HIS SON PLAYFULLY CHASES the dog in the yard, and Bill watches the boy as he delights in following the dog. The lanky Lab and collie mix occasionally stops and barks at the boy as if to challenge him. His son stops too, laughs, stomps his feet, and the dog begins running again. The sun is warm, and Bill is relaxed, slouched on the steps of his porch. The past years seem like a lifetime ago, and watching the little boy who is his son makes him acutely aware of where he is now and where he has been.

One day at the end of his shift at the gas station he blew his nose and noticed for the first time that the mucus was as black and tarry as the oil he cleaned out of car engines. He stared at the gummy and toxic substance wadded in his handkerchief and thought about how it was robbing his life little by little. That night he filled out his admissions and financial aid forms for the University of Minnesota. Although his grades from his senior year in high school were barely above a C because he had rarely shown up for class, his SAT scores were excellent.

Still, leaving was hard. He would never forget the sight of his mother, Rosemary, and Ernie as they stood in front of Bailey Hall on the St. Paul campus, getting ready to climb back into the Morriseaus’ sedan and go home. He saw how love caved in their shoulders and threatened to collapse them at the knees. Ernie blew his nose. His mother absently wrung her hands. Rosemary shifted from foot to foot. They would do anything for him, so desperate were they to make things right and give him some happiness. They wedged themselves as much as they could against the past, acting as though they were killdeers, faking broken wings to trick the bad memories and bad spirits away from him so that he could run to safety. He was homesick and could not speak. He hugged them all and then picked up his duffel bag and quickly walked inside the dorm before he changed his mind.

College filled a part of him that had been starving. He felt himself rise with each challenging course. He loved studying. It was the best drink of his life. Every A he earned was a sword against the real and imaginary enemies in his head. He wanted them off the cliff that was his life. He wanted his brain to be free of all the unwanted garbage that was buried in it. The only dirt he wanted near him was the real thing. As if she could read his mind, his mother sent him a pint-size pickle jar full of dirt from the farm. He placed it on the windowsill above his dorm room desk, and it solidified what he would do with the rest of his life. He double-majored in soil science and wildlife biology. They were the two things that never betrayed him: animals and where they lived, what they walked on.

He thought about going out west, but the pull to go home was stronger. He heard the words in his sleep: Don’t ever leave here. He knew his chances of getting a job with the U.S. Fish and Game Service in northern Wisconsin were almost impossible because it usually assigned its new biologists elsewhere. But he had a plan. He sent in his first application during his freshman year in college, and he applied every year until he graduated. He specialized in the flora and fauna of northern Wisconsin. He was born to it, he argued in his cover letters. He knew exactly what the damage was and how he intended to undo it. He decided that he would study constantly, that he would not date and thereby keep anyone away from pushing him off his chosen road.

He liked her too much. It made him afraid. They met in a soil science class, and despite his fear, he was drawn to her. She was double-majoring in soil science and geology. She liked dirt just like his mother did, and although they shared some other things in common as women, they were different. He told her he just wanted to be friends.

“You are full of layers,” she said one day. They were eating pie and drinking coffee at Vescio’s restaurant in Dinkytown near the East Bank of the campus.

“Don’t dig too deep,” he answered cynically, “or you won’t like what you find.”

The grin vanished from her face. “Every time we start to have fun, you say something like that. Why?”

“Sorry. I just meant”—he fumbled—“that I’m not a saint. I have my bad elements.”

“I wasn’t talking about elements,” she retorted.

He didn’t answer and ate the last piece of his lemon meringue pie. He thought the meringue resembled and tasted like plastic. The waitress dropped off their bill.

“Is this real meringue?” he asked.

“No. It’s called flacto-macto,” she replied curtly, and was gone. Flacto-macto. He looked at the crumbs left on his plate. What was that? What had he just eaten?

Elizabeth persisted.

“I wasn’t talking about elements,” she repeated. “I was talking about layers. Good and bad. Everything,” she added as though daring him to contradict her, “grows from layers.”

But one night it occurred to him that although he never needed people much, there would be a day when his mother would die. When Ernie and Rosemary would die. The three most important people still living in his life would not live forever.

They were friends for a year before they became lovers, and then two years later they married. Looking back, Bill was amazed that Elizabeth kept trying. He pushed her away and pushed her down with the weight of words thrown hard, only to pull her back up in confusion, to soften his tone and apologize frantically.

He had told her about his mother and about Ernie and Rosemary. He had talked about his brother as though James were still alive. When he told stories about James, he never tripped over his words. It wasn’t as though he didn’t feel pain. Of course he felt pain. His brother was dead, and the loss of him was a tragedy that did not diminish. But Bill did not believe in heaven or hell. He believed in systems, natural and unnatural. He believed in zones. And there was more than one zone of death.

He realized that people who were much loved and who died had a way of clinging. Rather than fade, they grew in another dimension, became epizoic, although not harmful like a disease. He had helped that process by casting his brother in a fertile zone that he knew best. In his mind, his brother had crossed the river and was walking in woods. It was his natural habitat.

But his father? In those silent minutes before he began speaking to Elizabeth again, he imagined that Holocaust survivors or anyone who had been tortured, nearly murdered, or hurt in ways by other people filled with hate had to do something with those unforgettable memories in order to survive. As he had done without realizing it. Just as he had willed his brother to love and life, he had willed his father to death. He put him in a most unnatural place in his mind. A museum’s airless closet where his father’s remains became mummified. Where none of Bill’s memorial juices could hydrate him again.

Still, it was hard to find the words to describe what was marked on him. He did not look at her while he talked. When he did turn his face toward her, expecting to see disgust, he saw something else.

Awe.

“GIVE THE DOG A REST!” he calls out to his small son.

His son is so happy today. As though nothing has happened. Last night he had a bad dream. The same bad dream as always. His cries are so piercing that it takes only one or two to wake Bill up. As his son suckered to his chest, Bill wondered, as he always did when he got up to soothe his son, if the boy remembered the first eighteen months of his life. If the mystery of those months would be known someday.

Most of the time he rocks his son back to sleep. But sometimes Bill has to crawl into his son’s bed and hold him until he goes to sleep again.

He woke up this morning, feeling his dark-eyed son pat his cheeks and smelling the chocolate cookies on his breath from the night before.

“Wake up, Daddy,” he sang.

“We could adopt,” she said.

He shook his head. She would not let it go, and it led to one of their few bad fights.

“You will not turn into a monster. Or your father,” his wife whispered to Bill that night in bed. He was glad it was dark and she could not see his face.

e said nothing.

Her sigh was as heavy as water.

“This big place needs kids. Your mother needs grandchildren. And some child,” she said, walking one hand up his chest until she could tap his chin with a finger, “deserves to have you as a father. No one,” she added, and her voice drifted above him, “expects you to be perfect. Except you.”

They did not speak about it the next morning, eating their breakfast in silence. It was Sunday, and he and Ernie had planned to fish the Chippewa before the really cold weather had set in.

They pushed north on the river against the current in Bill’s new ultralight canoe. Bill could see that Ernie was favoring his left arm, and he knew that Ernie’s right shoulder hurt from paddling. Ernie was in his seventies, and Bill wanted him just to sit and enjoy the river for once and let Bill do the steering and paddling. But Ernie insisted on paddling too.

They no longer entered the river at the old logging bridge, preferring to drive in on an old fire lane farther south. It meant backtracking a bit on the water, and they eventually paddled past the sandbanks and shoreline that Bill and his brother haunted as children. It was quiet except for the noise their paddles made cleaving the water. As they approached the banks, Ernie pulled his paddle in and stared at the shoreline.

“You know, this past spring I came down here to see if the turtles had nested,” he said over his shoulder to Bill, “but I went there for five days straight, and I didn’t see one snapper. Not even any drag marks or signs of digging. I guess,” he went on before Bill could say anything, “I didn’t think it would change. They’ve nested there since I was a kid. But maybe something is wrong with the river.”

Not the river, Bill thought. The logging bridge had always been a place for teenagers to hang out, but in addition to beer cans littered on the road, Bill found used condoms, syringes, cigarette butts, and the scant remains of joints. Then there was that persistent rural belief that snapping turtles were unwanted predators like badgers, wolves, and coyotes. Many of the locals shot snappers on sight, always justifying their actions by saying the turtles were hurting the walleye population or preying on too many wild ducklings. Bill also surmised that kids had raided the nests for years now, throwing the eggs against the bridge for sport, and that any of the old females that would have returned were probably dead.

“Not the river,” he said out loud, “although the water quality could be better. Our water biologist, Charlie, says snappers can survive in some pretty funky water. They still live in the Mississippi in Minneapolis.”

Ernie shrugged and put his paddle back in. They glided under the bridge. The noise of their paddling echoed, and Bill thought he could hear their breathing bounce off the rusty brown sides. They paddled for quite a ways until Bill saw the slump of Ernie’s shoulders.

“Hey! Let’s shore up first,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

They sat in a grove of white-barked birches, lovely even without their leaves. Ernie chewed on the venison sausage sandwich that Liz had made, tasting the tang of cheddar cheese against the peppery meat. Bill watched him.

“Were you ever afraid to be a father? I mean, whenever Rosemary got pregnant, did it scare you?”

“Nooo,” Ernie answered slowly. He paused from eating. “I was afraid after the first miscarriage and then every time she reached about the fourth month. One time she even made it to six months. I was more afraid that Rose would die from complications of a pregnancy or that another one wouldn’t make it. And after a while I got angry and blamed her. It was stupid of me. It wasn’t her fault. Fear”—he sighed—“and disappointment can make you do stupid things.”

Bill took a bite of his sandwich, but he could feel Ernie watching him. “Liz wants to adopt children,” he said at last. “We’ve been arguing over it.”

Ernie nodded. He had resumed eating, and Bill could hear the slight grinding noise of Ernie’s jaws. Ernie lifted his coffee cup and took a drink.

“Well”—he coughed to clear his throat—“I think it’s natural for her to want a family. But if you don’t want to be a father, then you shouldn’t be one. Or,” Ernie added quietly, “are you afraid?”

Bill stared down at this boots. “I don’t know exactly. I don’t know....” His voice trailed off.

Bill didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He poured more coffee into his cup from the thermos. Then he remembered something, spurred by their earlier conversation as they passed the sandbanks.

“Do you remember what you told me the night you killed that turtle?”

Ernie put his cup down. He shook his head.

“You said that your father told you that turtle made the world,” Bill said, taking a sip from his own cup. “I’ve wondered about that for years. How did a turtle make the world?”

“I don’t remember killing a turtle,” Ernie said, bewildered. “Are you sure I killed a turtle?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain it later. You didn’t kill her in the way you are thinking. Just tell me the story.”

Ernie pressed a hand to his aching shoulder. “That’s one story I can remember well. It was my favorite story when I was a kid. My father could always make me laugh. I tried to memorize it, but he told it to me so often that I remember it or at least most of it. My father said not to worry, that each storyteller adds a bit of himself in telling it.”

Ernie thrust out his cup. Bill poured coffee from the thermos into the tin cup and, nudging Ernie’s arm, dropped two ibuprofen tablets into his hand. Ernie swallowed the pills and washed them down with hot coffee.

“You know,” he said slyly, “I had to go to the kitchen and get something sweet for my father before he’d tell me the story.”

Bill shook his head. “Your blood pressure. Rosemary would kill me,” he said, reaching inside his field jacket and pulling out a Hershey bar.

“A Hershey bar! I always carried Hershey bars when I went hunting with your brother.”

Ernie popped the chocolate into his mouth and took another drink of his coffee, savoring the melting taste of chocolate and coffee. He stared out over the river and briefly waved a hand toward it.

“This used to be all water once. Either a big lake or an ocean. At that time all the animals lived in water, but many of them could ride the waves or would surface like mayflies to breathe and look up at the sky. They knew a spirit woman lived there. Sky Woman is what they called her.

“One day a moist wind blew across their faces, and they knew it was her breath and that she had been crying. They looked up and could see that she was tired and unhappy. That made them all feel bad. They got together and tried to think of ways to make her happy again. Then they thought of something, but before they did anything, they asked Loon to go beneath the water and call for giant Turtle, who lived below. Loon had to go down several times to persuade Turtle to help them. Finally Turtle rose to the surface of the water and agreed to offer his back as a home for Sky Woman.”

Ernie put out his cup for more coffee.

“That sky,” he said, nodding upward, “is the gray that always tells me I’ve got work to do on the house before winter.”

He took a sip of his coffee.

“All the water creatures called up to the sky and invited Sky Woman to come down and live with them. She agreed and left her house in the clouds and settled on Turtle’s back. They all climbed up on Turtle’s back as well. Once she had made herself comfortable, she turned to the animals around her and asked, ‘Who of you can get me a handful of dirt from the bottom?’

“Beaver volunteered right away and dived down. He soon came back up, coughing for air and saying he couldn’t do it. Then Fisher tried, but he couldn’t do it either. Marten and Mink tried too, but they said the water was too deep. They urged Loon, knowing that he could stay under the water for a long time, and Loon dived down. He stayed under for quite a while, but then Loon too came popping up like a cork. He said it was too dark down there and that he couldn’t see where he was going, much less find the bottom. They all hung their heads down because they were so ashamed. Here they had invited Sky Woman down from the sky, and they could not perform her one request.

“Then they heard a small voice. ‘I will try.’

“It was little Muskrat, and they started laughing.

“ ‘You! Ha!’ said Mink. ‘I’m a lot stronger than you. I have more oil to make me glide through the water. And I smell the best!’

“ ‘You mean, you stink the best,’ said Muskrat, because like Mink and Fisher and Marten, they all had musk glands. But while Muskrat was proud of his musk, he realized that only others of his kind thought the smell was beautiful.

“ ‘Mink is right,’ said Fisher. ‘We are much stronger than you, and we couldn’t do it. You are the weakest among us. It isn’t possible. Don’t cause us to waste time.’

“Sky Woman looked at little Muskrat. Muskrat looked at her.

“ ‘I will try,’ he repeated, and with that said, he dived off Turtle’s back and plunged beneath the waves. They laughed and joked while waiting for Muskrat to come up just as they had done, with no dirt to offer. But time passed. They kept joking, but their laughter began to sound hollow. Finally they became afraid and felt bad that they had picked on Muskrat because they feared he had drowned. When they had just about given up hope and were ready to apologize to Sky Woman, Muskrat floated to the surface, and it was only the quivering of his whiskers that told them he was alive. In one paw was the lump of soil that Sky Woman needed.

“While Mink and Fisher and Marten patted Muskrat on the back to get the water out of his lungs, Sky Woman took the dirt and painted the rim of Turtle’s back. Pursing her lips, she breathed upon it and gave it life. The animals couldn’t believe their eyes. The soil grew and covered Turtle’s back and formed an island where even more creatures could live, and eventually the People. Sky Woman spoke to Turtle.

“ ‘Thank you for helping me build my home. I shall call this place Mishee Mackinokong, which means the Place of the Great Turtle’s Back. As a reward, I shall give you the ability to understand and speak the languages among the other beings, great and small. They will come to you so that you can interpret their thoughts and send them to others. This must be done slowly and with the clearness of spring water. Everyone will know that it is through you that thoughts should be given and shared.’

“Turtle bowed his head with honor and then swam away.”

Ernie paused and sat up so that he could relieve the cramp that had now traveled to his lower back.

Bill involuntarily shivered and drew his legs up to his chest to stop it. “What about Muskrat?” he asked. “Didn’t he get anything?”

Ernie laughed. “I asked my father the same question. He said Sky Woman winked at Muskrat. Never”—he grinned, wagging a finger at Bill—“underestimate a muskrat. When the beaver and the rest of them move out looking for better places, the muskrat stays and survives all the same.”

Ernie looked up at the sky again and then back at Bill. “We better get moving if we’re gonna do any fishing today.”

They hadn’t even gone a quarter of a mile toward the oxbow where they fished when Ernie spoke over his shoulder. “Say, whatever happened to that turtle shield you used to have as a kid? And that wooden sword Jimmy made for you?”

He hadn’t meant to, but Ernie’s sudden recollection kicked Bill and threw him back. For a few seconds he was not thirty-nine years old but eight again. The grief erupted so unexpectedly that he could not speak. Grateful that the pain in Ernie’s shoulder prevented him from turning around to look at him, he lowered his face and clenched his teeth.

He could almost feel the wooden sword in his hand, the spin of his body, and the hot dust under his feet. The rope of the shield as it rubbed against the skin of his forearm. The bright yellowness of the sun in his eyes until he moved his arm. The larger-than-life shadow cast on the ground by his shield and how protected he used to feel, hovering inside that shadow.

He heard wood hit the side of the canoe.

“Billy! You’re losing your paddle.”

The broad end of the paddle was bobbing alongside the canoe. He grabbed the handle before it slipped into the water too and pulled the paddle up. Ernie had managed to turn around enough so that he could see Bill out of the corner of his eye. Bill was on the verge of saying “I don’t know” when he stopped and remembered how the shell had traveled down the river as though pushed delicately by many hands, the sword held under the rope. How he had watched it until he couldn’t see it anymore. He was about to answer Ernie when the older man spoke.

“You know, Billy,” Ernie said over his shoulder, “we haven’t talked about some things, mostly because I didn’t wanna push you. But I have to tell you this. Life has to go on. You think you can stop it, but you can’t. I tried to stop seeing what was right in front of me for those fifteen years after your brother died. And I ended up hurting Rosemary and you and even your mother. And I hurt myself.”

He sighed.

“I should have told your brother a lot of things. I should’ve driven over to your place that night your dad told us Jimmy had enlisted and stopped him. I have to live with the things I didn’t do. Or didn’t say. But I’m telling you not to make the same mistake. Don’t be afraid. You’re a good man,” Ernie added. “My father would have thought so too. And he would have told you to live life.”

HE AND LIZ HAD TRAVELED quite a bit in the few years after they were married, with their honeymoon being the first long road trip they took across the United States.

But nothing had prepared him for Bogotá. As if it were a premonition, Bill had hiccups from time to time on their flight down to Colombia. He could only remember the flight and parts of the trip, perforated by the visceral memory of those chest-pounding hiccups. Their cab ride from the airport to their hotel gave him the disquieting feeling of being lost and out of control. The cabbie drove with speed and a lack of rules. Driving in Bogotá was simply about getting from point A to point B, even if it meant hitting someone or something.

If they had gone with the intention of finding a child, they were mistaken. Their children found them. The two girls drew them within days, the magnetism on their little faces so strong that Bill felt as if he and Liz were compelled to take them. It was as though they had been chosen and did not have a choice. The babies knew they were coming and could smell them as parents when Bill or Liz picked them up. Isabella squawked whenever they left her crib side, so they spent their first two days soothing her, unaware that they were being seduced. It was the opposite with Maria. She was three cribs away from Isabella, and her wispy brown curls were charmingly attractive. She looked at them sleepily and contently but loudly passed gas in their presence, smiling as though she had released perfume. Her eyes never completely shut when they were there, and she casually looked from Liz to Bill and then back to Liz. Both girls were alert and even smiled when tickled. Both were six months old. Bill helped Liz with most of the paperwork but could not sit for long and got up to wander through the orphanage. His height frightened some of the older children, so he walked slowly and spoke softly.

The orphanage was segregated by age, and he found himself walking most often down the corridor that he thought of as the Peninsula of Babies. He walked the corridor at least four times up and down before he became aware of a noise behind the sniffles and intermittent crying. He could hear a small body lurch from one side of the crib to the other as it followed Bill’s movements.

Bill stopped midway down the corridor and saw the eighteen-month-old boy. He held on to the railing of his crib as though it were a boat about to be launched. The toddler did not move as Bill approached the crib. When Bill gently rubbed the boy’s knuckles, he lifted the hand Bill had touched only for a moment before clasping the wooden railing again. The boy did not speak or cry. Bill ran his fingers through the boy’s curly black hair, smiled, and caressed one of the boy’s brown cheeks. He dabbed with his handkerchief at the white crust of formula on the boy’s lips. But nothing Bill did could elicit anything other than seriousness on the child’s face.

That night Bill dreamed that he saw the boy inside the crib floating on an unfamiliar surface of water. The crib bobbed. The boy silently held on to the railing, his almond-shaped eyes wary yet expectant.

“I want that boy too.” He pointed toward the crib the next day. Elizabeth, fluent enough in Spanish to conduct conversations, asked the caseworker about the boy. The caseworker said the child had been abandoned by the service entrance to the building six months before and been nearly unconscious from dehydration and hunger when he was found. He did not speak and had only recently learned to pull himself up into a standing position. The caseworker tried to dissuade Bill. The boy was sick, the caseworker said, tapping his head.

Bill was sure the boy was not autistic or sick in the way the caseworker implied. He could not even explain it to his wife. Every day he went there, and every day the little boy was standing up and holding on to the crib railing. Every day he tried to get the boy to smile and failed. Their last month in Bogotá was spent haggling over the little boy. It was against the rules. Two children were the maximum for adoption. Bill called the adoption agency they had worked through in Milwaukee, which then referred him to an attorney who specialized in foreign adoptions. After many more phone calls and wiring their bank for more money, the orphanage was persuaded to make an exception and let them have three children.

“He’s stubborn,” Liz commented. She shifted the two girls in her arms. Then she laughed. “My God! I don’t know what to expect next from you. We were going to adopt only one child. Now we have three. We have a litter. This,” she exclaimed, “from a man who was terrified to be a father! How are we going to do this?”

Bill shrugged. He couldn’t explain what had come over him. He felt almost beatifically calm. “We’ll just do it.”

HIS SON IS WINDING DOWN, unable to keep up with the dog. His brown feet are even browner, covered with the dust from the sun-warmed and scuffed-up soil of the barnyard.

“Wear your shoes,” his mother used to say to Bill. “Or else”—she followed up with the threat—“you’ll get worms.”

“We’ll have to wait,” his wife said, “until we get home. I don’t want to drive around Tampa looking for a doctor or a clinic. I just want to get home. Even if we got the medication now, we might end up with a very sick kid on the flight into St. Paul.” She squeamishly wrapped the diaper in a small garbage bag and put it in the trash bin in the women’s rest room.

All three of them were slightly malnourished, and for a worrisome two days of testing, they thought the two girls might have tuberculosis. Three months after they brought the children home, his son spoke. Or rather he chortled. He had pulled himself up to the low windowsill in the living room one day and ecstatically pressed his face into the glass. Bill quietly crept up behind him and looked out the window.

Birds. Birds feeding at the bird feeder.

Bill can’t remember ever being able to walk up to his father as his son just did. With the knowledge of what to expect. Knowing Bill will hold him and touch him safely. He rubs his cheek against his son’s black hair. He can hear his mother and his wife talking inside the house. Hears his mother’s shrieking laugh and then his wife’s low chuckle. He thinks about the way Liz touches him.

His wife caresses him, and he experiences pleasure and his body feels good then. She aligns her body with his and slides underneath him like a canoe. He is lifted, and at the moment of climax, he feels as though he has transcended the white clapboard house and is flying. He feels holy in that moment. Afterward his wife rubs the liquid from both of their bodies into his groin, and the smell is both sweet and salty. She is careful, when she awakens him from sleep, to touch him someplace else before working her fingers across his body. Only then does she cup and fondle his penis.

His testicles remain small, but the burn scars are fading with age. Still, it does not release him from the self-loathing that surfaces on occasion. As if his body were still dirty. He fears touching his wife, his children at those moments. He tenses up when the children touch him. He tries to hide it from them, but they work harder to get his attention. They hug him forcefully and more often. They reach for his hands and pull on his thumbs. He is amazed at what they inherently know. That if they touch him, they can lift him out of the isolation that would lead him backward and lead him to drink again, burying bottles like his father. They crawl into his lap before their baths and crowd his chest. He can smell the milk on their breaths and the loamy dirt in their ears. His fingers scratch against the grit in their hair, and he knows they will leave a small sandbar in the tub after the water has drained away. Their fingers travel over the land of his face as if they have walked a long way to speak to him.

It is not just Bill.

He watches as they touch his mother. She has become a woman he does not entirely recognize from his youth. Elizabeth sensed Bill’s need to help his mother and was adamant that she not move out of the house. They remodeled and added onto the house so that his mother could have her own set of rooms, but those doors are rarely shut. His mother kisses and hugs her grandchildren every day. She greets them with the freedom to know she can. Even if she’s been away for only a few hours, they surround her as if she were the sun and they little moons that had drifted out of her orbit. They have fights over which one of them gets to sit on her lap.

“You can take turns,” she says, obviously delighted at being so treasured as to be fought over. They bring her stacks of books, and she reads to them tirelessly.

Every now and then, though, he will catch his unknowing mother as she watches the children at dinner or in the bathtub or at play. He sees a sudden stricken look, a quick but paralyzing pain that freezes her face for seconds. Or when Liz hugs him or kisses him, he sees the small envy on his mother’s face as she witnesses their casual affection.

Still, his mother tells him daily how happy he has made her. Sometimes in the noise around them, the constant talk at the dinner table and occasional cries of childish disappointment, he locks eyes with her. Or when they are on a walk through the woods with Liz and the kids, he falls into step with her. He knows that they remain as they always have been. Just the two of them. They know each other’s histories and the wounds they still carry. Scars that can be torn open with a wrong word or a gesture meaningful only to them. They are aware, even when they hug each other, of that space between them that was once filled with someone else.

It is a hot and humid day, and he has no energy to do much of anything. Still, it is pleasurable just to sit and think and watch what is going on around him. He looks at the dust in the driveway, at the tiger lilies that bend languorously, heavy with their finger-length buds that will bloom soon. He closes his eyes for a moment, and he can see himself as an eight-year-old again, playing in the yard. He can almost hear his brother’s record player blaring from the barn. He dreams often, sometimes during the day like this but most often at night. The dreams that disturb him the most are the ones that cause him to wake up with a question that he loses in the second after he reaches consciousness. He knows something was asked of him, yet he can’t remember or answer it.

He opens his eyes.

His children laugh, and the sound spirals upward. Bill watches them run toward the faded red barn and then behind it. He knows they play in the exact same spot where he and his brother used to play. Where they cannot be seen but can be found. They have discovered this on their own.

His children’s curiosity is endless, and in their roaming, their little fingers touch everything. Grass, trees, flowers, fences. Every inch of the barn they explore again and again. The lake and river water they tickle and splash with their hands. Their fingertips on his skin. Although he can still look at the barn or specific places on the farm and see painful images from the past, they are fading, and the farm is becoming a new place every day because of his children. Because of their touch.

It will not be long and they will be asking the questions that will be difficult for him and Liz to answer.

In the Darwinian world of his work, where only the strongest survive, they belong to the enigma of humans. He knows that Isabella’s and Maria’s mothers left them at the orphanage and, not long after, were found dead. He assumes it is the same with his son’s mother, and soon enough he will have to explain the harshness of the world to them. The despair and poverty that destroy the conscious act of love. He will also tell them of the kindness of people. They are alive because biology does not always determine destiny and goodness can arise from the most hellish of conditions. Even the natural world is not as ruthless as it seems. Hollow logs allow raccoons an escape from a predator. Skunks can spray those that threaten them. There are even places in the woods where small children can hide if they need to. His children have discovered this too without being taught it. Their need to hide is all in fun, either from one another or to pop out and scare their parents. They have to work harder to hide from their grandmother. Bill is amazed that his mother often knows just where the children are in the woods.

What he will have trouble articulating to them is what he didn’t know until recently. That children flower out of any soil that will nourish them. That his wife was right. That the layers of his life have enough nutrition in them for his children to take root and that at times he has only to be present and his children siphon what they need from him without his being fully aware of it. He cannot imagine life without them. They redeem and make holy everything they touch. They redeem and bless him.

There is a burst of laughter and his three children suddenly come into view. They run toward him as though he were the prize.

He has told his wife nearly everything about his life. But not everything.

Bill watches as a breeze that he does not feel on his own face suddenly lifts his son’s curly black hair.

Somewhere he hears a deep barking he thinks is coming from his own dog, but when he locates Enrique—he doesn’t know how the children came up with that name—the dog is sound asleep or in his favorite spot under the tree by the chicken coop.

One day his two daughters, standing ankle deep in the river and holding on to their cane poles, began to whistle. He did not teach them. Neither did Liz. Ernie said nothing, but he tilted his head back. Bill knows that Ernie heard it too. That third whistle, high above the girls’ halting notes.