’d made, how every little event, every time Julia had ever kissed him lightly on the lips to say goodbye, every time she’d touched his hand in passing, added something to a foundation, an edifice of accrued memories. He had wanted it not to be dangerous. He had thought you could hide yourself away. “What’s true is what I make true. That’s what the sign means. That’s how I know Mom is okay somewhere. Does that make sense?”

“Maybe to someone else,” Dewey said, “but not to me. I’m only ten years old.”

His son stood there sniffling. Tonio pulled his shirtsleeve down over his hand and wiped Dewey’s nose with it. “You know Mom. You can picture her right now.” Dewey looked down at the ground and nodded. “Keep that picture. Keep it in your head and Mom will come back to you.”

Dewey leaned in and rested his forehead against Tonio’s cheek. For the few moments that they stayed there that way, Tonio formed his own picture of his wife, a picture of her lying in their bed in Mount Pleasant in the morning with the sun coming through the windows, the cat, Cleopatra, sitting on her stomach and kneading her paws on the blanket while Julia talked to her in the way she had a habit of doing—How is Cleo this morning?

He pulled Dewey in closer. “I kept picturing you, and you kept picturing me. That’s why we found each other in this place.”

“I know about Sparky,” Dewey said. “I saw. I was watching from the window.” Tonio could feel his son’s breath catch, and he ran his hand through Dewey’s sweaty hair, and kissed him lightly on his forehead. He had killed Sparky with a hammer and buried him out behind the trees, and then he had stood there by the small grave trying to compose himself before he went back to the house. He wasn’t upset because of Sparky—Sparky was better off—but because he remembered the day they had brought Sparky home, how his son had looked at him with such joy, and how he had known it couldn’t last.

“Sparky was suffering.”

“I know, Dad. I’m not blaming you.” Dewey turned his head so that his face was buried in Tonio’s chest. “I’m saying I understand.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” Dewey said. “I understand everything.”

In a minute they went on. The passage was cut squarely out of the rock and it rose more and more and he knew they were close to the surface now. Dewey walked along beside him and they switched off holding the flashlight and the pellet gun. Tonio sensed that there was a door up ahead in the passageway before he actually saw it. It was a plain steel door at the top of a flight of wooden stairs, a door that looked less like the opening to a mine than to his faculty office building back home in Charleston.

As they moved toward the door the wind picked up, whistling from down in the mine shaft. Tonio pulled Dewey close and walked faster, the door looming in the near distance, flickering in the yellow light like a flame. The wind stopped, everything went still, and the heat rushed in and there was no air to breathe. Tonio gasped but drew in nothing, and Dewey bent over next to him, and Tonio had to straighten him up and keep him moving toward the door.

They could see well enough to get up the stairs, and he pushed Dewey up ahead of him. But then there was nothing left in the world except heat, and the ground convulsed beneath Tonio’s feet like a live thing shaking itself from slumber, and he hurried Dewey on as he heard the sound from below again, stronger this time, an extended moan. He fumbled the key from his pocket to open the door but there was Diamond on the stairs, as if he had been forged in the flashlight beam.

“Hurry, hurry, boy,” Diamond said, and boosted Dewey up with a hand to the back. The door opened to a rush of cold air and the sound of it went screaming down the shaft, and from far below came a rumble of expanding air, as if the cold air were being taken in, and then the rumble grew and the wind roared back up, burning hot.

Tonio clung to Dewey’s sweater and peeked carefully out the doorway. Outside was the snow and the cloudy night sky and one streetlight and, just across the alleyway, the side door leading into the hotel, the door that he had so often disappeared through. He pushed Dewey ahead of him out into the alley and handed him the flashlight and then mounted the top step, preparing to go out himself, still feeling the heat at his back and the earsplitting noise, but then an arm crossed his chest and barred his way, Diamond grappling with him there on the top step so that he almost lost his balance and tumbled down.

“No,” Diamond shouted. “No, sir, you can’t now, you can’t! Just the boy! Just the boy!”

He wrenched Diamond’s hand away and surveyed the street and right there, behind Dewey, fitting a key into the lock of the door across the alleyway, was Julia.

They were going to be all right. They would be all right after all, just as he had said. Within an hour they would be gone from here, even if they had to walk all the way to the interstate. They could do it together, they could make it. Things would be different, there would not be so much distance between him and his wife, there never should have been, they had known they would be together since the day they met on that bus, they had known it even before then, it had been in the air forever. Dewey saw her, too, his mother, and he slipped and scrambled through the snow calling her name but she seemed not to hear. She opened the door, and she stepped inside, and at the last moment she turned. Tonio saw her clearly in the streetlight. She wore a puzzled expression, as if she was trying hard to remember something that barely eluded her, like peering through a curtain at a light, and for a moment he thought their eyes locked, and he wanted to convey something to her, he wanted to let her know something important, but he didn’t know the words, it was only a feeling—he smiled at her. He smiled, he hoped, in the same way he had smiled that day when they met on the bus, when he held out his hand to show where he’d written her number. He smiled for all he was worth, but he didn’t know if she smiled back at him, because his eyes were clouded with tears.

The door across the street slammed shut and Dewey called out and ran to his mother and Tonio stepped out into the street himself, and he had the strangest feeling. He saw Diamond standing there to the side of the door, Diamond with that tragic look on his face, Please stop, Mr. Addison, you can’t, and he called out to Dewey and Dewey turned, and now he was coming out the door to his son and he could see him there in his sweater standing forlornly in the street, but he felt the crystal in his veins, the ice contracting. He was being pulled, harder this time than ever, through the cold passage. He could feel himself shattering like ice—his bones, his skin—and with what was left of him, of Tonio, of Mr. Addison, of Julia’s husband and Dewey’s father, he reached out his arm, and he opened his hand, and he tossed Dewey the key.