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that. But it’s too late. My mind, steered by force away from my son’s sleeping form in the dark bedroom where my husband must have finished reading to him hours ago, wanders and fidgets over his routines, and alights on his school. I can’t stand his teacher . I say this to myself with deep, poisonous pleasure, up here in the sky. Not just because of her “Mom,” her “Let us take care of everything.” She’s the only teacher, so who is this us ? The living? The little Flores boy, this snub-nosed young woman says with an apologetic grimace, just pollutes the classroom. That’s her word, pollutes . I wonder if she would say it on tape.
    It’s Rafe, the boy my son is afraid of, of course. Ms. Lemoine is recommending that Rafe be steered to a more suitable school, where there are other children with a similar learning style.
    â€œThat’s Rafe ,” my son says with pride, indicating with hisshoulder, afraid to point at him. No one plays near Rafe. He kicks over the Lego buildings, pees in the sand pile. Of course he does. Tortures the cat saved from the pound to show the kindergarten birth.
    He is heading for major trouble. He’s heading for the pound himself.
    Under the shadow hairline the little beast-face. Poor little devil. An idea rises in me rather grandly and stupidly, unsure it has been untied, like a hot-air balloon. One of those large ideas that sometimes exert a force on you in an airplane. Ah. No. Not at all what it says in The Problem of Pain ! It says, if I remember . . . that the pain of animals, their tearing each other to ribbons, their dying , does not figure into the equation. But if anything is left out . . . if pain . . . or rather evil, if they are not the same thing . . . if anything is left out . . . But it’s no use. As fast as it came to me the whole contraption bobs and drifts away. I can’t get it back.
    F IRST there was the head appearing, coming up the ladder. My husband carrying something under his arm like a bedroll. Bringing it up from the dark beach.
    It was our son. The sight copied itself on the way to me, coming by degrees as if I were blinking. This is the way the lightning of reason blinks through the mind, too swift, too hot for one steady cut. He was dead, drowned, and I would soon be dead! With an awful thrill, I inhaled the cold green air and held it. In a rigor of pity for my husband I dragged my eyes to his. But he knew our son was not dead.
    A sound echoed out over the wind. I reached up. My boy was ice cold, wet, laughing. “I went swimming! I got my head wet! Dad didn’t but I did!” He shook his wet hair onto me. I reached up. His cold skin sanded my palms as he planted his freezing kiss on me. “I swam!”
    In the middle of the night the boat yawed, bumped—what were these intermittent thuds coming from the underside of it, like a huge stymied heartbeat?—and strained at the ropes. We were all three frozen in the wet sleeping bags. Miraculously, two had gone to sleep.
    I did not notice right away that the wind had stopped and that I was hearing the water lap against the hollow pontoons with a chop-licking sound. I had pulled way back, up into the night, and was looking down at a walled ocean with tiny rocking huts sheltered in every inlet.
    I unfolded my sour limbs and got up unsteadily, my bare soles squishing on the indoor-outdoor carpet, to rummage for the tape recorder. In the dark I whispered the date to it. I was ready to continue but nothing came to me. I sat there, sliding against the wall and slumping forward, back and forth, with the boat’s movements. I sat there for a long time, maybe an hour.
    It was then I received the augury. I saw birds, four of them, long-billed shorebirds of a tawny pink color, and transparent, like tinted cellophane. A foamy tide ran in and out around their feet. One, slender and high-stepping, stretched its neck and flapped its wings. All of this with