NINE

I’VE GOT A customer for you,” Marty told Frank one night a few weeks later as he heaved himself to his feet and began to pass out the dinner plates. Marty’s eyes swam with exhaustion. School would end soon, and though his internship at the University of Wisconsin was secure, he thought endlessly about residency, about choosing a program that would determine where he and Eden would live for the next four years.

“Why don’t you worry about this after, say, your wedding?” Frank suggested. “After your final exams?” One would follow the other, in rapid succession, a month from now.

Marty ignored him. “Let me tell you about this client.”

Frank said, “I’m going to relax with the young dude here and watch Animal Planet.”

Holding up a restraining hand, Marty tucked into the chili like a man who wanted to drown his sorrows. Then he said, “Look, I have to tell you. Or she’ll kill me. You’ll like her. She’s a rare case.”

Frank waited, knowing Marty would go on, no matter what he said, although whatever Marty said, Frank would refuse to do it. Since Cedric and Tura died, he had no stomach for new plans, and his head ached as if watchfulness was a cap two sizes too small.

“She’s my professor. She’s taking a year off to train for something. Maybe the Olympics. Actually, she’s taking two years off if she makes the team, and she seems sure that she will.”

“What’s she a professor of?”

“Botany,” Marty said. “No! She’s a psychiatrist, obviously.”

“Is she delusional? Is that common? Because if you get to the age she must be and you haven’t realized a dream in the Olympics, that’s pretty far out of sight.”

“No, she’s young. Edie’s age. Kind of young. She . . . you know . . .” Marty made the universal hand sign of the inverse humpback C moving along the table to signify jumping horses. “What you do.”

“I meant does she do all-around dressage and so forth, or just jumpers?”

“In-a-ring type jumping, judging from the pictures on her wall. She’s very good. Tops.”

“I’m not set up to train, pal. That’s a whole business of its own.”

“Wouldn’t you like to do that, though?”

You’ll train your own horses, he heard the vanished say.

“Someday. I might. But right now I have the farm to get fixed up, and Ian—”

“She’s going to come over anyhow, to see the place, and she’s invited to the wedding,” Marty said. “She moved here two years ago from North Carolina and she just moved her horse. She’s not happy with where he is.”

Under the table, Ian was methodically kicking Frank in his bad leg, waiting peevishly for a response. As it turned out, Ian loved school and, despite his muteness, was a hit with the other kids. The only downside to school was that Ian threw himself into it like a cyclone: he fell apart every day around four, and never got any traction until the weekend, when he slept twelve hours straight both nights. Waving to Marty, Frank pointed at Ian and said, “No TV tonight, buddy. You’re out of here.” He draped Ian over his shoulder, and Ian began to pinch the back of Frank’s head, digging his nails in. Frank tried to see it as a sign of how much the boy trusted him, but it hurt so much he wanted to drop Ian on his face. He would not later remember what he said to Marty.

As it turned out, he didn’t meet Claudia Campo until a couple of hours after he’d walked Eden down the aisle.

The wedding morning came up a bold, blue, late-May day and Frank was stunned as he lifted out his morning clothes, which had shown up in the one crate that actually did arrive, by the bruise of emotions. His suit was folded in broad sheets of tissue paper, next to Natalie’s wedding dress. He thought of the last time he’d put the suit on, which also was the only time.

Natalie saying, “Well, your eyes are too deep in your head, but you’re pretty when you smile, teeth like one of those horses of yours. And if you wear trousers like that every day, I’ll be your genie . . .” Natalie, in her crown of white rosebuds, at the top of the aisle, shaking off her father’s arm and kicking off her white pumps to run down the aisle to him.

Frank pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, then took Natalie’s wedding ring out of the child’s china mug where he kept it, and warmed it in his palm. Under the clothes lay the slim album. Natalie must have had it in her office to show to friends. She had asked that all the photos be sepia tinted, so they would never look outdated. Now Frank turned to the one of him laughing, arms linked with Cedric on one side in his ancient frock coat and Tura on the other, in a floor-length pale suit. They gazed at Frank with pride. Gently, he laid the album back in the box.

Later, at the ceremony itself, those memories tucked away with the ring, he was brought up short by even older sentiments. He gazed in astonishment at his mother’s straight-backed, fading beauty, and at Eden, the chubby, bookish baby, now a slim tulip of vanilla satin. A lone guitarist played Hope’s favorite song, “Stardust,” which had been played at her own wedding. The couple took their simple vows under a huge catalpa tree, where a traditional chuppah stood. Hope’s priest and Marty’s mother’s rabbi bestowed the mostly extraneous Judeo-Christian blessings. Marty stomped a lightbulb wrapped in a white handkerchief and Eden tossed her bouquet, which landed at the feet of a friend’s six-year-old daughter. Taking hands, they walked proudly into the arms of their families. Everywhere, there were splashes of Eden and Marty’s humor: the roses, irises, and the lady trumpet lilies that Hope said were called Pretty Woman were displayed in big zinc feed buckets. Behind the wedding canopy, they’d set up a makeshift altar, a two-tiered jump with TENACITY painted on it in thick bold letters. Instead of hiring a photographer, except for two or three formal portraits, they’d handed each guest, even the babies, an upscale disposable camera. A long water trough invited guests to “Dump Your Snaps Here When You Leave,” while an email guest book promised a selection of the choicest shots to everyone who signed up.

After the new-minted couple greeted the guests, everyone sat down at one of the long trestle tables on a hilltop patio to drink Spotted Cow Ale and eat picnic food—hamburgers and hotdogs and chicken kebabs passed among vats of potato salad and baked beans. The bridal dessert was almost as tall as Eden, a tower of crenellated carrot cake cauled in a hive of fly netting, with rubber horses that Ian clearly coveted racing around each layer.

Frank had jotted down ideas for the toast he would make as surrogate father of the bride. But when he stood, he said, instead, “I’ve never seen you two even be rude to each other. You guys have perfect sympathy, or at least you have the class to let everyone think you do. It seems like bad luck to wish you good luck. I can’t believe that Eden is grown up. What I really can’t believe is that you two won’t be coming home tonight.”

“It’s okay, Frank. We’ll be home tomorrow night,” Marty said.

Although they were spending their wedding night at a pricey bed-and-breakfast inn in Madison, their honeymoon was not set until July: they were going for a month to Australia, the tickets long since purchased. Brisbane was no longer on the itinerary. Their wedding-night treat was a gift from Frank, who had known the innkeepers since a night in Chicago a decade before when he had saved their then-teenage son from a robbery and a bad beating or worse. Several times over the years, visiting his mother, he’d opted to stay at the expansive lakeside mansion, where one whole floor with three luxe bedrooms was the honeymoon suite.

After the couple was drawn away to change for the dance—driven by Hope in the pony cart, with its canopy of blooms—there came a lull. Patrick took off to feed the horses. Hope phoned to say she was going to lie down for an hour, leaving Frank to greet an endless stream of people he hadn’t seen in ten years, if ever. Finally, in a cabin on the grounds cleaned up for the purpose, Frank changed into black pants and a cream-colored silk shirt Natalie had given him. He tried in vain to coax Ian out of his tuxedo, which he realized he would be buying tomorrow from Salvatore Rose Formal Wear.

The woman was standing alone near a circle of stone benches when Frank came out, and he noticed immediately that she was standing with no apparent expectation of any kind of reward or amusement or any sort of busyness—thinking, gazing around her, a skill Frank did not himself possess.

When she saw Frank, she said, “I’m Claudia Campo, Marty Fisher’s friend. And I know you’re Frank.”

“Hello,” Frank said. “You’re the rider.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. Not today, of course. There are enough splendors today. But could we talk, sometime?” The woman didn’t look as though she expected an answer in the negative. Frank wondered how old she was. Younger than he was, maybe Eden’s age or a little older, thirty-three, thirty-five, she was the kind of expensive dark blonde who had been told all her life that she was beautiful. A few lines around her lips said she’d become impatient with hearing that and wanted to move on to other things. Her eyes were big and brown and the makeup that emphasized them was cursory. She wore loose and drapey wide-legged black pants and a sleeveless coat. No necklace, no purse, Frank noticed. The only other woman Frank had known who never bothered with a necklace or a purse was his wife, although Natalie was vain in other ways.

“Sure,” Frank said. “Someday.” But the woman had shifted her attention to Ian.

She held out her hand, and Ian took it.

“I’m Claudia,” she said. “Hello.”

Ian said, “Hi.”

Heat that had nothing to do with the growing mugginess of the blue May evening flooded Frank’s face. Miles off in a cloudless sky, lightning winked.

“Are you okay?” said Claudia.

“I’m fine,” said Frank, sitting down on one of the benches. He asked Ian, “What did you say?”

“I said hi to her,” Ian told him. Although this was impossible, Frank recognized Ian’s light voice with his drawn-out, nasally Aussie vowels. The boy added, “I want those horses, please.”

“He hasn’t ever talked,” Frank said to Claudia.

“I know.”

“Marty told you?”

“Marty said you adopted him after his parents were killed and that you never heard him speak.”

“Could I have those horses?” Ian said. It took Frank a moment to figure out that Ian didn’t mean living horses; he meant the little rubber racing horses on the wedding cake.

“Yes, after they cut the cake.”

“Can I go find the grandma?” Ian said.

“Not now. She’s having a nap.”

“Then, can I go play with Patrick?” Ian said.

“No.”

“Do I have to sit here?”

Frank surveyed the flat ground near the vast renovated antique barn. A deejay had pulled up, and his crew was carting sections of dance floor and speakers into the barn no more than twenty yards away. “You can go watch them.” Ian grinned. Then Frank said, “Wait a minute. Can’t you tell how surprised I am? Could you talk always?”

Ian stared at the ground.

“Could you always talk?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever talk?”

“I talk to the horses. And I talk at night. I talk to Sally.”

A drinking pal of Patrick’s, who lived with his grandparents just down the road from Tenacity, had given Patrick a border collie called Sally. Even Frank had to admit that she had terrific manners, although she loped nearly constantly and ate the rest of the time. Sally was a good dog, and a farm needed a dog, and she adored Ian extravagantly. She never barked unless an unfamiliar car approached, and then she whined, nervously, for about two minutes before anyone else heard its approach. Under Sally’s unwavering gaze, the little paint filly no longer bit the other horses. She let Farmer Frank be his bemused self.

“Okay,” Frank said. “Well, you can go now. Look at me and yell when you get there.”

“I will.” Ian ran off. Another little boy just slightly bigger seemed to have been waiting and fell into step with him.

Frank turned to the woman called Claudia. “Can you explain that?”

“Because I’m a doctor? Not really.”

“I thought we were going to have to get him a computer with a voice synthesizer when he got old enough to type. Do you have a professional opinion?”

“Sometimes stuff like that just happens.”

“That’s your professional opinion? Stuff happens?”

“Well, my professional opinion and my personal opinion are the same. Sometimes stuff like that just happens. I’m glad it happened for a good reason, and I mean by that a positive reason. Maybe he didn’t have a good enough reason to talk until now.”

“But what’s the reason now?”

“You would have to ask him, and he wouldn’t be able to tell you in a way that would make sense, I don’t think. It was the right time for him.”

Frank laughed. “Do you think it’s good?”

“It’s pretty great. How could it be bad?”

“The world falls open for him and me. I hope that’s a good thing.”

“There’s no going back.”

“I can ask him how he thinks about things now.” Frank thought, I can ask him who his real parents are, and if that woman in the van was his mother. But if, more likely, they’re still alive, and have a million acres of cattle land in the vast Northern Territory, and their own airplane, then I have to bring him back, which means going to prison for life, with my pal Charley.

Come down off the ledge, Frank scolded himself. Ian was not yet four. His real parents’ names would be “Mummy” and “Daddy.” If Ian’s living parents were jackaroos and he longed for them, Ian would not act the way he did. Even Frank, whose sum total of hours with a kid he could count on both hands before Christmas Day, knew that. I could lose him, Frank thought. No. How could he lose Ian? He’s mine, Frank thought. And then, He’s not mine. He belongs to someone else. He’s someone else’s boy. I was only ever supposed to protect him from getting caught in the tidal pull of the human flood that came after the real flood, just until I found the people he really belonged to.

So why didn’t you look for them?

“I wouldn’t expect big ponderings from him. He’s a little guy,” said Claudia. “You knew his family?”

“Only slightly.” For about ninety seconds. “Anything at all would be big.” Frank’s guts squeezed, in sync with his temples. Like the deepest throat of a cello, a note of despair opened.

“You seem to already know how he thinks about things,” Claudia said, then stopped. “If I had to guess, I would say he wanted those rubber horses on the cake more than anything else in the world. Kids, they think differently. If something’s too big for them to think about, they won’t think about that. But a small thing to us gets really big to them.”

“Do you want a drink?” Frank asked. “I’m buying.”

Marty Fisher’s mother and father had brought out the champagne. It was now on ice in wheelbarrows—a good use for wheelbarrows, Frank observed. Marty’s college-age twin sisters were dancing silently to music piped through their earbuds.

“That’s an iconic twenty-first-century sight,” Claudia said as the girls swirled and gyrated on the grass in their ballet flats, to the tune of apparent silence. “I’ll bet they were IVF twins. You think?”

Frank had no idea what the woman was talking about. He stared at her. A drink might help . . . or do nothing. He wanted to take Ian and go home to Tenacity and lock the doors. But it was Eden’s wedding day; and he was just a father, so everyone thought, a new and somewhat tragic father whose own story, thankfully, did not bear much examination. He should sound normal. So he concentrated on what he would have said if his mind hadn’t been a damaged boat heeling around his skull.

Frank said, “Marty and Eden hired a string quartet for now and for the ceremony, but they called this morning. One of them had a headache. I don’t know if you’re from Madison, but . . . you know, he had a headache.”

Claudia said, “I’m from there now. I know exactly what you mean.”

“They were hired six months ago. And he had . . . a headache.”

“You’d think there would be a violinist standing by.”

“I liked the guitar, though. That is my mother’s favorite song,” Frank said.

“I think it must be everyone’s mother’s favorite song.”

Claudia smiled in a big, unaffected way at odds with her precise but somehow Mediterranean prettiness. Frank fought to relax. His leg and his wrist now pounded with every pulse of his heart.

“Is it the shock of him talking?” Claudia asked. “You’re sweating.”

“I guess it is. I thought that would happen, some quiet way, or some huge, dramatic way, years from now. I don’t know why I thought that.” Frank wished the sun would fall already and he could stop squinting, feeling untented without his ever-present sunglasses, which Eden forbade him to wear today. He would call Patrick and ask him to bring back his sunglasses, but there Patrick was, his hair still wet from the shower, flirting with one of Marty’s sisters. The girl must be eighteen. Frank hoped she was twenty. Ah, well. “I hurt my wrist not long ago. It acts up sometimes.”

“I’ve got some aspirin,” Claudia said, and reached into her pocket. “You fall off a horse enough and some things just don’t get their lube back. So I’m always packing acetylsalicylic acid.”

A blue-jeaned bartender offered them flutes of champagne. Claudia was thoughtful and pleasant: Frank tried to smile, despite the enormous net drag of grief stirred up by the wedding day. On a day this bright, he’d promised a future with Natalie. And now, there was joy that Ian might finally be able to articulate both his process and his provenance, and so his future, which wouldn’t include Frank. He needed a psychiatrist. Here was a psychiatrist. Why didn’t he just talk about it?

If he did that, he’d need a psychiatrist and a lawyer, too.

“I’m a widower,” he said.

“I know,” the woman replied.

“And this is a wedding.”

“I see. Everybody feels all sorts of mixed-up stuff at a wedding, sadness and loss along with joy. Even if they’re not widowers.”

“And Ian talked.”

“Well, he’s not going to tell you why. Maybe in twenty years.”

What if he didn’t know Ian in twenty years? What should he say to this woman that wouldn’t entail ornamenting the tunic of lies he wore? He smiled again.

Hope was back, her gray silk replaced with a long flowered skirt and ruffled vest. From across the long verge of grass, she shrugged at Ian, who was jabbering to everyone, dancing with a collective of little girls and big girls, like a heron in a spasm. Hope motioned Frank over. Now in thunderous pain, Frank extended his arm and he and Claudia walked over to the dance floor.

“I don’t know what to say,” Hope told Frank. She turned to Claudia. “Hello, I’m Hope Mercy, Eden’s mom. I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet earlier.”

“I’m from the groom’s side of the aisle. I was one of Marty Fisher’s supervising professors. I’m Claudia Campo.” Claudia extended her hand and took Hope’s. “I’m trying to talk Frank here into helping me and my horse train for the World Cup, and maybe the Olympics. What do you think of that?”

“I think that if you could talk him into it, you wouldn’t find anyone within a thousand miles, maybe more, who could do that better. I’m also sure there’s no way you could talk him into it.” Hope turned and nodded at Ian. “The disco king over there has taken our lives over a bit.”

“I’m going to have to try to grab a dance with Mr. Ian tonight. But I haven’t given up yet. I know from Marty that your husband trained some remarkable champions.”

“He did, and Jack, that’s Frank’s grandfather, trained Midsummer Night’s Dream . . .”

“The horse that won the gold for the 1952 Olympic team. I know. And also Rough Magic, the great mare who fell at the end of a perfect round.”

“I’m impressed,” said Hope. “She wasn’t disqualified, but she was hurt, and no one ever got on her back again. She made some beautiful babies for DuPree Farms. They bought her from Jack, right there. On the spot.”

“Babies like Twelfth Night. I know all about it. My own horse, Prospero, is descended from Twelfth Night. So, you see, it absolutely has to be Frank Mercy who trains this horse. And this rider. Well, along with my other coach. He has shelves of international trophies. But I trust my gut.

“Well,” said Hope. “You make a compelling case.”

“Except I don’t do that work,” said Frank. “I haven’t trained anybody for much of anything yet. I don’t have a gift.”

“I heard you did. In Australia?”

“Some. In Australia. But here, I’m just a farmer, ma’am. Those days are over. If they aren’t over, they haven’t started yet. Now, I hate to spoil this particular midsummer night’s dream, but if I’m going to dance with the bride tonight, I really have to go home and get something stronger than aspirin for my leg, Mom. You’ll take over with Ian, right? Claudia, please excuse me. Maybe it’s that the storm is coming, but my leg is now killing me,” Frank said, grateful that the wrist no longer ached. “The storm and old age, of course.”

“Well, yes, you’re spry for a senior citizen. Do you have some hydrocodone back there?”

“I do.”

“Well, at least don’t take it until you get back to Hilltop here. How far away is Tenacity Farms?”

“Five minutes, really,” Frank said.

“Well, why don’t I go with you? I’ve been wanting to see it. Marty said you might have room, at least, to board Prospero. You can take your medication and be ready to dance with the bride, and I’ll drive us back.”

Frank laughed, and the laugh exploded the wedge in his chest into a fine mist. “I’m driving a pickup truck from the farm. I had to drive the trailer, too, with my mother’s horse, Bobbie, in it.”

“Is the trailer still on the truck?”

“No.”

“I’m fine with driving a truck. I am a rider. And I am a single woman. I drive my truck with Pro in it all over. In fact, I drove it all the way from North Carolina when I came to Madison.” Claudia, obviously knowing how to do it, switched on the high beams behind her brown eyes and let the thickness of blond hair flip forward. She was used to getting what she wanted. “Please, let me come. Marty has told me so much about the farm. Even if you won’t train my horse and me.”

“That’s fine,” Frank said evenly, working hard to avoid seeing his mother’s eye roll. He hoped nobody could tell that he was going through life in a robotic state—since planning was beyond him. Every night, he lay down to read to Ian, and then planned to connect the dots. Then it was dawn. He was too spent to decide anything. He knew this was by design. He knew it had to stop.

Claudia opened the door to the cab.

“Do you need a hand?” Frank said as Claudia gathered her long pants up in a fist over smooth-calved and tight-muscled rider’s legs.

“I’m just fine,” she said.

Just as Frank was about to turn the key, he heard Ian calling, and saw the boy tearing across the parking lot in a way that put a knot in Frank’s throat.

“Doesn’t seem to want to be too far away from you,” said Claudia.

“Not that much,” Frank said. He scooped Ian up, clutching him against his chest. In his ruined, muddy tuxedo, the boy smelled of burned grass. How could Frank have even considered leaving Ian behind, even for five minutes, on the day he first spoke? Disengaging the airbags, Frank buckled Ian into his car seat between him and Claudia. They rode in silence for a minute or two before both of them noticed that Ian was asleep. Frank said, “I’ll grab some clean clothes for him. No reason to wake him.”

When they swung into the long driveway, it was not quite dark, and Frank felt it right away.

There was no sound, but somehow, a disturbance: then he heard Sally, or another dog, barking, far off. He put the truck in park and opened the door, slowly. “Stay here for a moment,” he told Claudia. “I think someone’s messing around up there. My grandfather is ninety-six, and he and the day helper are there. She’s a young girl, Filipino, and she doesn’t know much English. She probably has the TV on loud.”

Frank began walking away from the house, out toward the big pasture, so that he could walk down toward the barn unseen. Then he turned back and spun the lock on the box behind the cab. “Paranoid farmers,” he said as he lifted out his old service shotgun, the Remington pump-action twelve-gauge he’d kitted out for himself more than twenty years ago. Although he’d never fired it except in practice, he believed that the simple sound of that gun loading, and the sight of his big horse, Tarmac, bearing down on a punk with steam streaming from his nostrils like a preview of the Apocalypse, were more effective than any dozen warning shots from his Glock. Limping by then, Frank covered the half mile down the road up onto the slight ridge in a few minutes. He could see the unfamiliar double trailer parked at the barn’s open door. Then he stood amazed as he saw the kid from down the road, who’d given them the dog Patrick called Sally, coming out of the barn holding one end of a long rope. And then Frank heard mayhem. He began to run, as best he could.

Somehow, the kid had managed to get a halter on Glory Bee, but she was straining and cantering in place, pawing at him with one hoof, hauling him along at the end of the snap rope. The guy was holding on as if the horse was a rogue sail in a storm.

“Stop!” Frank yelled. The kid looked straight at him. Dropping the rope, he let Glory Bee take off at a dead run, and fumbled in his pocket for what Frank could vaguely see was some kind of shitty little no-name automatic the kid would use to blow an ugly hole in Frank and in his own already fucked-up life. Frank loaded his shotgun, that deadly cash-register sound, and prepared to walk down the hill toward the kid. How old was he? Twenty-one? Twenty? He was shaking so hard he had to grip one hand with the other in the parody of a military crouch. Unbelievably, he took aim at Frank. “Put it down!” Frank yelled again.

“No, you! You put yours down! Get out of my way! I’ll kill you! All I want is the horse! Move now!” The guy was screaming. He kept looking down at the gun and shaking it, poking at it, and then, in the next moment, remembering his life-and-death confrontation, furrowing his brow and turning back to Frank. When he looked away, his absorption in the gun was so complete, reminding Frank of the way Ian concentrated on his Legos, that Frank was sure that if he rushed him, he could knock him off balance.

Frank was about to move, when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that trapped his breath. Holding the rope, Glory Bee following him, Ian was making his way back to the barn. In the shrieking silence, the kid turned the gun on Ian. “Stop!” the young man yelled. “I’ll shoot you.”

The kid went into his stupid crouch again. Ian kept walking. Then he stopped, dropped the rope, and, so quickly Frank wasn’t sure he saw it, swung his two hands, left, right. He said, “Be nice. Please.”

The kid with the gun seemed to glower, and to somehow grow bigger. Frank didn’t want to fire the first kill shot of his life, but before he could, the kid threw his gun down and sank to the ground, sobbing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

One shoe off, Claudia came stumbling into the drive.

“I couldn’t catch him,” she said. “I was standing on the running board, trying to see you, trying to get service on my phone to call 911, and he just slipped out.”

“It’s okay,” Frank said. Frank jerked the big kid to his feet. “Do you have shit for brains? You pointed a gun at a little boy?”

“It’s not loaded,” the kid said. “It’s just some gun a guy gave me in Milwaukee. I don’t even know what size bullets go in it.” He was a pale, soft-looking kid, his hair-sprouted belly lapping over a cinched belt and jeans. His faded blue tee shirt read I Live in My Own World. They Like Me Here. Frank picked up the gun. Not only was it not loaded, it didn’t have any kind of trigger.

“So you have a death wish, too. You pointed a fucking broken gun with no bullets at a guy with a loaded shotgun and at a three-year-old kid.”

“I was going to take her to the auction in Des Moines. The horse. I owe a guy money. I don’t have anything left to sell. I can’t rob my grandpa. He’s old . . .”

“Jesus Christ,” said Frank. “How decent of you. What’s your name?”

“Clay. Clay Bannock.”

“Your dad is Cal Bannock.”

“My grandfather.”

To Claudia, then, Frank said, “Do you mind just helping me for a moment? Please help Ian put Glory Bee out in the pasture. Can you? I don’t think he can close the latch by himself. She’ll go with him, but I don’t know if she’ll go with you . . .”

“She’ll go with me,” Claudia said, and reached for Glory Bee. Already overexcited, the horse began to strain backward, then went up. Claudia cried, “Ian, no!”

The child simply moved back until Glory Bee came down, and then approached her, with a whisper and a touch. As if a sedative had poured through her, Glory Bee dropped her head for a mouthful of May sweet grass before obediently following Ian into the paddock.

“I’m sorry?” Claudia, confused, said to Frank. “What . . . ?”

“No, it’s nothing you did. She’s probably scared and she’s always way too high-strung.” Claudia followed Ian to the pasture, where the child unclipped the lead from her bridle and handed it to Claudia, who looped it around her elbow and hand. Frank depressed a button on his phone and said harshly to Patrick, “This is urgent. Get here fast.” He tied the big kid’s feet with the halter rope and his hands with some baling twine, then pushed him down so he was sitting on a square bale.

While Claudia washed up in the first-floor bath, Frank found his painkillers, took two, and helped Ian change out of his tuxedo into jeans and a fresh shirt.

“I don’t want to leave my horses,” Ian said. Frank was confused for a moment, and then watched as Ian carefully removed twenty sticky rubber racers from the pockets of the defunct formal wear. “He had a gun.”

“He did.”

“He didn’t want to shoot people.”

“Maybe not.”

“Were you going to kill him?”

“Of course not.”

“Were you really going to kill him, Dad?”

Frank’s arms prickled. He had not misheard Ian. Dad. He wanted to take off his own clothes and put on his oldest clean sweats and lie down in the dark.

Dad.

Instead he said, “If he tried to hurt you, yes, Ian.”

Who was Ian’s real father, that he could call Frank Dad? On the first day he could talk?

The aide taking care of Frank’s grandfather hadn’t noticed anything. Jack was already asleep, and she was hunched over a deep bowl of french fries, so engrossed in a consummately violent war film that she wouldn’t have noticed if a real war broke out in the kitchen. She waved to Frank and Ian.

Then Patrick burst through the door, one of his small, potent fists clasped around the fat kid’s bicep. The kid’s feet were still hobbled and his face was smeared with snot and blood.

“I swear on my mother, Frank,” Patrick said.

“I know that. Did you tell him about Glory Bee?”

“I told him about Glory Bee and that she was worth a lot. He hung about, Frank. We had a drink. But I swear to you . . .” The big kid’s nose was broken. Ian held up a dishtowel, which the Bannock kid, for some reason, took and pressed against his nose and jaw.

“It’s just the same legally as if he tried to shoot my . . . son. He could be dead now, your friend. He could be dead, easy.” He turned to the kid. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” said the kid. He looked older, stuffed and bloated with drinking.

“He’s even an underage drunk, Patrick. Well played.”

Patrick looked away. As the pain of his headache began to recede, Frank’s vision cleared, and he appreciated Patrick’s laconic manner. One more word, and he would forget whatever instinct was propelling him toward an impulse of charity.

“Don’t blame Pat. He’s a nice guy,” the kid said. “I got to know Pat because of the pictures I was supposed to take.”

Frank said, “Pictures?”

“I met the girl on Twitter. His daughter? The guy from New York who’s buying the farm?”

“No one’s buying this farm.”

“Her father paid me to take pictures. Five hundred bucks. I just really thought I would come over when you guys weren’t here because I wouldn’t get in the way. I was just going to take the pictures because she said her father was trying to figure out if they were going to knock this house down or fix it up and try to sell it—”

“What in the hell are you talking about? You don’t even have the right farm. This farm isn’t even for sale,” Frank said.

“It is. They sent me a picture of the farm. ’Course I knew it. This guy is some big deal in real estate. He’s going to build a hundred houses here. But the girl. We got to talking . . .” Cal said, and blushed. “She liked me. I told her about my music. I play guitar. She sent me pictures . . . you know . . . of her. And they wired me the money. It was a lot of money.”

“For these . . . pictures?” Claudia said. “That you didn’t even take yet? Didn’t you think that was strange?”

“No . . . because the girl and I had a relationship. We’ve been talking a long time. Two weeks. Three weeks.” Snuffling, the Bannock kid went on, “Then I got here and I remembered the horse, and I just went back for our trailer. I’m really sorry, man.” Without prompting, he fished in the back pocket of his half-staff jeans and pulled out a disposable camera. He threw it to Frank. “You can have the pictures. That’s the only roll.”

Simultaneous wires of information told Frank that the fat kid wasn’t lying, but that what he was saying was also not the truth. Clay Bannock didn’t know the truth.

“What did she tell you about her father? The guy who’s supposedly buying my farm?”

“The builder. He wanted to see where all the bedrooms and bathrooms were, and how the barns were set up—”

“You went into our house?”

The kid cringed. “I didn’t touch anything. I swear to God. Nobody locks their doors around here . . .”

“Patrick, do you know anything about this?”

Patrick murmured in the negative.

If wishing could make it so, Frank would have stood alone in the graveled circle in front of the farmhouse, seining the summer light through the lens of memory. He would never have gone to Brisbane. He would never have met Natalie. He would never have put on his rescue coat and set in motion this tumbrel that never stopped, only changed course, and rolled forward.

“Take your truck and get out of here,” Frank said. “I’ll speak to your grandfather tomorrow. If I don’t turn you in tomorrow and get you charged as an adult with felony assault and armed robbery, it will be because your grandfather knew my dad and he tells me you’re in an inpatient program for alcoholism, starting Monday. Otherwise, you’ll spend the next ten years with people who’ll see your ass as a pillow park. Do you understand me?” The kid nodded. “Put your grandfather’s number in my phone and label it.” The kid did. “Go on. Now. Get off my farm.”

When the room was quiet, Patrick said, “I’ll see to packing my things.”

“That’s foolish, Patrick. It’s not anything you did. Just find Sally . . .”

“She’s under the porch. I guess she was scared.”

“Some watchdog. I have to get back to my sister’s wedding. This is over now. Let’s forget it.” Frank peered at the disappearing flash of the trailer rounding the bend on Sun Valley Road. “What do you think he meant?”

“I think some guys think everything is for sale. I knew a guy who lived like that. His cars. His house. He would say, everything is for sale,” Patrick said. “I think maybe some fellow got the wrong impression.”

“I think someone is after Ian.”

“Too right, guv. I do as well,” Patrick said miserably. Claudia said nothing until she and Frank were back in the truck, Ian in his car seat. “And here I was worried that you’d fall asleep at the wheel. I had no idea it was going to be the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”

“I can’t believe this. It’s a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”

“You handled it well.”

“I don’t know that I did. It was a mess. And I know better. I was in law enforcement for twenty years,” Frank said. “It’s like I have combat fatigue. I can’t think straight.”

“Marty said you’d been in an accident in the line of duty.”

Frank shrugged. “Not hardly. I got hit by a car.”

“You saved lives other times.”

“I doubt that, unless it was sending some idiot to prison for ten years of his life so he would have to wait longer to breed little criminals. I do know I thought that this was Disney Farm, USA, though. It’s been a long time since I lived here. Patrick said we needed to get motion sensors. I was thinking, crazy. Now maybe we need razor wire.”

He glanced over at Claudia and saw how fixedly she was looking at the little boy, and, with an electric surge along his forearms, he knew what she was thinking. After quieting a colossal plunging, high-kicking horse, a forty-pound child had quietly told an adrenaline-pumped adolescent with nothing to lose to “Be nice,” and put down his fake gun—a gun Ian didn’t know was fake. “So, you saw what Ian did. I think he just assumes most people want to do the right thing. And he’s, well, he’s good with animals.”

Claudia said, “Is that what you really think?”

Frank said, “Not really.” In a few sentences, against his better judgment and almost against his will, Frank told her about Ian’s effect on his mother, and the animals in the hold of the airplane, and about Cedric and Tura’s deaths—everything short of how Ian had come into his life.

“Marty said he’s a relative of your late wife.”

“Yes, indirectly . . .” They are both human, Frank said to himself.

“What did other people in the family say?”

“Nothing. Not to me,” Frank told her. “I would imagine it’s something no one talks about.”

Claudia then sat quietly until Frank pulled the truck into the parking lot at Hilltop. Necklaces of paper lanterns swung like festive plums from poles and eaves at the opening to the converted barn that was now used as a banquet hall. She didn’t say a word for so long Frank thought she would simply get out of the truck, get into her own car, and drive away.

When she did speak, it was to say, “I met someone who could do that once before.”

“Was it part of some study?”

“No. I was in college.”

“Where?”

“She lives in North Carolina, not far from where I grew up. We moved to the south when I was twelve. I was born not very far from here, north of Chicago. Then later, my father was a professor of anatomy at Duke. My sisters and I went there. This woman was probably in her thirties then. I thought of her as old. She’s probably fifty now.”

“How did you meet her?”

“Well, she was the aunt of a professor of mine. This professor took an interest in me. I was going to medical school, and I was interested in neurology then, the physical part of the mind, and mostly in the vestiges of instinct in human beings. This professor, she took me up there, a few times. I don’t want you to get the impression that the woman was some kind of hillbilly mystic . . .”

“I don’t think that.”

“Her name was Julia. Julia Madrigal. Isn’t that lovely? Everyone knew Mrs. Madrigal. Sounds like ‘magical.’ She did a great deal of good. She taught school. There were kids whose parents abused them, and people who hit their wives. There were kids like that guy back at your farm.”

Frank glanced at Ian, who had seen the lanterns, and, impeded by the pockets stuffed with rubber horses, was struggling to get out of his car seat. “Ian, here. You can go ahead and find Aunt Eden.”

Gratefully, Ian said, “Okay.”

They watched him, a small dark hullock moving against the mounds of faraway clouds and hills, disappearing with a bounce into the sweet orange glow of the barn’s open bay. They could hear the music, an old Eagles song.

“So, she worked with the parents and those others,” Frank said.

“She didn’t need to work with them. She was just with them. The way Ian was with that guy at the barn,” said Claudia.

“Did you want to study her?”

“Of course I did. My professor did, too. But she wouldn’t allow that. She told us that she had always been this way, and helped people do the things they should do and that they probably really wanted to do anyhow. She didn’t want anyone outside the county to know about it.”

Frank admitted to himself then that this was why he had let the fat, drunken kid go home to his grandfather’s farm when he deserved to be in the back of a cruiser on the way to the Sauk County Jail. He admitted that he didn’t want to answer questions, to draw even more attention, and his aversion was a wall in front of his common sense. The ranks of those who knew about the Ian effect were swelling, and if people didn’t want Ian for their use, then certainly they would want him under their lens.

“Do you want me to talk to Ian?” Claudia said. “At least, you want to know if this troubles him.”

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “Do you think it troubles him?”

“Maybe now that he is talking, he could talk about what it’s like. That makes people feel better, to talk about what things are like for them.”

“I’ll help you and the horse,” Frank said.

“You don’t have to. I wouldn’t tell anyone about Ian. I’m not like that. I’m offering to talk to him because he’s little and you can’t help but care about him.”

Frank said, “I think you misunderstand. It’s not a quid pro quo. I assumed you wouldn’t tell anyone about Ian.” Frank got out and opened Claudia’s door. “I’ll try to help, although I’m not really at all like my dad.”

“Don’t take me on if you really don’t want to.”

He put out his arms and Claudia let herself be lifted down. Frank felt a stirring, like a memory, at the spring of the warm flesh under her light coat, and was surprised.

“I do,” he said. “I can try. I’ve done this with horses way more than people. And not really at your level. My dad was the master. Better than my grandfather, who was a legend. In Australia, I was starting to get good at it, but I’m not at all an Olympic coach . . .”

“You could be.”

“No, I couldn’t be, because that would have had to have started a long time ago. You, you still have events to go through . . .”

“Quite a few. I’ve taken a year off. A second year if I make the national team. I’ll be ready if I qualify for Sydney.”

“Sydney? Seriously? They’re going to be there again?”

“The summer games. Sydney. Australia.”

No fucking way was he ever going to fucking Sydney. Even if her horse was Pegasus.

“Well, you should find a real coach,” Frank said.

“I have one. He comes up from Chicago. I knew about you from Marty. Then I heard you were coming back, so I spoke to Marty.”

“I can help,” Frank said. “Maybe. I’m reluctant. What I can do is give it a try. Once. If your real coach doesn’t mind.”

“When I was twenty-two, I almost got there. But I didn’t. I got hurt. The orthopedists said I’d never ride again. So I went to medical school . . .”

“What happened?”

Claudia said, “I broke my neck.”

“Oh. Are you sound now?”

“Yes. I got better. Like how you got hurt, it wasn’t glamorous. It was a stupid error. I wouldn’t risk ending up paralyzed. This is my last chance.” She lifted her hair off the back of her neck. Frank saw that she was young, and only seemed rather than looked older. She said, “I’m curious. Would you have changed your mind if this hadn’t happened?”

“I don’t know. I might have. But it goes without saying that I’m grateful. And of course, I’d like you to look at Ian, not formally, but . . .”

“I get it,” said Claudia. “Well, it’s been quite a day. Are you going to tell your sister?”

“Maybe someday.”

“Ready for the dance?”

“Sure.”

“But what?”

Frank told her, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Anyone can dance,” Claudia said, a smile exploding with dimples and creases.

“I can dance,” Frank said.

“What, then?”

“I meant, I don’t know what to do about Ian. Or what to make of my life.”

Claudia said, “If today was a taste of it, I wouldn’t either.”