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answer. I said nothing, still shaken about the aid car and Mrs. Swanston’s condition. I wasn’t thinking of any company that came and went. Just the thought of that nice old lady and her umpteenth medical emergency.
    Then I went into the house, dropped my backpack by the door and went to turn off the running water in the bathroom. And after that, my brother and father in the kitchen. Red everywhere.
    THE FERRY LURCHES TO A STOP and I’m sitting here thinking, remembering, registering Mr. Swanston’s remark properly. Mr. Swanston had seen a visitor, a visitor who had left in a hurry  …  when the sirens came screaming down our street. Maybe my father’s killer, my mother’s abductor, had been scared away by the sound? Maybe he thought the police were closing in on him.
    A couple who smell like a cloud of body spray and marijuana scurry past, toward the stairway that leads to the car deck. A woman in a black suit with a carnation-pink scarf follows. Hayden, still looking at the breaching killer whales on a brochure, is motionless. I don’t move.
    I wonder if Mom told the man who killed Dad that she’d already called the police. It was something she taught me at a very young age.
    “Even when your back’s against the wall, you lie,” she told me when I was eight or nine. “You tell him that you’ve pushed a panic button or something and the police are minutes away.”
    Him. I’ll come back to him later.
    I turn to Hayden and nudge him away from the real-estate magazines that hold his rapt attention.
    “Let’s move now.”
    He nods slowly. “Okay. I’ll plug the toilet.”
    NOT SURPRISINGLY HAYDEN DOESN’T LIKE the idea of us taking over the women’s restroom but I figure it will be a safer location than any other to stay the night. At one time there was a black vinyl couch in there, a place where nursing moms are invited to sit and rest with their babies. But when I go in there to break the cabinet lock I notice the couch is gone that night. Or maybe it was on another boat? Hayden and I wad toilet paper in the first toilet and send the water overflowing. I lead him to the back of the restroom and the storage locker. I push some rolls of toilet paper aside and he goes inside. He’s compliant and I wonder why he doesn’t protest at least a little. I don’t want him to, of course. But still? I shut the metal door and it seals like a rickety coffin.
    “You’re not locking me in, are you?” he says, muffled behind the door.
    “No. And be quiet.”
    I hurry out to find the lazy ferry worker. He’s chatting up a woman too young and too smart for him, I think.
    “Excuse me,” I say, “but someone clogged the toilet in the bathroom.”
    He looks at me with irritated eyes.
    “Jeesh!” he says.
    “It wasn’t me,” I shoot back. No one wants to be the source of a toilet clog. “It was like that when I went in there.”
    “Just a sec,” he tells the woman. She looks relieved when he walks toward the bathroom.
    “He’ll be right back,” I say.
    She mouths, I hope not .
    I smile.
    The lazy/horny crewman does exactly what I thought he would do. He stops the flow of water and puts an out-of-order sign on the door, locking it. I hover by the brochure rack until he goes off looking for the woman he was chatting up—smartly, she has left for her car. When it is safe to do so, Hayden opens the door and I go inside and turn the lock. We are safe. We are alone. We’re also in a bathroom, which isn’t anything to brag about. But what choice do we have? We don’t have any place to go. We don’t have any family. We are alone.
    I look at Hayden. “We’ll be fine. Just fine.”
    He doesn’t respond. Being shut in a storage locker has made him mute. Like I said, I wonder how much his life so far has affected him that he has this instinctive response to these situations? But the fact is I don’t need him peppering me with questions and complaints. Even worse, I don’t need him crying. Because if he cries