O’Neil had been living with Kay since he returned from Europe in late April, sleeping on a cot in a tiny room behind the kitchen that they use for storage, and paying her and Jack fifty dollars a week. The house, a one-story bungalow encased in aluminum siding, sat on a block that ended at a high cement wall and the freeway, and though the street seemed fine during the day-clean and neat in a neutral sort of way-at night a gloom descended, dogs began to bark, and groups of young men gathered on the corners. One early morning as he left for work, O’Neil discovered in his car an empty pack of cigarettes, and three butts in the ashtray. Otherwise, the car was untouched. No harm had been done, but O’Neil still worried about his sister, living in a neighborhood where strangers would smoke in your unlocked car when you weren’t looking. The room where he slept was full of boxes with words written on them in black Magic Marker-Dissertation Notes, Office Misc., Kitchen/Bath. Early on, O’Neil had opened one box, marked Wedding Presents and found, inside, three brand-new waffle irons, still in their packages. The hidden bounty of these boxes amazed him, for O’Neil himself owned almost nothing. He had sold most of his belongings to pay for his trip and was still living out of the backpack he had carried with him to London and Paris, Lisbon and Rome.

Kay, who was five years older than O’Neil, was the director of a state agency that assisted teenage mothers, and Jack was an economist, doing his postdoc at a think tank in Stamford. When this was done, in a year or two, they would sell the house and move to wherever Jack found a tenure-track position. O’Neil hadn’t a clue at all about Jack’s job, which had something to do with labor, and Kay often joked that it would have rounded out his expertise nicely if he actually did some around the house. At such moments she appeared not to like her husband very much, but these glimpses were brief. O’Neil didn’t feel one way or the other about Jack, who seemed to regard him with the generic masculine warmth of a fraternity brother. “How’s the man?” he would ask O’Neil as they crossed in the hallway, or maneuvered past one another in the cramped kitchen. “What’s the word, O’Neil?” One Friday, a few weeks after his return, O’Neil had come home late from a bar and heard Kay and Jack talking in low voices in the kitchen. He paused in the dark hallway to listen. Although he couldn’t make out their words, he knew from their measured, parental tone that they were speaking about him. When would he move on? What would become of such a person as O’Neil?

Back from the hospital, Kay helped him to bed in his little room of boxes, and in the morning O’Neil awoke late to find that Kay and Jack had already left for the day. Balancing on his crutches, O’Neil made coffee and took some more codeine and then paged Joe, who called him back in the early afternoon while O’Neil was watching a soap opera on the sofa, his cast propped on a stack of pillows.

“I just drove by the house,” Joe said, and in the background O’Neil could hear the wash of traffic on the Post Road. “What the hell did you do to the roof?”

“I had an accident,” O’Neil said.

“Those people are going to be royally pissed. Just get over there.”

“Joe, I have a broken leg.”

A pause followed, as O’Neil waited to hear what Joe would next say.

“Okay,” Joe said, “I’m sorry. Tell me, how’s your leg?”

O’Neil held the phone to his leg and rapped the plaster with his knuckles. “You can sign my cast, if you want,” he said. “Also, you owe my sister fifteen hundred dollars for medical expenses.”

“Jesus, O’Neil. Don’t you have any insurance?”

On the television a couple began kissing with their eyes closed. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?” said O’Neil.

“Okay, okay. I have to tell them something. What’s the woman’s name? Patty?”

“Patrice. She drove me to the hospital.”

“I always thought she was pretty good looking,” Joe said, thinking aloud.

“Try telling her you’re going to paint her house.”

O’Neil passed the afternoon watching television and napping, and keeping off the leg, which had begun to hum with pain, like a low-bandwidth radio signal. He believed that Joe would call back eventually and try to settle the situation. He had never met anybody like Joe, who spoke about his native country with a rhapsodic patriotism that was like nothing O’Neil had experienced in his life. “People think Canada is cold,” Joe liked to say, “but it’s the warmth of the people that makes it special.” O’Neil had serious questions about Joe’s business practices-he underpaid all his workers so badly that almost no one stayed, and he seemed to be taking deposits on houses he couldn’t paint in a million years-and yet O’Neil liked to think that his loyalty, doing an awful job nobody else wanted, would count for something in the end. But Joe did not call back, and as the afternoon wore on, it occurred to O’Neil that this silence might be permanent.

After dinner, when Kay and Jack had left him to catch an early movie, O’Neil put two pills in his shirt pocket and swung on his crutches out to the patio, a concrete slab attached to the back of the house that Kay and Jack had dressed up with plastic furniture and potted marigolds. O’Neil arranged himself in a chair and washed the pills down with a can of Coors, and waited for the codeine to kick in. The day was nearly gone, and the last of the light seemed to pour into the shadows like water down a drain. His body had always been highly responsive to medication of any sort, and this was true of the codeine, which made him feel like hammered tin. At times like this, O’Neil sometimes thought of Sandra, the last girl he had loved. They had broken up just a few months after his parents’ accident-with so much on his mind, O’Neil had simply drifted away-and though they had managed to remain friends for the rest of their time at college, O’Neil often felt a stab of longing for her, and the way she had made him feel: more alive somehow, as if his life were an open door he had only to step through. The summer after graduation, Sandra had ridden her bicycle across the country, raising money for hunger relief; now she was in California, a medical student at Stanford planning a career in pediatric oncology, while O’Neil was painting houses and living in a storage room. He would have liked to call her, but what was there to say? On top of everything, Joe owed him two weeks’ pay, and O’Neil had begun to wonder if he would ever see it, let alone the fifteen hundred for his broken leg. If his parents had still been around, he would have asked them what to do. For some time after they had died, when he was alone and feeling lost, O’Neil would speak to them, asking them questions about his life. Should I drop calculus? Should I buy a car? He has never told anyone about this, not even Kay, though secretly he believed she did the same thing.

Now, five years later on his sister’s patio, O’Neil found that his memory of his parents, their incorporeal vividness, had receded. He could no longer hear their voices, or even imagine what they might say to him. When he closed his eyes he could still conjure their faces, but these images were static, like photographs. Sitting in the dark on Kay’s patio, he understood that’s just what they were-memories of pictures, nothing more. It wasn’t just the codeine, O’Neil thought. They had left him alone.

The accident that killed their parents happened on a trip they had taken to visit O’Neil at college, the fall of his sophomore year. His parents had driven up for parents’ weekend, and on the way home, in a snowstorm, their car went off the road and fell a hundred feet into a river gorge. All of this would have been clear enough-a skid on a wet road in failing light-if not for the fact that they had left the college at noon and crashed their car six hours later, on the wrong road entirely, having driven only thirty miles. Where had they spent the intervening hours? Their mother had telephoned Kay at four-thirty, but not said where she was. The stretch of road between the campus and the ravine where their car was found was empty: no towns at all, and no reason to stop. Sleeping in the college library, O’Neil had awakened at five to see, out the window, the first dry flakes falling; by midnight nearly a foot of snow was on the ground, and he had learned that his parents were dead. Identifying the bodies was a job that should have been O’Neil’s-he was, after all, right there-but in the end he could not face this; he waited for Kay and Jack to drive up from New Haven and stood outside the police station in the snowy cold while they saw to this task. Then the three of them drove on to Glenn’s Mills, the upstate New York town where O’Neil and his sister had grown up, to wait for the bodies to follow them for burial.