5

Will waits for his father at Molyvos, a Greek restaurant in midtown with a tiled floor and walls the color of terra-cotta. It’s not the quietest place, but the lunchtime crowd has started to thin, and the layout makes for a lot of small corner tables, a sense of privacy if not calm. Will prefers to have his back to the wall, but he takes the chair and saves the banquette for his father, who gives his shoulder a hello squeeze before he slides in.

“So,” he says. “How’s Carole? Sam?”

“They’re good. Sam’s loving this crazy tai kwon do class we put her in. Spends hours bowing to herself in the mirror. Carole’s working too many hours—big surprise. There’s some sort of grievance developing between the union and the district, but her position probably won’t be affected by whatever changes are made. If any changes are made.”

“So she did sign the contract?”

Will nods. In addition to her private practice, Carole has recently taken a job with District 15, screening children for speech disorders. Four mornings a week, she administers diagnostic tests at either P.S. 321 or P.S. 282 in Park Slope, or at P.S. 8, a progressive elementary school in Brooklyn Heights. No retirement package, but benefits that include health insurance at a rate much more affordable than what he can get through NAAP.

Will waves the waiter away. “We need a few minutes,” he says. He points at a book in his father’s upper-left-hand pocket. “What’s that?”

His father pulls out a paperback copy of Frankenstein and asks Will if he’s read it.

“A long time ago.”

His father frowns. “I wasn’t expecting it to be so sad,” he says, thumbing through the pages. “I’d stop, but you know how I am. Can’t walk out of a bad movie. Can’t cancel a trip to the beach because rain’s forecast.”

“Where are you?” Will asks him when he doesn’t look up from the book. “What part?”

The two of them meet once a month, just to see each other, keep up. Sometimes they talk about books they’ve discovered, movies they’ve seen, and Will is often surprised by his father’s choice of reading material. Last month it was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

“Just finished volume two,” his father says, and closes the book. “The monster has killed Frankenstein’s son. And he’s requested a female companion as hideous and deformed as himself, so that he can make love to a creature that won’t turn away from him in revulsion.” Will’s father closes his eyes for a moment. “Isn’t it curious that such a tragic figure would have become, a hundred years later, a kind of joke? A hulking, green bungler with big boots and bolts in his neck. A figure of derision. Not capable of an act as focused as a hateful, vengeful murder.”

“Why are you reading it?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I was in the bookstore, looking through the classics because, you know, I skipped so many. I picked it up, put it back on the shelf, ended up coming back to it when nothing else caught my eye. Something about the cover, must have been.” He holds it up, but the picture’s too small for Will to see clearly from across the table, and his father hands it to him. It’s a reproduction of a painting—six people gathered around a table and above them, on a pedestal, a white bird trapped inside a glass globe. Will turns the book over to read the fine print on the back cover. “A detail from ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, ’ a painting in the National Gallery,” he tells his father. No date is given for the work, and Will has never heard of the artist, Joseph Wright. The bird is caught in an unnatural position, one wing extended, perhaps broken, and a tube attaches the sealed glass globe to a sinister-looking apparatus. The whole scene is lit dramatically so that a flood of yellow light picks out certain details and leaves others in darkness, as in a crucifixion by Caravaggio, for example.

“Doves usually represent the holy spirit, don’t they?” Will asks his father.

“Guess so,” he says. “Distressing, seeing an animal trapped like that.” The waiter returns and Will’s father points to a line on the menu. Will leans forward, trying to see what he’s chosen.

“What are you getting?” he asks him.

“Dolmades?”—dole maids—“Is that how you say it?”

Will shrugs. “Grape leaves,” he says. “With rice inside and something else, I’m not sure what.”

Across the table, his father is patting the many pockets of his sportsman’s vest as if to remind himself of their contents, a gesture that has become habitual, even compulsive. Once he’d sold his veterinary practice and discarded his lab coats, he created what is in effect a new uniform: the khaki vest with numerous pockets, all of which he fills; wide-wale, navy blue corduroy trousers; and a fishing hat that looks like an upside-down flowerpot. The hat might be funny on another man—on anyone but his father—and Will has himself to blame for the vest. After he complained to his mother that he and Carole were receiving too many of what they’d begun to refer to as his father’s “booty calls,” his mother bought the vest so his father wouldn’t have to carry his cell phone in the back pocket of his trousers, into which he’d jam the thing and then sit on it while driving, inadvertently putting pressure on whatever button he’d programmed to speed-dial Will’s home number. Whoever picked up would hear the thrum and whoosh of highway travel punctuated by random throat clearings and sometimes the strains of whatever song was playing on the local oldies station. “Dad!” Will would yell. “DAD!” But his father never heard the tiny voice coming out from underneath him, and once Will had answered the phone, he found it difficult to hang up and sever the connection. Though his father was oblivious to his phantom presence in the car—or perhaps because he was oblivious— there was an unexpected intimacy in having been summoned to ride along with him, invisible and undetected, returned to his ten-year-old self, happy to be with his father, no matter how workaday the errand.

“So,” Will says to him after the waiter has left, “I talked with Mom.”

“Oh,” his father says. “And?”

“She told me it’s that woman you met at the gallery. The one who bought all those prints.”

“Yup.”

“You’re living with her?” Will asks.

“I like the city.”

“I didn’t ask you how you felt about New York. That’s not—”

His father smiles. “I know.” Silver hair and laugh lines have made Will’s father improbably handsome, more so than either of his much younger sons, more than when he himself was younger and women already found him irresistible, so that they’d linger in the exam room, schedule appointments for healthy animals, drop by the clinic with questions about dewclaws or ear mites or housebreaking, whatever they could think of. Will remembers his mother being good-humored about this, but then, his father hadn’t given her reason to be jealous, not back then. Or at least he hadn’t as far as Will knew.

His father plays with a rubber band on his wrist. “I spend a few nights in town, then go back home.”

“What about Mom?”

“She’s busy enough that she doesn’t seem to take much note of where I am.”

“Is that what this is about? You feel like she’s not paying attention to you?”

“She’s not. But that’s not what this is about.” The waiter sets their plates before them, and his father picks up his fork. “Your mother and I have been married for nearly fifty years,” he says. “You don’t think we’ve paid attention to each other the whole time, do you?”

“I guess I’m just trying to figure this out—what it means.”

“Does it have to mean something? I like spending a few nights a week in the city. I like spending time with Lottie.”

“Lottie?”

“Charlotte.”

“She’s good company?” Will says. “What do you talk about?”

“Nothing much. We rent movies. DVDs. She has a good setup. Big screen. Like a little theater, almost.”

“She’s rich, Dad,” Will says. His father nods, chews. “But that can’t be—” Will is suddenly aware that he’s pinching the skin over his Adam’s apple, pulling at it absentmindedly as he does sometimes while concentrating, especially on something that bothers him. “There must be something else,” he says.

His father looks at him, raises his eyebrows. “There is.”

“Oh, God,” Will says. “Don’t tell me this is about sex.”

“I didn’t introduce the topic.”

“It is about sex?”

“Will,” his father says. He puts his knife and fork down and leans forward over his plate. “I take it your mother told you I was having an affair. Doesn’t that imply that it’s about sex?”

“But . . .” You’re seventy-four, he was going to say, his mind already jumping to Viagra, and then to one of his patients, only two years older than Will, who uses a cocktail of Viagra and Cialis, each prescribed by a different physician, neither of whom knows about the other or that the man doesn’t even have a problem with sexual performance. “My happiness,” the patient had said when Will challenged him, “is predicated on my getting this reward. The only time I feel really good, really alive, is when I’m getting laid. And everything I do, all the effort I put into my career, my wife, my kids—it’s all about earning my right to have relations with as many ladies as possible.”

“As many as possible,” Will repeated. The man nodded.

“I feel okay about that,” the man said. “I work hard. I couldn’t work any harder. I feel I’m entitled.” He looked at Will. “Who’s getting hurt?” he demanded, and then he answered himself. “No one, that’s who.”

Across the table, Will’s father is smiling. “Will,” he says, “I’m not asking for your permission, or your advice, or congratulations. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about you. How’s work?”

Will shakes his head. “I have a problem,” he says.

“Yeah? What sort?”

“I’m not sure. I’m trying to figure it out.” His father tilts his head to one side, frowns. Come on, the expression says, get to the point. Will draws a deep breath. “For the past month or so, every time I’m in session with a female patient, I end up, I don’t know, having this, uh, physical response to her. It’s weird. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

“Physical meaning sexual?” his father asks, and Will nods.

“As if she were the most desirable woman on earth, and I the most sexually starved man. Makes no difference what she looks like.”

“Huh,” his father says. “So what do you do?”

“What do I do? Nothing, of course.”

“Not with your patient. I mean, what do you do about dealing with the problem?”

“Check in with Daniel, I guess. I’ve made the appointment.”

“Daniel, your what’s it called, trainer?”

“Training analyst,” Will says. “Basically, the mandate is that any time an analyst experiences feelings that are inappropriate or that might compromise the relationship between him and a patient, he goes back to his own analyst. Whoever it is he sees when a situation like that comes up.”

“Countertransference,” his father says, nodding.

“Right. But countertransference is a neutral term. It isn’t necessarily wrong or even untherapeutic. Just sometimes.”

“You see Mitch?” Will asks to change the topic. His father wrinkles his forehead in an expression of something that looks like apprehension. “On TV,” Will clarifies, and his father shakes his head.

“When was this?”

“Sunday last. CNN, I think. Some filler show called People in the News.”

“Oh?” his father says.

Will nods, watching his expression. “Same old, same old.” His father doesn’t answer, and Will frowns at him. “It still bugs me, you know it does, his turning his back on all of us. I can’t square it. Coming after . . . after he was . . . well, after that toast at the rehearsal dinner.”

His father waves a hand through the air. “Let it go,” he says, as he does whenever Will drags Mitch into their conversations. Let it go. Let him go. Give it a rest. Do yourself a favor: let it go. But how?

Will doesn’t say anything, remembering his brother the summer they were at camp together in the Adirondacks, both of them thirteen, an age he associates primarily with the onslaught of wet dreams. He sees Mitch’s long body moving underwater, white, ghostly, aimed toward the dock where Will was standing, his face breaking through the surface. He came up out of the water and onto the dock in one motion, already more graceful and at ease in water than on land. It was an all-boys camp they attended that summer, and some of the campers teased Mitch about his birthmark, a port-wine stain that colored more than half of his face purple, but it had been Will whom this angered. Mitch was stung, he must have been, but whatever pain he felt in the moment seemed to fade. Or rather, Mitch faded, he became increasingly vague and distant—in Will’s memory it’s as if he is out of focus, an outline blurring into the background—while Will seethed with rage he couldn’t control. Like two people long married, he and Mitch had developed a tacit, if not unconscious, symbiosis, one in which Will bore their humiliation, both the shame of his twin’s disfigurement as well as the imperative to respond to insult. For his part, Mitch represented their capacity for patience and longsufferingness. Superficially, he did.

That summer, Will got into fights on his brother’s behalf and, after bloodying a boy’s nose, was given formal warning by the camp director. A report of his misconduct was sent home to their parents, and in reparation for the nose, he’d been denied an afternoon of tubing on the river, instructed to spend those hours composing a letter of apology to the owner of the nose and another letter to the nose’s mother and father. As he remembers it, he had to write about a dozen drafts of each before he was able to purge the letters of recriminations against the boy he’d punched, and it required an extraordinary act of will to actually form the word sorry. Then, not an hour after he’d presented the letters to the director, he overheard a kid call Mitch an ugly douche bag and, before he knew what he was doing, had attacked him. The camp director called their parents to ask that they pick Will up; he was expelled.

Mitch was encouraged to stay, but the twins left together, and though there was little discussion of what had happened, it was that summer, before eighth grade, that Will and Mitch and their parents became aware of what should have been apparent for some time: his and Mitch’s mutual, even symbiotic, maladjustment. Because Mitch had to bear the birthmark physically, Will had assigned himself its psychic burden.

“Hey,” his father says, “where’d you go?”

“Nowhere. Actually, I was thinking about that summer I got kicked out of camp.”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. I guess it was the beginning of my being aware that things between Mitch and me were pretty seriously screwed up. That I didn’t respond to people on my own terms, or for my own sake, because I’d fallen into the habit of empathizing with Mitch. As if nothing were happening to me, not really, or not independently. I know, I know,” he says, seeing his father’s expression. “You’ve heard this before. And what’s the use in going back over it? I just wish the two of us had talked more. Or at all.”

His father is still shaking his head, as if the very fact of his other son is baffling, unknowable. “I guess nothing else gives him what he gets from swimming,” he says. It’s not unusual for Will’s father to make non sequiturs, voicing only the last in a series of thoughts.

“What’s that?” Will asks.

“I don’t know. Beauty, maybe. Excitement. Simultaneous fulfillment of his life and his death wishes.” Will says nothing. His father pulls a credit card from his wallet. “This one’s mine,” he says, and he lays the card on the check, motioning to the waiter. “What’s the word for the death wish? Thanatos? Eros and thanatos ? Life and death?”

Will nods. “What else are you reading, Dad? Frankenstein with a little Freud on the side? A dash of Ferenczi?”

His father smiles as he signs the receipt and slides out from the banquette; he stands and his napkin falls from his lap onto the floor. Will picks it up and lays it on the table. He looks at his watch. “You want to walk a little ways? I’m running early.”

“Sure. Samantha still seeing that woman?” his father asks, alluding to Laura, the child psychologist.

“No, no. She hasn’t gone since last spring.”

“Yeah? That’s good, no?”

“I think so. It’s hard to say with kids. It’s, not as if Luke’s death won’t stay with her for all her life. Inform who she becomes. But for all that, she doesn’t appear unhappy. I’m always looking for symptoms, of course, signs of depression, anxiety, but she seems okay. Genuinely okay. I see her in the school yard. She skips, giggles, plays with the other little girls. She’s the president of their jump-rope club. In two years she’s going to set a world record, she says, but she doesn’t have to start practicing until she turns nine.”

“Sounds normal to me,” his father says.

Will points to Frankenstein. His father is patting the book through his pocket. “Is this classics thing an attempt to suck up some culture so you have something to talk about with, with—what’s-her-name, Carla?”

His father grins at him. “Charlotte,” he says, “and we don’t need things to talk about.”

“Nothing?”

“Not much.”

They stand just inside the restaurant door, looking out at the people on the sidewalk, the taxis, the buildings that look like walls of glass. A thick fog swirls down the avenue. “It’s very strange,” Will’s father says, “having sex with someone other than your mother. I hadn’t done that in, well, decades.”

“Forty-nine years,” Will says. “Almost fifty. A half-century. Golden anniversary coming up.”

His father smiles his disarming smile. “I’m not sure if the sex is better,” he says. “Maybe it’s just different. One thing—it’s reacquainted me with my body, sort of yanked me back into it, like I haven’t been for as long as I can remember. Started trimming my toe-nails with attention. Flossing my teeth. Upgraded my underwear.”

“How’s Mom feel about it?”

“You know, Will, she’s very happy being a businesswoman. She likes it a great deal.”

“So much so that she doesn’t care if you’re cheating on her?”

After Will’s father sold his veterinary practice, and perhaps in response to his having embarked on a new, solitary career as a photographer rather than settling into leisure with her, Will’s mother transformed herself into a dervish of housework, not so much a woman as one of those tornadoes that blew out of a bottle of, what cleanser was it? Mr. Clean?—something advertised in the late sixties, when he and Mitch came home from school on winter afternoons and watched too much television. Not that she’d been uninterested in hygiene before, but her commitment had ebbed as much as it flowed, never reaching an obsessive standard. But, having scrubbed their house in Ravena until there was no carpet left to pull up, no floor to strip or tub to scour or window to wash, she turned her attention to other people’s homes, creating a business, overnight it seemed.

Heaven Help You is the name of Will’s mother’s cleaning service; her business card includes a graphic of an antic mop wearing a halo. She’d started out with two young women and now employs twelve, sending them forth in teams of three, charging one hundred dollars an hour and clearing 20 percent of the gross. Will went back to his hometown some months after she’d established herself, and the whole place looked cleaner to him. As if his mother’s frenzy for order and cleanliness had penetrated as far as the town council, there were new litter barrels on the corners, and a shining yellow street cleaner came by, spraying water on his bumper as it turned its massive brushes against the curb.

As they exit the restaurant, Will’s father reaches out and touches him gently on the chest. “Cheating implies that I’m being dishonest. I’m not. I asked her permission.”

“You’re kidding.” They walk out into air heavy with moisture.

“No, I’m not. I’m not kidding.”

“I guess I missed that part.”

“Oh? What part did she tell you?”

“I don’t know. How many are there?”

Will’s father doesn’t answer this.

“I called to talk to you,” Will says. “She gave me a number in Manhattan, and when I asked whose it was, she said, ‘Your father’s girlfriend’s.’ ”

“Huh.”

“I tried to get her to talk to me, but no dice.”

“She thinks you blow things out of proportion.”

“So she told you it was fine with her if you went ahead and had an affair?”

“What she said was she trusted me to determine how important it was for me to do this. And that if I decided I really did need to, then she accepted that.”

“Need to?” Will asks.

“Okay—want to.”

“And is there parity? If Mom decides she needs or wants to explore sex with another man, is that all right with you?”

“Of course. I’m not a hypocrite.” Will’s father stops walking and looks up at the slice of sky over the avenue, a luminous gray band. Already his vest is covered with a layer of fine droplets. “I don’t think she’s all that interested, though.”

“That’s lucky.” Will manages to say this without sounding peevish. It must be that he’s feeling guilty for having facilitated his father’s entry into the art world, and thus his arrival at infidelity to his mother.

After a period of trial and error that he now calls his apprenticeship, Will’s father had come to Brooklyn with a shirt box filled with what he judged were the best among his photographs, and asked Will if they could go together to a gallery in Manhattan.

“I don’t think it works that way, Dad,” Will told him, not wanting any part in what he was sure would prove a disappointment.

“Well, how does it?”

“You can’t just walk in off the street. I’m sure you need an introduction or something, a—”

“Maybe,” his father said, and he smiled. What did he know? the smile said. He was a retired veterinarian. But Will lived in the city. He must know someone, didn’t he?

Yes, actually, the mother of a friend of Luke’s, yet another someone eager to inoculate herself against whatever it was that had fallen upon Will and his family. She’d gladly do a favor—Anything! Just ask!—to address the difference between them, the fact that her child was living and his was not. An editor at Art News, she knew a number of gallery representatives, and in a gesture akin to throwing salt over her shoulder, she took the box of prints into her clean hands. Will could assure his father, she told him, that she would be responsible for their handling.

To Will’s astonishment, within a few months, his father’s work was picked up by a small gallery on Greene Street, his photographs mounted, framed, and hung on a freshly painted wall, celebrated with an opening announced on creamy, deckle-edged invitations and catered by attractive, hip young men and women who carried trays crowded with glasses of champagne, caviar rolled into tiny blini, and slices of honeydew wrapped in prosciutto sliced so thin it was almost invisible.

Henry Moreland was an instant and happy success, his work favorably mentioned in Art News and Photography, his show recommended by Time Out, embraced not just because he was old but because he was a retired animal doctor. Having been a humble sort of savior, a man who’d never cultivated connections in the sniping New York art world, never sucked up to anyone or done anything to invite spite, Will’s father was forgiven his talent. Gracious at the opening, he introduced Will’s mother—wearing a new dress and salon-styled hair—to people she would never see again, among them the woman with whom he’d embark on an affair. Will and Carole had watched all this from where they stood, on the party’s periphery, grateful to have Samantha between them, the necessity of answering her questions, of collecting her half-eaten hors d’oeuvres and finding her a cup of water that didn’t sparkle, of wiping up her spills and asking her again to please not point, not even at people whose clothes were designed to awe and confound.

The crowd of flushed celebrants; the trays of filled champagne flutes; the indecipherable praise; the little cards that read “Price available upon request”: none of this was what Will’s father had imagined for his old age. But, on the other hand, as his modest smile implied, it wasn’t unwelcome.

“Dad?” Will says now, as they stop for a red light, “when you’re working, taking a picture or printing it, do you ever feel something’s being revealed to you? That your consciousness is heightened— augmented, maybe—by a force outside of your own intellect? That you understand something you hadn’t before?”

His father looks at him. “I don’t know. I can’t tell what you’re talking about. Do you mean something to do with God?”

“It wouldn’t have to be. It could, but it wouldn’t have to.”

They walk in silence for a block, then cross Forty-seventh Street. Ahead are the bright lights of Times Square, mesmerizing, each neon shape bleeding into the fog and creating its own aura of color. So many more giant screens than there were even a few years ago, it seems to Will. On the side of one building a series of portraits appear, each for a second or two. He watches to see what the monumental faces are selling. Insurance of some kind, life insurance, or health. Or maybe it’s financial planning, mutual funds. Beyond them, he can just make out the shadowy outline of 1 Times Square, the building on top of which the glittering New Year’s Eve ball slides down a flagpole, its audience, five hundred thousand strong, counting down the seconds to their lists of resolutions, or at least to clean slates. Will has never understood why a giant disco ball is the country’s chosen symbol of time moving forward, and shouldn’t the big orb go up rather than down? So un-American to descend. America was all about upswings and bootstraps and mind-over-matter, a confidence so profound—or was it blind?—it ensured the country would always be out of step with the rest of the world.

“Are you talking about inspiration?” his father asks. “Whether it comes from within a person or from without?”

“I don’t know. What’s inspiration?”

His father frowns thoughtfully, says nothing.

The photographs his father takes mystify Will. Whenever he visits, he looks at his father’s most recent work, going slowly through the images, many of which he can place in the town where he grew up: benches he’s sat on, signposts he’s swung from, mailboxes and sewer covers and barber poles. But no sculptures or fountains or fancy weather vanes; his father prefers the artless and unassuming among possible subjects, and points his camera at things that stay put. There are no people and no animals, not even trees that aren’t incidental, blurred background. Only objects, humble objects strangely transformed by his father’s vision. It must be the light, Will has decided, the angle of the sun, the time of day, perhaps a filter that removes light waves of a particular length. What else could elevate a seemingly inventory art into a catalog of yearning? Even a lamppost looks as if, unfulfilled by life as a lamppost, it’s on the brink of evolving into something else, something truer and brighter and realer. By virtue of a silent, invisible intent, it seems to shimmer, caught just at that moment before it disappears, changes, becomes another thing, or a nonthing—animate, potent, and unexpected.

Or maybe it isn’t a function of light; maybe it’s just projection. Maybe what Will sees is his own need to believe in a father who has the ability to alter the world around himself, or, at the least, to show Will what a new, illuminated world might look like.

“Well,” his father says, “aside from painting and music and what have you, aren’t you asking the old God question? Whether or not God exists outside of faith? Independent of our faith?”

Will looks at him. “Weird how as you get older you find yourself less and less certain of anything.”

“Just wait,” his father says. “You have no idea.”

“Mom believes in God, doesn’t she?”

His father shakes his head. “That’s a very private question,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever asked her directly.”

“Carole does. Or maybe she doesn’t. She seems at peace with life, with herself. Not like me. I think she might be what they used to call a secular humanist. Brimming over with unaccountable optimism. Even after Luke. Even now, when every day brings more evidence of how many messes we’ve made that we can’t undo. Environmental damage. Terrorism.”

His father nods slowly. “Sometimes,” he says, as he steps onto the curb, “when I print a picture, I see that I’ve photographed what I didn’t know was there. Whatever it is, it’s something I looked at without seeing. So I’m surprised, I feel something’s been given to me. But by whom? What?” He looks at Will. “There’s a quote I came across. I can’t get it out of my head. ‘The unconscious is “God’s country.’ ” He folds his arms over his chest, frowning. “That’s the reason I’ve been reading up on it—Freud, Jung. What do you make of it?”

“What’s the context?” Will asks. “Who said it?”

His father makes a swatting gesture. “I can’t remember. What I want to know is, is it true? Do you, as a psychoanalyst, someone who’s always mucking about in there, think it’s true?”

Will frowns. “Well, the unconscious would be the place from which irrational fears and hopes, dreams—”

His father interrupts. “Whoever it was, that’s not what they were talking about.”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“I know where you’re going, and it’s a little more mysterious than that.”

“No, you didn’t let me finish.”

“All right. I’m listening.”

“Okay. This is the only way I can answer. I’ve thought about Luke’s continued existence. I don’t mean my wish that he live on, but the conflict—the discontinuity—between his presence within me and his absence in the world. I’ve ascribed that, that disparity to the unconscious. My unconscious. I know that Luke’s . . .” Will stops, unable, for a moment, to speak. When he does, the first few words come out choked. “I know he’s dead,” he says, reaching for his father’s arm. “But only when I’m awake, conscious. In my unconscious, Luke lives. The realness of him in my dreams is, is so . . . I wake up, and the bed, the floor, my wife, my own hand—nothing has the . . . the reality, the incandescent life of the child in my dreams. My unconscious.

“So,” Will says, “maybe that’s an example of the unconscious being God’s country. A place of life after death. Of resurrection. Reunion with those who die before us.”

His father nods, looking up. “Heaven,” he says. “Just as it’s always been promised.”