A faint chord of music rang through the great cavern. Fairies began drifting in. In various sizes, they hovered in the air, watching. Waiting.

She nodded graciously, waved, touched several fairies who came near her.

But nothing diverted her from the direction of her flight: toward the slab of rock where Oberon knelt in chains, his head bowed.

She stood before him. "Oberon, my husband," she said.

He did not raise his head. "I can't bear to remember what I did to you," he said.

"But I understand, my king. You suppressed the part of you that loved me, the part that knew how to love. Bit by bit and day by day you ejected it from yourself, isolated it, gave it no control over any of your choices. It was no longer part of the cause of anything you did. When there was nothing left but malice, envy, and ambition, how else could you do but the things you did?"

"I did them," said Oberon. "All my cruelties, they were my choices. I knew what I was doing."

"Yes," said Titania. "Even when you created a surrogate for no other purpose than to capture other people's wishes and keep them until you needed their power, you knew what you were doing.

You were the one who chose to build them out of the very parts of you that you had driven into exile.

Forming them into a living soul who walked the earth as you could not, seeing what you had forgotten how to see."

She reached down, put her hand under his chin, and lifted his face to see her.

The face that looked at her was not the proud face of the captive Oberon.

It was the face of Mack Street.

"Hello, baby," she said. "I told you I'd only miss you for a little while."

She ran her hand across his hair and behind his head. As she did, the chains dropped away.

He raised his hands, took her wrists in a firm grip, and looked intently into her face. "I didn't think it would be me," he said. "I thought it would be him."

"They're both you, baby," said Titania. "Driving together down that canyon, through the flood.

But now you've got the right person in the driver's seat."

She leaned closer to him, kissed him.

"You loved so many people up there in that neighborhood, and so many people opened their homes and hearts to you, that you became too strong for him. It's everything I hoped for, baby. He didn't stand a chance."

They soared upward to the rocky ceiling of the cavern, and then began to whirl, growing smaller as they did. Below them, the other fairies also shrank and began to fly, swarming upward. Then they funneled through a ceiling passageway and the cavern was left empty and dark.

In Fairyland, in a clearing in the woods that covered a steep-rising hill, there was a small opening in the earth, surrounded by flowers from the first rush of spring that had begun only that morning. Out of the cleft there burst two tiny whirling fairies, followed by a thousand more that swarmed like bees escaping from a hive.

There were birds in the branches around the glen, and squirrels that skittered on trunks and over roots; they gave the bright cloud of fairies only a moment's glance before going about their business.

The fairies formed themselves into a circle around their king and queen, who danced above the opening into the underworld.

In Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, as tired neighbors were dropped off at their homes, or parked their cars and went inside, Word Williams walked down the hairpin curve of Cloverdale to join Ceese Tucker and Ura Lee Smitcher on the brow of the hill, looking down into the dead brown hollow surrounding the drainpipe.

In a perfect circle around the rusty red pipe, a thousand toadstools grew.

"It's a fairy circle," said Ura Lee. "The toadstools grow where the fairies dance."

"I hope she takes good care of him," said Ceese. "Where she took him."

Word took Ura Lee's other arm. "She took him home."

Together they walked her back down to her empty house, where tonight no dreams would be dreamed except her own.

But the hands that helped her make that walk despite the tears that filled her eyes were eloquent with promises. You will not die alone, Ura Lee Smitcher, they said to her. There will be two men beside you when that time comes. An LAPD cop and a preacher from a storefront church; they'll hold your hand to remind you that they also knew and in their own way loved the son you raised, the boy who never existed in this world, and yet who saved it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel began in 1999 with a letter from Roland Bernard Brown, a friend of mine who grew up in an upper-middle-class black family in Southern California. We had been talking about racial issues in America (and have continued the conversation for many years since then), but one of his biggest regrets was that black men get short shrift in literature. He wondered why I had never written a black hero in my fiction.

The problem with my writing a black hero—using his point of view, seeing the world through his eyes—is that I'm not a black man myself and probably never will be. I didn't grow up in black culture and so I would make a thousand mistakes without even knowing it.

Whereupon Roland promised me that he would help. He would give me background. He would catch my mistakes and help me get back on track.

Then you should write the book yourself, too, I said.

Someday he would, he told me. But that didn't let me off the hook.

Because I was intrigued by the idea. Roland had told me stories from his life, growing up in a mixed middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles—the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that he was told that his "acceptance" was less than total.

But I didn't want to write a novel about race—that is, I didn't want to write about racial conflict.

So we decided together that the ideal place to set this book was in Baldwin Hills, a middle- to upper-middle-class black neighborhood in Los Angeles between La Cienega and La Brea. There, I could create a community of African-Americans who had made it—or whose parents had made it—out of the morass of poverty and oppression.

When next I was in Los Angeles, my cousin Mark and I drove to Baldwin Hills and took pictures. I was impressed by the great variety of the houses, from impressive demi-mansions on the slopes of the hills to the more modest, but still well-tended and attractive homes in the flat. It was a neighborhood with tire swings here and there, occasional yards with eccentric plantings or houses with odd paint jobs; the flat of Baldwin Hills, in fact, reminded me of the neighborhood I had grown up in farther north, in Santa Clara.

It felt like what I had imagined when reading Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.

Above the neighborhood was the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, which had a drainage system that funneled rainwater down into the steep valleys where the wealthiest houses of Baldwin Hills stood. The park had gorgeous views of Los Angeles to the north—and of old oil wells to the south.

And between the park and the neighborhood, there was a wild area that ended in a basin surrounding a drainpipe. In a torrential rain, the runoff from the wild hills would collect there and then be drained away so it wouldn't flood Baldwin Hills.

I knew then that my story would be about the leakage of magic into the world, right there where it would spill out over this particular neighborhood; and because no one would be likely to believe what the residents were going through, they would have to solve the problem themselves. I called it Slow Leak.

It's a long way from a situation to a story. It took me so many years to come up with a good character that sometimes I despaired. I made two attempts at beginning the tale. One was the short story "Waterbaby,"[*] my first telling of the tale of Tamika Brown.