“Seth. His name is Seth.”

“He told Kelly his name is Seth and she told you. He could be Smike for all you know. Or Squeers. Or Snagsby. Probably something with an S. Like Sex.”

Fern is riffing now, trying to make me laugh. I know what she’s doing, but I can’t help responding, and my heart unclenches. A big, tension-relieving sigh and anxiety begins to recede like the tide.

It’s so much easier on the phone. If Fern was here I’d be worried she’d see the tears in my eyes and go all soft, and then we’d both be blubbering.

“I hate it that they grow up,” I tell her, taking a deep breath.

“No you don’t,” she responds. “Not so many years ago you were praying she’d get the chance to grow up. Your prayers were answered.”

“True.”

“The miracle kid. She’s a character. They broke the mold. What a personality she has! If the average person has a hundred watts, Kelly has five hundred, all of it beaming. One day she’ll make you proud, but right now all she wants to do is blow your mind. And maybe Smike’s little thingy.”

“Fern! Please!”

“His little mind, too.”

Nobody enjoys her jokes better than Fern herself and that gets her laughing until she can barely breathe. After a while, after we’ve both enjoyed a few moments of silent communion, she goes, “So, you got a battle plan?”

“Grounding doesn’t seem to mean much.”

“Means nothing. Not unless you can lock ‘em up and throw away the key. What you gotta do, you gotta scare some sense into her.”

“And how do I do that?”

“With Jess I used to grab my chest, make my face go all white. Make her think my heart was about to stop.”

“You can do that, make your face go white?”

“Years of practice scaring my own mother.”

“I can’t fake a heart attack, Fern.”

“A seizure then. That’s easier. All you gotta do is drool.”

I’m crying now, but tears of laughter.

“It’ll be okay,” Fern says, shifting to serious. “You’ll see. Kelly’s a good soul. She’ll know what to do, even if you don’t.”

“You really think so?”

“I really do. But just in case, can you fake a nosebleed?”

I’m still smiling ten minutes later when I enter Kelly’s room. My intention is to rummage around, see if she left a contact number for Seth. No doubt it’s right there on her computer somewhere, but her computer is forbidden to me. The personal computer, Kelly has explained, is like a diary. Therefore no peeking, on pain of death. To which I agreed. Not the death part, of course, but the general idea. So in my mind her computer is off-limits until one second past noon. Until then I’ll stick to her address book, the handy little purse-size one I gave, assuming she hasn’t taken it with her.

Can’t find the address book. What I do find, nestled way back in the drawer, very nearly gives me that seizure Fern was suggesting. A photo album I’ve never seen before. Quite new, very slick.

Pictures of my daughter doing something really awful. Something worse than sex. Far, far worse.

7. When Sleepy Voices Make It Snow

Once when Roy Whittle was a boy—just the one time—Pap took the whole family to a carnival in Belle Glade. Some kind of harvest jubilee thing, where they blessed the dirt and prayed for the sugarcane, or anyhow that’s how Pappy explained it, in the brief interval when he was sober and smiling.

The thing about it was, the memory Roy savors, he and Dug got to pretty much run wild because Pappy was off doing whatever he did, and their momma went to the bingo, and the Whittle boys were left to their own devices. They didn’t have money for rides or cotton candy, so they took to sneaking into the sideshow tents. Crawling under the heavy canvas, flat on their bellies, the smell of wet grass in their faces. Saw Howard Huge, the blubbery fat man, big as a whale and sitting on a scale that proved he weighed a thousand pounds. Saw a boy using a hammer to drive big spikes up his nose, which Dug thought was funny—it was a rare thing, hearing his brother laugh out loud—and a skinny old woman with really disgusting scaly skin calling herself the Real Fiji Mermaid.

What Roy remembers best though, is getting hypnotized. This man in a shiny black suit and western string tie, the Amazing Mizmar, had the ability to control minds not his own. Picking folks out of the little audience for his famous experiment in mass hypnosis, he’d pointed out Dug to his pretty assistant, but Dug wouldn’t have none of it. He wasn’t one for talking to strangers, or drawing attention. So Roy took his place up on the stage with the other victims, all of them looking pretty sheepish, and then the Amazing Mizmar produced this truly amazing device, a glittery little ball on the end of a wand. He clicked the wand and the glittery ball shot pulses of light. Alluring, rhythmic pulses that blended in with the Amazing Mizmar’s sleepy voice, urging Roy to stare at the wand and feel the light and then to close his eyes and still see the light through his eyelids, and in less than a minute Roy was really and truly hypnotized. It was like being awake but sleeping somehow, frozen in a half-dream, in-between state, and it felt good. Felt right somehow. When the voice suggested it was snowing, Roy looked around, delighted—he’d never seen snow—and then set about dusting the big wet flakes from his shoulders. The laughter of the crowd was like the sound of flowing water or the crying of distant gulls, and when the voice told him to wake up at the sound—a sharp hand clap—he tried resisting. Wanted to stay in the between world, where sleepy voices made it snow.

Roy still has his “between” moments and this is one of them. Sitting in the air-conditioned cab of their new Dodge Ram, Dug nods off as they wait, and Roy studies the shimmering waves of heat that rise from the white runway. Makes the air look like pulsing, transparent jelly. With that and the regular sound of Dug breathing heavy through his nose, Roy can almost hear the drone of the Amazing Mizmar’s voice, he can almost see through the heat-shimmered air into some other place.

Almost but not quite, because Ricky Lang pulls him back into the big bad world. Yanks open the door and pokes Roy with an index finger that feels like a warm steel rod in the ribs.

“Wake up,” says Ricky.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” says Roy. “I’m keeping watch.”

Ricky, studying him from behind his mirrored sunglasses. Nodding to himself. “Uh-huh. Whatever. What you watching for, Roy?”

“Like you said. A plane.”

Ricky’s face untightens, and he smiles with just his lips. “Good. The specific aircraft we’re expecting, that would be a Beechcraft King Air 350. Twin turboprops. Color, green and silver. Tail number ends in seven, my lucky number.”

“Yes, sir,” says Roy. He’s tried nudging Dug, but Dug is deeply asleep, and he’s worried about how it looks, his brother snoozing while the boss is giving instructions.

“Leave him be,” Ricky suggests. “Don’t matter if he sleeps through the end of the world. This is on you, not your retarded brother.”

“Dug ain’t retarded.”

“Whatever’s wrong with him, that’s not my concern. You got the Glock?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know how to fire it? How to get the safety off, rack a bullet into the chamber, all that?”

Roy nods. He’s pretty sure he knows all that.

“Good,” says Ricky. “Then you know how to leave the safety on, how not to fire it.”

“What’re you saying?” Roy asks.

“I’m saying the gun is for show. Don’t shoot nobody is what I’m saying.”

“Okay,” says Roy. “I won’t.”

“Good. Little while, the aircraft will circle the field. It will land from the east, over there,” Ricky says, indicating where the long runway blends into the low scrub pine. “It will taxi to us. First thing you do, when the engines shut down, you come around from behind and put the chocks under the wheels. Think you can do that?”