ASLEEP IN THE STOCKROOM of Fusco’s, sprawled out between cases of beer and liquor, Owen dreamed of the Bijou fire.

The dream was vivid enough to send his heart racing, even as he slept. Everything was slowed down, the details sharpened: He could see his mother’s tired face reflecting the colors of the movie and smell his father’s Aqua Velva mixed in with the gassy smell of the old man digesting another dinner. From here and there came the soft crackling of the audience munching popcorn. His father stifled a yawn. Emotionally it was all clearer too, Owen’s anger at having to be here when Scott was free at college, his loathing for this town and his parents and Great-Uncle Butch. Everybody knew that Great-Uncle Butch was a fraud. All missionaries were frauds and leeches; they sucked up money and claimed to be doing God’s work, and if you believed them, well, then you were just another sucker too. Not that there was any shortage of them here tonight, he thought—sheep lining up to be sheared, one after another.

Somewhere in the audience, a kid started crying. Owen tried to ignore it at first, concentrating on his own rage, squeezing it down into a hard black ball in his chest. The pain gave him a perverse thrill, like biting off his nails and pushing the parings up into his gums until they bled. But as the crying got worse, became screaming actually, Owen realized something was going on behind him that maybe didn’t have to do with the movie.

He was going to turn around when he noticed what was on the screen. Instead of missionaries painting houses, there was the figure of a pale girl in a blue dress, standing there with her arms spread wide. Somehow Owen found this seemingly innocent image totally unnerving—and he wasn’t alone. Several rows back, the kid’s wails rose up a notch, as if he were being tortured. All at once, Owen started seeing stars, his mouth filled up with nauseated saliva, and he knew he was going to be sick. Either that or he was going to start crying. To his right, he saw his father covering his eyes, and was he screaming too—or was he yawning again? It didn’t make sense.

I’m only feeling this way because I’m drunk, he thought remotely. It’s the anniversary of the fire, and I got drunk; I’m having nightmares, some kind of fucked-up posttraumatic flashbacks like those Vietnam veterans, except instead of a war, I got this. I’ll wake up shivering in a puddle of piss and everybody will be laughing at me, but at least I’ll be awake.

Except that, more and more, with every passing second, the nightmare was becoming real. Between the screams of the kid and the image on the screen, some third event was taking place. In chemistry class, they’d learned how certain compounds, inert in themselves, came together to form lethal mixtures, but what was mixing together here? Owen became aware of a boiling cloud of explosive energy, as if the theater were filling with natural gas.

Buried in the dream, the sense of impending doom was more than he could take. He jumped out of his theater seat, shoved past his mother, who scowled at him—“Where do you think you’re going?”—and fell into the darkened aisle, smashed his knee on the armrest, and started scrambling for the red EXIT sign. A few other heads turned at the commotion. Owen ignored them all. He took three steps, and that was when he saw the kid who had been screaming. He was a beautiful blond boy, three or four years old, wide-eyed. He looked more scared than any child had any reason to be. He stood on his seat with his arms outstretched to Owen, the message plain: Get me the hell out of here, mister.

Not even thinking, teenage Owen scooped up the boy, while adult Owen, paddling helplessly through the drunken dream, thought immediately of his son, Henry. Of course, the boy in the theater seat wasn’t Henry—on the night of the fire, Henry wouldn’t even be born for another fifteen years—but the resemblance between them was more than accidental. And the last thing Owen heard the boy say just before the fireball came rippling through the theater, tearing the child from his arms, was the helpless, unfinished cry that came from the boy’s lips, a single word that changed everything:

Daddy.