When he did spend the night in the park, though, there was so much trouble at home. Tears from Miz Smitcher, real anger and cussing from Ceese. "We thought you were dead! Or kidnapped!

Can't you come home like a normal child? When I get home from work I want to find you here."

Ceese was even worse. "Miz Smitcher trust me to take care of you, and you make it look like I don't even look out for you. That shames me, Mack. You make me ashamed in front of Miz Smitcher."

"Maybe it comes from being abandoned as a baby," Mack heard Miz Smitcher say to Mrs.

Tucker.

"Maybe he's just like his daddy," said Mrs. Tucker. "Men like that, they don't ever sleep in the same bed twice."

Which made Mack think that Mrs. Tucker must know who his daddy was, till Ceese set him straight. "My mama was just imagining your daddy, Mack. Nobody knows who he is. But my mama sure she knows everything about people she never met. Just the way she is."

The only struggle Ceese won was teaching Mack that he had to use a toilet to pee or poop in every time, and not just when one happened to be close when he felt the need. Till that battle was finally over, Mack was as likely to squeeze a turd onto the sidewalk as a puppy was. It was only when Ceese made him go and pick up his turds with a Glad bag and carry them home in front of the whole neighborhood that Ceese finally got the right habit. "You nothing but a barbarian," Ceese told him. "A one-boy barbarian invasion. You a Hun, Mack. You a Vandal."

But it wasn't really true. There was nothing destructive in Mack. When he was little and Ceese tended him by building towers of blocks, it was Ceese who had to knock them down—Mack wouldn't do it. Not that he objected to the noise and clatter of the falling blocks. It's just that to Mack, when something was built, it ought to stay built.

Except for Mack's own body. With his personal safety, Mack was reckless. The neighborhood kids soon learned that he would take almost any dare. Climb up on the roof. Jump off. Walk along the top of that high fence. Climb that tree. Drink that murky brown liquid. One of Ceese's main jobs in tending Mack was to keep the other kids from daring Mack to do something truly suicidal.

It didn't always work out well. Mack was pretty deft for a little kid, but he fell off a lot of high places. The miracle was he never broke his neck or his head or even his arm. Sprained his ankle once. Lots of bruises. And cuts? Mack left blood scattered all over Baldwin Hills from his various scrapes and slices and gashes and punctures. Miz Smitcher made sure his tetanus shot was up to date.

By the time Mack was in school, though, the daring had stopped. Most of the kids realized that it was wrong to dare Mack to do stuff, because he'd do it almost by reflex, so when he got hurt it was their fault. And Mack gradually came to realize that he didn't have to do stuff just because people said so.

When he took those dares, it wasn't because he felt a need to prove that he was brave, or to impress the other kids, or because he feared being excluded from the group. He wasn't particularly aware of whether or not he belonged to a group of friends or not. Whoever was there, he'd play with; whoever wasn't, he wouldn't. If there was nobody around and he wanted company, he'd go off by himself until he ran into somebody interesting.

But by school age, he was learning not to do whatever came to mind. He was taking control of what happened to him.

It was because of those cold dreams. After he saw what happened to Tamika Brown, he'd feel a cold dream coming on and he'd try to get out of it. He didn't feel like he was just a watcher. But he also didn't feel like he exactly was the person making the wish, either. It was more like he joined on to that person, got inside them, and as he remembered the cold dream of Tamika swimming, it felt to him like it became real only when he began to wish for the dreamer's wish. Like he made it come true.

When he asked Ceese at bedtime one night, "Can one person make another person's wish come true?" Ceese's answer was true enough.

"Course you can. Person wishes for money, you give him a buck."

And that was the question for that night. By the next day, Mack had figured out that Ceese couldn't answer his question anyway. How would he know? Mack was the only one in the world had these cold dreams. Cause if he wasn't, then somebody else would have talked about it. They talked about everything else. "I had a cold dream last night and made your wish come true! You wished to pee, and I made you wet the bed!"

And even if he wasn't the one making the dreams turn real, he still didn't want to be there to watch them. Some of the dreams were ugly; some of them were mean; a lot of them he didn't even understand. And even the good ones—he just didn't want to know about them.

Because he always knew who the dreamer was. Oh, not during the dream, necessarily. But later, the next day or the next month or the next year, he'd run into somebody and he'd just know, looking at them, that he'd seen their dream.

How do you get out of a dream? It's not like you could make yourself wake up. Even in his own dreams, whenever Mack dreamed of waking up, it turned out that the waking up was part of the dream. He could dream himself woken up three times in the same dream and it didn't happen.

And it's not like he did his clearest thinking in his sleep. He'd be in a cold dream but he wouldn't say to himself, This is a cold dream, I've got to wake up—heck, having that thought would mean he already had woken up. Instead, he just felt a strong desire to get out of there.

So in his dream, instead of waking, he'd start running.

And then a funny thing would happen. Instead of running, he'd be riding in a car. Or an SUV or something, because regular cars couldn't drive on such rough roads. He always started out on a dirt road, with ragged-looked trees around, kind of a dry California kind of woods. The road began to sink down while the ground stayed level on both sides, till they were dirt walls or steep hills, and sometimes cliffs. And the road began to get rocky. The rocks were all the size of cobblestones, rounded like river rocks, and the vehicle hurtled along as if the rocks were pavement.

He always knew that they'd done it again—him and whoever it was in the vehicle beside him.

They'd missed the turn. They hadn't been watching close enough.

So they backed out—and here was where Mack absolutely knew it wasn't him driving, because he didn't know how to back a car. If it was a car.

Backed out and headed down until the canyon was wide enough that they could turn around, and then they rushed along until they found the place where they had gone wrong. When the road reached the lowest point, there was a narrow passage off to the left leading farther down, and now Mack realized that this wasn't no road, this was a river that just happened to be dry.

The second he thought of that, he heard distant thunder and he knew it was raining up in the high hills, and that little trickle of a waterfall at the dead end was about to become a torrent, and there'd be water coming down the other branch of the river, too, and here they were trapped in this narrow canyon barely wide enough for their vehicle, it was going to fill up with water and throw them down the canyon, bashing against the cliffs, rounding them off just like one of the river rocks.

Sure enough, in the dream here comes the water, and it's just as bad as he thought, spinning head over heels, getting slammed this way and that, and out the windows all he can see is roiling water and stones and then the dead bodies of the other people in the vehicle as they got washed out and crushed and broken against the canyon walls and suddenly...

The vehicle shoots out into open space, and there's no cliffs anymore, just air on every side and a lake below him and the vehicle plunges into the lake and sinks lower and lower and Mack thinks, I got to get out of here, but he can't find a way to open it, not a door, not a window. Deeper and deeper until the vehicle comes to rest on the bottom of the lake with fish swimming up and bumping into the windows and then a naked woman comes up, not sexy or anything, just naked because she never heard of clothes, she swims up and looks at him and smiles and when she touches the window, it breaks and the water slowly oozes in and surrounds him and he swims out and she kisses his cheek and says, Welcome home, I missed you so much.