When they walked in the front door, she said, “We have to go get April in about an hour. You want a snack and I’ll read to you?”

“Mommy?” he said. “I don’t want to die because when you’re dead you can’t talk or get up and I’ll miss you.”

And here she learned a lesson about desperation and the ways in which a parent could sometimes rely on it. “Come here,” she said. He sat on her lap. She told him that he was a big boy and it was time for the truth. The truth was that no one knows what happens after we die, because we can’t talk to dead people and dead people can’t talk to us. But some people have some ideas about what might happen. Some people believe in an idea called reincarnation, where when one life ends there’s a little rest time and then you get to come back and live again; not the same exact life, though, and maybe not even the same kind of life-maybe you came back as an eagle, or a dog. In fact, maybe this life, right now, wasn’t even his first one: maybe he’d been a dinosaur, so long ago that he’d forgotten. (She could feel his little arms relaxing.) Another idea, which a whole lot of people believed in, was called heaven. Heaven was a place that depended on your wishes: the place in life when you’d felt safest and happiest and most comfortable, heaven was that place for you all the time, forever.

“A nice warm house,” Jonas said, “with you and Daddy.”

He left his sister out of it, Cynthia noticed, but she had let that go. It was a little rite of passage for her, a confidence builder, a lesson in love’s resources even when there was nothing in particular you yourself believed in.

JONAS WOKE UP FIRST-he could tell by listening-with the shutters open facing the sea. No sound but the rain turning to mist on the stones of the patio. It often rained in the first hour of the morning, as if considerately, to get it out of the way early in case the Moreys or the rest of the island’s inhabitants might have had anything planned. Not that there was much to plan, even if you were so inclined. Another walk on the beach, maybe, or another ride across the harbor to Scilly Cay to eat a lobster. That was the genius of the place, as far as Jonas was concerned: wasted time. You needed that in order to properly value, and to gauge the insanity of, your regimented life back home, where sometimes that first minute of brain activity after waking generated so much anxiety that you’d have to get out of bed just to stop thinking. Then again, Anguilla itself was starting to feel a bit like home by now. Twice a year-Christmas break and spring break-for four years. That kind of fidelity was unprecedented. His father must have found something he liked here, since it was the only place they’d ever visited that he had expressed any desire to go back to. Maybe when Jonas was his father’s age, and someone used the word “home” in his hearing, Anguilla would be one place he’d think of. Probably not, though. They rented the same Greek-style villa here every time, even though his parents surely could have afforded to buy it. At least Jonas thought so. It wasn’t always easy to tell what they couldn’t afford anymore.

April was in the bedroom right behind his head, with her friend Robin from school, and the very thought of Robin lent Jonas’s thoughts an instant and somewhat humiliating focus. He put his ear to the wall even though the two girls would not be awake for a couple of hours. They were sleeping in the same king-size bed, because they liked it that way, and this provoked Jonas in ways he almost resented. His mom had urged him to invite a friend on this trip too, but he didn’t really have any friendships that intense; there were the guys in his band, but frankly they were better off taking a little break from one another. Robin was tall and thin and long-haired, like all of April’s nasty school friends really, but she was also on the lacrosse team and knew who Gram Parsons was and turned red when she laughed and was nice to him, and not just when his parents were in the room either. He sublimated a lot of his feelings toward her into a sentimental appreciation of her as a tragic figure, because her own home life was so bad. Her father was a partner at White & Case and they were over-the-top rich-plenty rich enough to take their own family trip to Anguilla for Christmas, or anywhere else in the world, if they could stand being around one another that long-but the mother was bipolar, or so he’d heard his own mother say, and Robin’s father either couldn’t acknowledge that kind of defect or else just chose not to make the requisite sacrifices to deal with it. Robin had been spending a lot of nights with the Moreys back in New York lately, sometimes on short notice. When she was with them and the phone rang, Jonas had been instructed not to answer it until April or their mom had a chance to screen the incoming number. Robin had an older brother who didn’t always come home at night anymore either, though nobody knew where he went instead.

The sadness of it all did nothing to diminish his urge to masturbate, and this was a perfect opportunity, but then Jonas’s eye fell on the Gibson electric guitar he had received two days ago for Christmas, on its stand in the corner of the bedroom. His feelings for it were as passionate as for any object he had ever owned. Indian rosewood neck, humbucker pickups: he’d coveted it for so long that he was in the weird position, Christmas-gift-wise, of knowing exactly how much it had cost. His amp was back in New York but the guitar came with a pair of wireless headphones, so he could jam away without bothering anyone else. He got out of bed, put on a t-shirt, and sat on the couch by the glass doors with the guitar in his lap. The rain was already letting up, and the sky was brightening in great slabs of blue and white. He heard a door open downstairs and footsteps on the patio, but at this hour it could only be Simon laying the table. He decided he’d work on mastering the opening lick from “One Way Out” until his dad appeared on the beach for his morning swim. He clapped the headphones on; an hour later, when he saw Adam winding his way down the whitewashed steps toward the calm ocean below the house, he unplugged and went downstairs to tell Simon what he wanted for breakfast.

Adam walked into the mild surf until the dropoff came, and then he turned and floated, with his toes sticking out of the water, and stared up at the villa. The water on the island’s bay end was impossibly warm. A cargo ship was passing to the north of him, toward the open Atlantic, and he watched it for a while but there was no way to track its progress. Even the plume of smoke trailing behind it was as still as a painting. He swam back and forth for a while, but when he paused the salt water held him up easily and so he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, female figures were moving back and forth on the patio, and he walked out of the surf, grabbed the towel that Simon had hung on the beach chair for him, and headed back up the stairs.

“You might put on a shirt there, nature boy,” Cynthia said to him, rolling her eyes at the girls, and so he stood up again and went to the bedroom to get one. Simon, having dried off the chairs and opened the umbrella that shaded the table, was pouring coffee and taking omelet orders. He was one of the house’s amenities; in the hot off-season, he went to college in Atlanta, and in the winter he saw to the needs of the villa’s guests and went home to his parents’ place at night. Cynthia caught April and Robin nudging each other from time to time when Simon was entering the room, or leaving it, but that was okay. Let them. She prided herself on not talking to her daughter about sex or men in the censorious way most mothers would.

“Robin,” she said, “that skirt is so cute on you.” They’d given it to her for Christmas, and Cynthia was proud of the rightness of it for her. She was fascinated with Robin, who had both everything and nothing. She just loved it that you could have such bitter fuck-ups for parents and still somehow foil them by turning out so sweet and poised and confident at age fifteen.