"No, Mack, she's alive. But there's things she won't be able to do anymore. Doctors don't know how bad the damage is yet. She might get some of it back, she might not."

Mack had tears in his eyes. He was taking it harder than Ura Lee would have expected.

"Mack, this kind of thing happens sometimes. Accidents that hurt people. All you can do is pray that it doesn't happen to someone you love, and then pray for strength to deal with it if it does."

"I should have told her," said Mack.

"Told her what?"

"To stop wishing she could be a fish."

"Mack, honey, this doesn't have a thing to do with you."

But Madeline was intrigued now. "She told you she wanted to be a fish?"

Ura Lee didn't want Madeline to start making something out of this. "It wouldn't matter if she did."

"Well it would too, if it would show she had a motive for getting into that waterbed."

"Motive or not, she can't fit down the hose hole in a waterbed, and that was the only way she could have got in."

"If Mack knows something," said Madeline stubbornly, "then he's got to tell."

"He's five years old," said Ura Lee. "Nobody is going to accept his testimony, especially since there's no way Tamika could have got in that waterbed except through the gash Curtis Brown cut in it."

Ura Lee turned to Mack. "Mack, this is a grownup conversation. Tamika's going to be fine in the end, I'm sure of it. It's sweet of you to care what happens to your friend's big sister. But now you need to let us talk."

Mack turned around and went back up the hall. Madeline was about to talk again, but Ura Lee held up her hand till she heard the door close. Then she got up and walked to the hall and looked down to make sure Mack wasn't faking being out of earshot.

"Well?" asked Madeline, when Ura Lee returned to the living room.

"Well I did not go over there to spy on them. I think you want to talk to Miz Ophelia for that kind of thing."

"Oh, she wouldn't go in that room, she called it the death room and said it had some powerful curse on it."

"Well, if you're reduced to asking me for gossip, Madeline, you are at the bottom of the barrel, cause nobody tells me anything and I wouldn't remember it if they did."

In his bedroom, Mack was afraid to go to sleep. What if he dreamed again, and someone else had something terrible happen to them? So many cold dreams. A whole neighborhood full of them.

And when they came true, it wasn't ever going to be like the dreamers hoped.

He stayed awake forever, it felt like. And then he woke up and it was morning and he knew that he'd have to find another way to stop the cold dreams from coming true.

Chapter 7

NEIGHBORHOOD OF DREAMS

The older Mack got, the more he lived outside the house. Nothing against indoors. That was the place of breakfast, of sleep, of Miz Smitcher's hugging and kissing and scolding. It was a good place and he was glad to go back there when Ceese called to him at night.

But he grew up on the streets, more or less. Once school started for him, he'd go, and try to concentrate while he was there. But for him the real day was that morning run to the bus stop to hang out with the other kids from the neighborhood, and it started up again after school when the bus finally let him go in the afternoon. Summers were only different because he got to get lunch at the house of whatever kid he was playing with.

"That boy getting himself a powerful set of lungs calling out for you," Miz Dellar said one evening. Mack had eaten dinner with Tashawn Wallace's family, and Miz Dellar was Tashawn's great-grandma, about the oldest person Mack knew in person. Her teeth hurt her, so she only wore them at supper, and Mack liked to watch her put them in.

"He knows I always come home," said Mack.

"He cares about you, boy," said Miz Dellar. "That's worth more than a day's pay in this day and age."

"Day's pay for me is the same as a week's pay," said Mack. "Nothing."

"That's cause you lazy," said Tashawn. She liked Mack fine, but she always said things like that, dissing him and only pretending it was a joke.

"He can't be lazy," said Miz Dellar, "cause he stinks like a sick skunk."

"That means he's dead," said Tashawn.

"Do we have to have a conversation like this while people are trying to eat?" said Mrs. Wallace, Tashawn's mother.

"Mack's lazy," said Tashawn. "He doesn't do any work."

"I do homework," said Mack.

"Not so anybody'd ever know it," said Tashawn. "He always says he forgot to do it."

"No, I forget to bring it. I did it, I just didn't have it at school."

"Tashawn, let up on the boy," said Mrs. Wallace.

"Oh, that's just how Tashawn shows love," said Miz Dellar.

Tashawn made gagging noises and bent over her plate.

"Thanks for supper," said Mack. "It was delicious but I got to go or Ceese will think I died."

"If he smells you he'll know you died," said Tashawn.

"I wish you hadn't mentioned his smell," said Mrs. Wallace to Miz Dellar.

Mack stood in the doorway, listening to them for a moment. To him, conversation like that sounded like home.

But then, all the conversations in all the houses sounded like home to him. There was hardly a door within three blocks of Miz Smitcher's house that Mack hadn't passed through, and hardly a table he hadn't sat down at, if not for supper then at least for milk or even for a chewing out because he did something that annoyed some grownup. Some of those houses, he wasn't welcome at first, being, as they said, "fatherless" or "that bastard" or "a son of a grocery bag." But as time went on, there were fewer and fewer doors closed to him. He belonged everywhere in the neighborhood. Everybody working in their yard greeted him, even the Mexicans who did the gardening for the really rich people up on the higher reaches of Cloverdale and Punta Alta and Terraza. They'd call out to him in Spanish and he'd answer with the words he'd picked up and come and work beside them for a while.

Cause Tashawn was wrong. Mack worked hard at whatever task anyone set him. If a Mexican was trimming a hedge, Mack would pick up the clippings and put them in a pile. If one of his friends had to stay in and do chores, Mack would work alongside without even being asked, and when his friend got lazy and wanted to play, it was Mack who kept working till the job was finished.

At home, too, whatever Ceese or Miz Smitcher asked him to do, he did it, and kept right at it till it was done. Same with his homework—when somebody reminded him to do it.

That was the problem. Mack didn't think of any of the work he did as his work, just as he didn't think of any of the houses he went to as his house or any of the friends he played with as his friends.

If there was a job and someone asked him to do it, he did it, but he never remembered to do any of the chores Miz Smitcher or Ceese assigned to him. They had to remind him every time. Had to remind him to do his homework, and then in the morning had to remind him to take his homework, and if they didn't remind him to take his lunch he'd leave that behind in the fridge, too.

He just wasn't much for finding patterns in his life and holding on to them. He never thought: It's nearly seven-thirty, time to grab my lunch and my homework and head for the bus stop. He never thought: It's getting late, Ceese will be looking for me.

If Ceese didn't call him home, Mack would stay wherever he was till they kicked him out or reminded him to go home, and if they didn't ever do those things, well then he was likely to spend the night, lying down wherever he got tired and sleeping there until he woke up. That happened most often when he was playing up in Hahn Park, which crowned the heights above Baldwin Hills. The park employees were used to finding him when they came to work in the morning, and one of the gardeners warned him, "You best learn to snore real loud, boy, or someday I'm going to mow right over you and never know you was there till your bones get chipped up and spat into my grass bag."