Outer Space

Sterling opens the front door, and the sight of the spaceman there almost kills him. It’s too much, especially that hour of the morning--his goldfish-bowl head opaque like a Mafioso’s limo, his smooth reflective glass face. He talks at Sterling, but all Sterling hears are muffled sounds, “Vuhvahvuhouhvuh . . . .” Behind the astronaut are two more spacemen who Sterling has not noticed until now. He watches the pair, silver suits gleaming in the morning light like brand new stainless-steel pans, and he expects to see them bounce, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did, like interstellar litter blown across the moonscape. They are working strange instruments that appear to be natural extensions of their bulky, otherworldly gloves--longish aluminum poles with rubber handles at one end and a Frisbee-size metal disc at the other. In ultra-slow-slow motion the spacemen move across the lawn, wagging their instruments over the tips of grass like blind men.

Moses and Ira come to see what’s going on. Sterling’s first impulse is to block their view, protect the boys from uncertainty, mystery, keep the two within the bounds of human society. He herds the boys back from the door; who knows what contagion the spaceman might carry? He picks up Ira, nudges Moses away with his hip.

The boys can’t take their eyes off the spaceman. Sterling can’t take his eyes off the three of them reflected in the spaceman’s glass face. The spaceman points at the Volvo parked in the driveway, he points at Moses, at Sterling, at Ira, at the car again. “Vuhvuhvuhvuh . . . ,” he says.

“What?” Sterling shakes his head. “I can’t understand you.” He leans in closer to the spaceman’s helmet, his own face reflected on its surface growing larger, coming into sharper focus. “What do you want? What are you guys doing here?” he says, as if he were talking to himself in a mirror.

The spaceman unscrews his head. The boys gasp; they are in awe. Inside, the man’s face is long and skinny, like the tongue of glass left over in a smashed light bulb. “You shouldn’t be in there,” he says, holding the helmet aloft, poised, as it were, to be popped back on at any moment. He claims of being told that no one would be in the house when he and his crew come to do their work. It’s the car in the driveway that’s prompted this inquiry. “Get out!” he says, and plunks the helmet down over his skull.

The spaceman removes his head again. “I’m back,” he says. “Oxygen break. Hey, he’s a cute kid.”

Sterling’s liver curls. He doesn’t know which boy the man means. With Moses, Sterling had no choice; Bliss was going to have the baby, and if she had to do it alone, she swore Sterling would never get within 10 miles of the child. What was he going to do? He was Chinese, and everyone was always talking about how important “family” is to the Chinese? But it was a different story with Ira. They were already in deep by then. His sister Lucy said, “Sterling, what are you, stupid?” when he mentioned that he and Bliss were planning to have a second child. But Ira’s arrival elated Sterling, and the months that followed were the happiest time in the marriage, doing something, finally, that they both unequivocally wanted. He lets the spaceman’s comment pass. “What are you doing here?”

“What are we doing here, what are you doing here? A Mrs. Bliss Lung sent for us. You must have some problems here. Nobody calls Home Wreckers if there are no real problems.”

He tells Moses to come closer, which he does, and instructs him to unzip a zipper on the hip of his space suit; the unzipped zipper opens to another zipper, which opens to a third zipper, which opens to a pocket which holds a dozen or so lollipops of different flavors. “Take one for yourself,” he says, “and one for--” His eyes jump from Moses to Ira to Sterling to Ira to Moses to Ira. He’s not sure if they’re all family. “And one for the little one.”

“Say thank you.”

They do but you can hardly hear them.

“My personal touch. I love kids. Usually don’t see many kids on the job. By the time I get to ‘em they’re not feeling so good. Most Home Wreckers-size problems don’t come with people inside. People get the hell out and call us from a phone booth. You see this suit. We can walk through a nuclear reactor in this thing, wade waist-deep in a toxic chemical swamp, survive days in an oxygen-free environment, dance through wildfire, play golf on Mars.”

“Wow!” Moses says.

“Wow!” says Ira, imitating his big brother.

He promises to inspect the “domicile,” 10 feet below ground, 20 feet in the air space above; he starts with radioactivity, “very nasty stuff, just a silly milligram’ll make you feel lousy, sick in the blood”; he and his crew will find something; that’s why Sterling and the kids have to go. “We always find something terribly wrong, it’s the Home Wreckers guarantee.”

*

Sterling and the boys go riding in the Volvo. Like that, the three are transformed into migrants, nomads, refugees. Cast out by Bliss. He has to find the boys’ mother, wherever she’s disappeared, remind her what her sons look like. The spaceman had agitated Moses so, all that talk of radioactivity, toxic fumes, chemical spills, ancient spells, that he ran from the infected house, dragging his brother and father out to the car. Sterling, caught up in Moses’s panic, lost his head and, cursing Bliss, stuffed the boys into the backseat and, to shave seconds off their getaway, let the seat-belting of Moses and kiddie-seating of Ira wait until later. He keeps his eye on the boys in the rearview mirror. At Spudnuts he buys breakfast: Ira is covered in powdered sugar and grape jelly; Moses doesn’t touch his donuts.

He steers the car downtown, on a narrow street lined with antique lamp posts and potted trees. At this hour most of the pedestrians are homeless people or parents with kids. Except for the cafes, the businesses are closed. But employees are preparing for the workday, hosing down the pavement, hauling racks of discounted clothing into the sun, arranging cut flowers for sale in buckets of water.

The kids torment each other. Sterling can’t tell who’s the instigator. “Moses, give Ira your donuts if you’re not going to eat them,” Sterling says, turning his head away from the road to let the boys know he means business.

“Who says I’m not?” Moses says. “I’m just saving it for later.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

Sensing that things are breaking in his favor, Ira seizes the moment and lunges for the donuts. “I need it!” he whines. The urgency in Ira’s voice turns Sterling’s head. This is parental instinct in operation, a situation for which a glance at the rearview won’t do. “Moses,” he says, “let him have it.”

Moses does, whacking Ira on the top of his head until he retreats back to his seat. Sterling expects Ira to start bawling but he doesn’t. They are always disappointing him. Sterling stops the Volvo in the middle of the narrow street. He checks: There are no cars behind his. “Moses, what’s wrong with you, huh?” He tells him to leave Ira alone, hand over the donuts, buckle his brother’s seat belt. He supervises the latter procedure, Moses having lots of difficulty just locating the metal ends. Sterling can’t deduce whether he truly can’t find the pieces of the seat belt or is fooling around. Another car comes up from the rear. “Damn!” he says and turns to face front, keeping his eyes on Moses for as long as they’d stick, and eases off the brakes.

The car rolls just a few feet, and he slams the brakes on again. The boys tumble forward a little and bump the back of his seat.

A man stands in front of the Volvo. He stares at Sterling, as if he had been hit. He looks mean, his face half-eaten by beard. Sterling has done nothing wrong, even though his heart pounds, his head swims in adrenaline. “It’s OK, it’s OK! No one’s hurt here!” he yells at the kids, who are rearranging themselves back into their seats. “I want Mommy!” Moses says. And this sets off Ira. He wants mommy, too. So does Sterling; she’s to blame for this; she chased him from the house.

A car approaches from behind and honks. Sterling waves for the car to pass. It takes a while, as if the driver doesn’t understand the signal, before the car crosses the double yellow lines and pulls up alongside the Volvo. As the car speeds past Moses shrieks, “Look, Jack!”

“Mommy!” Ira says.

Sterling waves for the man in the crosswalk to cross. “Come on,” he says.

“There goes Jack!” Moses says.

“Mommy!” says Ira.

Their noise shrivels his heart to a prune. “Who’s Jack?”

“Mommy’s friend!”

Sterling knows who Moses is talking about. Jack Pierce, dirt-doctor-geologist.

“You saw Jack Pierce?”

“No, his car!”

“How do you know his car?”

“He drives the car to my house.”

The man approaches the driver-side window. “Damn. Damn,” Sterling says and surreptitiously locks his door.

The man taps the glass, cranks his hand in the air.

Sterling shakes his head. He doesn’t know what he is saying “no” to. He shakes his head and turns both palms skyward. No change. No clue. No speak English.

*

At the risk of provoking the kids, Sterling drives to the medical building where Bliss works. Her car is nowhere in sight.

He drives the kids to the park. Do something the little ones dig before they explode from boredom. A preemptive strike. But after 10 minutes of swing, slide and sand--Ira discovers that by rolling his body in the sandbox grains will stick to the jelly patches on his shirt, arms and face, like sesame seeds to bread sticks--Sterling suddenly has had his fill of the moment. He is overcome by a sense of impermanence, of waiting for an alternative way of being--playground as refugee camp. He hurries the unsuspecting boys into the car, as if he were taking protective cover.

Ira’s sweet, sandy, sweaty body protests the abrupt escape and refuses the kiddie seat. As before the boys are parked side by side; Sterling secures the seat belts around their waists. Once in motion Ira unleashes a bucket of forlorn tears; Moses is seething and sullen, arms crossed across his chest, eyes like drill bits that eat holes in the pine that is his father’s head. Ira complains about the seat belt. Sterling hears him messing with the buckle. Moses rats on his brother, “He’s trying to take off his seat belt!”

“Don’t do that! Jeez!”

“I want to get out,” Ira says.

“Ira, I can’t let you right now. We’re in the car, and when we’re in the car, we all wear seat belts or ride in the car seat. Now isn’t it special to be sitting next to your brother like a grown-up, instead of stuck in the car seat?”

“Yes,” Ira says, after a half mile, his voice, his body full of resignation.

“It’s so special, isn’t it, Ira? It’s so special, let’s keep it our special secret! Yours, mine, and Moses’. It’ll be fun. We’ll keep the secret from Mommy. OK?”

Ira isn’t answering. Sterling finds Moses in the rearview. He asks, “Does he understand what I’m saying?”

The kid leans over and stares straight into his brother’s face, nose to nose, as if he were suddenly myopic. He says to the rearview, “I think so,” with a shrug of his shoulders.

A minute later, Sterling parks on a block that fronts a row of stores Moses has developed a fondness for: a bookstore, a toy store, an Italian deli, a gourmet cookie shop, a pet shop, a taco stand. “OK, guys!” Sterling says, trying to talk all three into a better mood. “Let’s stop fooling around! It’s fun time! We’ll read books, check out the animals, then everyone gets a treat!”

Immediate dividends: Ira claps his hands. Moses scowls at his brother. Moses has recently cultivated notions of cool behavior, but Sterling can detect an eagerness in his posture that belies his outward attitude. “Can I take my seat belt off now?” he asks.

“Of course.”

But he struggles with the buckle. “Push the metal in the middle,” Sterling says, which is exactly what he sees Moses doing.

“It won’t work,” he says, his frustration and anxiety rising in his voice, as if he fears that he will be left alone, so tethered inside the car, while his brother and father are playing.

“Stop, before you break it!” Sterling says, making no effort to palliate his annoyance. “I’ll help you.”

Having liberated the kids, Sterling turns and unfastens his seat belt. Out the farthest left-hand edge of the windshield he sees the geologist’s car. Immediately he is drawn to it, with the urgency of sex. He turns the ignition, shifts into DRIVE. “Hey, what’re you doing?” Moses whines.

“Birdies, birdies!” Ira says, longingly, reaching his stubby arm back, hand going for the grab. “Birdies!”

“His seat belt is not on,” Moses says. It’s his grandfather’s bossy, authoritarian genes acting up. Nosy about others; doesn’t realize his belt isn’t buckled either.

“This is just a temporary change in plans. Do you know what that means? Daddy has to drive around the block first, then Ira can see his birdies. Which birdies do you think you’ll see today, Ira?”

It’s the same brown car that had passed him earlier, now at the corner, fronting the laundermat, in the opposite traffic lane. Jack the geologist leans against the hood of the Barracuda; he’s laughing, shoulders bouncing like a ball down a flight of steps. Sterling sees a woman in the gap between the car’s hood and the rear bumper of a green pickup truck. It’s only a three- to four-foot space between vehicles, and he’s driving at 30 miles an hour, five under the speed limit, and trying to negotiate the kids. Sterling’s fix on the scene is, at best, sketchy: She’s wearing a miniskirt over black tights, a top of flowers printed on a shiny synthetic fabric that rides the curves of her body. Her knees are bent slightly, her hands rest heavily on the fronts of her thighs. To this point she could have been Bliss; he thinks it’s her, only her head, which hangs forward from her neck as massively as a ripe sunflower on its stalk, is covered with hair that’s a perfect match for the Barracuda’s brown; it cascades down, kinks and curls, tips touching past knees.

Sterling doesn’t know what to think. He drives to the end of the next block, he adjusts the side-view mirror so as to keep the geologist, the brown car and the woman with the brown hair within his sight. Then things start adding up, the possibilities unfurling like curls of butter shaved off a two-pound bar. He sees a sloppily parked Saab that’s the same lemon-sherbet yellow as Bliss’s. But he’s not sure if it matches her year or model. And what if it is her car, what’s wrong with her coming downtown?

His eyes stay on the side-view mirror; he won’t let go, though the Barracuda is by now an indistinguishable segment in an unbroken line of cars. He persists, trying to get a fix, discern the indiscernible, see from the whole individual molecules that are the components of air. He hangs a right, circles the block for a second look. It’s as irresistible as reading her letters.

He tells Moses to sing. The car’s interior silence is like the ullage of a partially drunk bottle of wine, the more of it there is, the quicker the wine will deteriorate: As the seconds pass, he feels himself go to vinegar. “Come on, Moses,” Sterling says, already losing patience. “Ira, what should your big brother sing?”

In the rearview he sees that the little guy is keen on the idea. It breaks Sterling’s heart to see how simple and uncomplicated life really is: a song, a tumble in the sand; not brown cars. Their eyes meet in the mirror. Ira says, “ ‘You Are My Sunshine’ ”?

“How about it, Moses? Ira wants to hear ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ ”

The kid crosses his arms and glares out at the window.

“Don’t be that way. Just lead us, Moses,” Sterling says, “then we’ll join in.”

He doesn’t, but Ira picks up the ball; he starts singing, sweet and pathetic, his puny voice barely making a dent in the car’s bleak interior, its rough atmosphere. He rocks back and forth in his seat, eyes blank and unfocused, as if his singing is a form of self-hypnosis and he is slipping into a trance. He doesn’t care that his brother and father won’t sing. He is totally absorbed in the moment, taking the greatest pleasure in his clever body--lungs, breath, mouth, ears, memory.

He comes to the end of the song. Ira looks content, infinitely pleased with himself, six feet deep under his own spell. “Do it again,” Moses says. He is goofing on his little brother; Sterling knows that, but Ira doesn’t. He gathers his breath and lets loose, louder this time; his urge for volume throwing him further off key.

They’re waiting for the green at the intersection of Ocean and Water. Ira’s singing for his life. Moses scowls, mouth open with astonishment. He can’t believe how the kid delights in being a kid.

By the time the signal’s green--please don’t take my sunshine away--there are tears in Sterling’s eyes. He can’t explain why this is happening. It comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. The tears seem frozen in place and in time; they seem to have always been there and seem destined to perch there far into the future. He turns right onto Water. The circuit’s now complete.

Ira suddenly breaks off his song. He leaps to his feet. He shares the genius of animals: cattle that predict storms by sniffing ions escaping the soil, birds whose feathers are ruffled by electromagnetic disturbances before earthquakes. Well in advance of downtown’s gold coast, Ira seems keenly tuned to a chaos of sensual signals hanging in the air: dust mites from spines of books, salami on sour dough, dander from cockatoos, rabbits and ferrets, taco shells sizzling in lard. He stands momentarily on the car floor, surveying the street, the shops along the street, seeking visual confirmation of what his body sensed.

“Sit down!” Moses says, with a mouthful of irritation.

“Hey, that’s right,” Sterling says, as if Moses’s suggestion is the most novel of ideas. Then, in his tough-authority-figure voice that he rarely uses on Ira, he adds, “Get back in your seat.”

The Volvo moves at the rate of a tour bus cruising a monument. They pass the toy store, bookstore, deli, the whole scene--kids, parents, sidewalk cafes, balloons on strollers. Moses is sunk deep in his seat, arms crossed. A look of puzzlement congeals on Ira’s face; his hands press against the window and he bounces anxiously on his knees. “I want to go home,” Moses says, and kicks the back of Sterling’s seat.”

“Mommy,” Ira goes. The word comes out as if it were a revelation, like he’s talking in his sleep. He starts in with that song again, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” very softly, as he used to serenade himself while resting in his crib.

Ahead, the Barracuda. Won’t Bliss be disappointed to learn that Jack the geologist is too busy with a grad student to come visit her at the house? The black-tighted, miniskirted woman is bent at the waist, mass of brown hair cascading like an inverted artichoke plant. She shakes her head, and Sterling finally has her figured--she’s drying her hair in the sun. Sterling likes what he sees. Dumb Bliss, he thinks, saving her body for the geologist; does she honestly believe she can compete with her?

From the hood of the car Jack Pierce rakes his fingers through her thicket of hair. His friend, legs spread, high-heels planted to pavement, loses it; it’s as if his touch jolts her with hundreds of volts of electricity and every hair in her scalp is a wire and each wire is connected to a nerve: she whips her hair up and down, then in circles, like a go-go girl on “Hullabaloo.” Strangest of all is the public display, this out-of-control expression of passion in daylight form.

Ira’s still singing into the window, in that same eerie, out-of-body way of his, as they pull even with the Barracuda. The woman, bending at the waist, tosses her hair like fanning a fire. “There’s Jack!” Moses goes. “Jack!”

“Yeah,” Sterling snaps, “you won’t be seeing him around much anymore.” He can’t help himself; he feels betrayed.

He can’t take his eyes off the two across the street. “Jack!” Moses says, pushing the window button. But Sterling holds the ultimate controls.

“I want to see Jack!” He kicks his father in the kidney.

Sterling brakes. Turns. Fixes Moses in his eyes. Cars are honking behind them. Moses crosses his arms, and his eyes, gull-like, meet Sterling’s. Moses’s mouth blisters: “GO!”

Sterling hits the gas pedal. He can’t remember the last time he saw the road. “Happy now?” he says to the rearview. Moses averts his eyes from the mirror.

“Mommy!” he yells, so loud and sudden his voice is a stab at Sterling’s heart. Ira stirs from his song-induced trance and crawls unsteadily over to his brother and clambers onto his lap to see what he sees. “Where? Where?”

Ira might not have put all the pieces together in time. She’s dressed in clothes he’s never seen before, her familiar nimbus of silver hair has been dyed brown. His brother’s voice had penetrated the car’s shatterproof glass; just after the Volvo passed the Barracuda, standing there as if she were anything but the mother of sons, as if she had no ties to the world, as if she were a stranger and no one could name her used the streets, she looked up.

Bliss. He keeps her fixed in the rearview mirror, but she is receding. He goes slowly, trying to keep a hold on her; cars honk, switch lanes and pass. Tears come to his eyes. Self-pity. His boys call for their mother. The kids’ two-syllable chants are pistol shots that wound, bullet holes that only Ira-size fingers can plug to stop the bleeding.

In the rearview: the backs of the boys’ head, their mother and her boyfriend, cars and drivers who have no idea. That is what he remembers seeing when he smashes into the car in front, an old Cadillac hearse, cratered with dents and only a patchwork of original paint. The Volvo struck the hearse’s rear end squarely, the collision mitigated by their respective motion. Contact, then a concussive explosion that seems to originate inside his head, brakes and tires screech, the boys holler, their bodies thud against the backs of the front seats. The boys are crying.

“You guys OK?” he asks. “Everything’s fine, OK? We’re all OK, OK? We’re all all right.” Through tears Moses complains of pain in his hand. It’s likely that he jammed his wrist catching himself when he was thrown. He tilts awkwardly to his right, half-sitting, half-reclining, his legs crossed serenely at the knees like an adult’s. But luckily he’s buckled in; he had surreptitiously buckled his seat belt. But Ira, dear little Ira! Except for one foot--its shoe has improbably been knocked off--which hooks the steel frame of his kiddie seat, Ira is face down on the floor behind the passenger seat, as if he’s bodysurfing on black carpet. He whimpers, a muffled crying that’s in sharp contrast to Moses’s wail; his shoulder blades poke from his T-shirt like wings. Sterling pats Ira’s back. “You’re OK, right? Let me help you up,” he says, grabbing a handful of the boy’s T-shirt, but immediately reconsiders the efficacy and wisdom of lifting him this way. “Don’t move, I’ll come around and get you, OK?”

Sterling puts the car into DRIVE and signals right and pulls over to the curb, the hearse mirroring his move. He releases himself from his seat belt, thinking, “Bliss is going to kill me.” He activates the emergency blinkers, gets out of the Volvo. Cars in both directions of traffic are already slowing to rubberneck; people gather in distinct clumps on the sides of the street. The other driver, a hippie girl, probably an undergrad at the university, pops from the hearse. “Did you hit me or did I hit you?” she says. “I mean, was I going too slow? People have said I’d cause an accident one day because of how slow I drive.”

Sterling eyes her suspiciously. She must be joking. Is she damaged from the crash? He hurries to Ira. As he lifts the boy out, the girls says over his shoulder, “I’m Summer. My car’s such a boat, I hardly felt a thing. I’m cool. But how’s the baby doing?”

“Oh, you’re so big,” Sterling gushes, trying to cheer Ira up. “You’re getting to be such a big boy!” But the mustache of blood, two thin branching lines on his upper lip that look like Magic Marker, shuts him up. Ira wipes at his nose with the back of his hand and coughs. Stuffy noses make Sterling feel so helpless, overmatched by circumstance. At least Ira isn’t crying. He just blinks and stares--dazed. Hasn’t cried since he left the car. A good sign, Sterling thinks; things can’t be too messed up if the child isn’t crying. Moses is squeezing out enough tears for both of them. “Aw, little baby boy!” Summer says, patting Ira’s head. He looks as if he’s waking from a nap. He reaches his arms out to the girl. “If you don’t mind,” Sterling says, lowering Ira into the stranger’s arms.

In the distance sirens sound. He holds Moses in his arms now. On the curb, the girl carries Ira on her hip, very maternal-like, and she is trying to wipe the blood off his face. Ira lets her have her way, but the blood won’t come off, it seems destined to permanently stain his face. Passersby keep gathering on the sidewalk. But from his vantage point, Sterling doesn’t see what’s so interesting. There’s no broken glass, no spilled oil, no crushed steel, no carnage. There’s a hearse and, parked behind the hearse, a family car, a vehicle that’s reputed as being the safest thing on wheels; there’s a child with a bloody nose and girl who to the casual observer might easily be mistaken for his mother. Still, people stop and gawk, they go up to Ira, especially women without children, pet his head, chuck him under his chin. Poor Ira, arms looped around the stranger’s neck, looks spooked.

He parks Moses on the hood of the Volvo and massages the kid’s wrist. He complains, “Ouchouchouch!” trying to pull away, sucking air through his teeth.

“You said your wrist hurts.”

“You made it worser.”

An ambulance arrives and double-parks beside the hearse. The paramedic wants to take someone to the hospital. He seems disappointed that there are no customers here. “Moses sprained his wrist, and his brother has a little nosebleed. He just needs to be cleaned up.” He points Ira out to the paramedic.

A commotion breaks out in the crowd. “Moses! Ira!” Bliss is shouting. “My baby!” Ira’s expression doesn’t change. He looks at her and blinks and stares, his hand goes to his nose. She reaches for him. “I’m his mother,” she says.

“No you’re not!” Summer won’t relinquish Ira. “You don’t get it, lady,” she says. “He’s with me.” She scans the street, finds Sterling. “Ask him, he’s the father!”

Bliss stares down Sterling. The geologist stands just off her shoulder, like a bodyguard. Bliss mouths something at Sterling that he can’t catch the shapes of. “What?” he says, across a distance that geographically is nothing, a few squares of sidewalk, but emotionally they may as well be on separate continents. “Moses,” she says, “come here!” Sterling doesn’t frame Moses’s going or staying as a test of loyalty, but when the kid splits, squirming free of his father’s grip, which has tightened since her appearance, he sees, again, the little traitor the kid is. He hugs her black-nyloned leg, and she bends and pecks the top of his head. It’s the first step in her rehabilitation. Then a strange thought comes: He’s looking at a Volvo ad, the station wagon, Jack and Bliss the typical upper-middle class couple, Summer the au pair girl, Ira their child, Moses their adopted refugee from an Asian war. Perfect picture except for the persistent hearse.

She mouths the words again, her eyes darkened by anger. What is she so pissed about? Who is she kidding, trying act so discreetly, after the public spectacle she made of herself.

“Nice hair,” he says. “Nice outfit. You look ridiculous.”

“I look ridiculous. What about all this?” She waves her arms to indicate the whole scene. “And who is this little darling?”

“Hey,” Summer says, “I’m cool. Don’t drag me into this. I did the accident. That’s as far as I go.”

The paramedic comes up to Sterling, “If there’s no problem, I ‘m going to have to leave.”

He looks over at Ira. For a brief instant he weighs the offer of medical assistance. But Ira simply appears stunned and disoriented--no surprise in light of all that’s happened, the accident, seeing his mother that way.

“We’re OK,” he says. But as the paramedic goes to the ambulance, “Wait, I’ll go!” Summer calls after him. She drops Ira into Sterling’s arms, secures the hearse and says, “Peace, you guys.”

Once the ambulance leaves, the crowd thins. Moses releases his mother’s leg and leans on the Volvo. “I’m hungry,” he whines, dribbling his rump against the car. Ira seems so light in Sterling’s arms: fragile, his bones hollowed out like a bird’s. He seems on the edge of flight. Sterling wipes at the blood under Ira’s nose. His skin feels rubbery; the dry blood is stubborn and weighty. The blood won’t go. Forgetting himself momentarily, he looks imploringly at Bliss for assistance, advice. But when she closes in, Sterling--with a quick, short turn--shields Ira from her. She grabs his arm. Sterling glares at her over his shoulder. She mouths something again. “What?” he snaps. “Why don’t you just say it. What’s to hide now?”

He keeps challenging her.

“She said,” Moses says, “ ‘How could you?’ ”

“How could I what?”

“How could you?” she says.

“How could you?”