Edgar walked along.

“While you’re enjoying your stroll, you might want to consider that you and I have people in common. Your mother, for instance.”

And my father, he signed.

Claude couldn’t help trying to read his sign, even when Edgar flashed it out. The Impala rolled alongside him while Claude replayed the gestures in his mind.

“Yeah, likewise,” Claude said, taking a wild guess. Then he gave the Impala the gas. It knocked and stuttered down the road. He’d gone about a half mile toward the house before the car slid to a stop again and he climbed out.

“You’re just like your father! Goddamn it all!” he shouted, kicking the gravel. Then he turned and climbed into the Impala and roared away.

Trudy

I F TRUDY HADN’T BEEN PREOCCUPIED AS SHE DROVE TO MELLEN, she might have felt pleasure in the trip, for it was one of those perfectly warm June days when the sun felt like a voluptuous and reassuring hand pressing down on a person’s skin. Ordinarily she liked the radio, but the roar of air past the truck window was best for thinking, and Edgar was on her mind. He was engaged in a rebellion she didn’t completely understand. It was over Claude, she knew that much. Three nights in the last week he’d refused to come in from the kennel, sleeping instead in the mow. But whenever she tried to talk to him, he just walked off or stood there and shut her out as only Edgar could.

He had, of course, always been hard to read, even as a little boy, so inward and stoic, beyond anything she’d expected. He had virtually never cried as an infant. Almondine had done his demanding for him, half nursemaid, half courier. His teachers attributed his stoicism to his lost voice, but Trudy knew that wasn’t it. In fact, Edgar had started communicating with a desperate urgency when he was only a year old. By the time he was two he had absorbed the clumsily demonstrated basics of sign language and begun, to her amazement, to construct a vocabulary of his own. There’d been a period-memorable but exhausting-when he’d demanded she name things from the moment he woke until his eyes fluttered closed in exhausted sleep. The ferocity with which he applied himself was almost frightening, and though she supposed it could have been a perverse form of motherly pride, she could not believe such obsession was typical. Almost in self defense, they’d handed him the dictionary and started him naming the pups.

He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, everything came out, eventually, somehow. But the process-how he put together a story about the world’s workings-that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more part of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be as opaque as a rock.

A perfect example had been the Christmas when he was five. He’d started kindergarten that year. Every morning they stood together at the end of the driveway and she’d watched him board the school bus, and every noon he’d returned, hands upraised to greet Almondine, who almost flattened the boy as soon as he stepped clear of the bus, making such a spectacle that other children called Almondine’s name from the bus window. Edgar had been excited to be around other children that fall, but he wouldn’t tell her much about school unless she probed him. What had they done that day? Was his teacher nice? Did she read stories? Then she would coax him into telling her the story. Sometimes there was a sign he didn’t have yet, and together they would look it up in the sign dictionary, and if that failed, invent one on the spot. When December came, he’d sat at the kitchen table and written out a wish list for Santa and sealed it in an envelope before she could read it. She’d had to wait until he was asleep to steam the envelope open.

At the top of his list he’d written, Pocket watch WITH A CHAIN.

It had taken her completely by surprise. He had never once expressed a desire for a watch, and he already knew how to tell time-he’d learned when he was four. For a few long weeks he had included the time in everything he said-At six fifteen we are going to eat dinner. When I get done with my bath it will be eight thirty. That had quickly lost its thrill, but perhaps his obsession with telling time had just been internalized, gone opaque. In any case, it was the number one thing on his list and she was determined he would find it under the tree. She and Gar located a watch shop in Ashland whose proprietor rummaged around in back and produced an old pocket watch that a boy might use (and almost certainly break). And it came with a long chain. The winding knob was intricately knurled and engraved on the brass cover was a flowery letter C. Trudy liked the C. They could say it stood for Christmas. The man told them it would run for almost a whole day when fully wound; perhaps it lost five or ten minutes, but that would okay for a boy-better, in fact, since he would have to wind and set it frequently. They’d wrapped the watch and put it under the tree and made sure that the smallish box in green foil was the last one Edgar opened. He’d looked at the watch in his hand and smiled exactly the smile she’d been hoping for, and then he slipped it neatly into the pocket of his pajamas.

“Aren’t you even going to open it?” Trudy cried. “Press the little lever! Look at the hands!”

He took it out of his pocket and let them demonstrate how to wind the works and set the time. He watched intently, but when they’d finished, he closed it up and slipped it back into his pocket. That was the last they saw of it for almost a week, until Trudy walked into the living room and found Almondine in a sit and Edgar swinging the watch back and forth before her eyes. Almondine panted and looked past the swinging timepiece at Edgar. When Edgar understood that someone else was in the room he turned around.

It doesn’t work on dogs, he signed.

“You’re trying to hypnotize her?” Trudy had said. “That’s why you wanted a watch?”

He nodded. Come on, he signed to Almondine. It’ll work better on puppies. And he pulled on his coat and marched out to the kennel while Trudy stood there, mouth hanging open.

That had been the moment she’d realized how he carried things around inside, things entirely separate from her. Five years old, barely in kindergarten. She had no idea where he’d heard of hypnosis. She couldn’t remember seeing anything on TV that might have put it in his head. She didn’t think any of his books mentioned it. Wherever he had picked it up, he’d been walking around with that idea for weeks-months, maybe-without mentioning it even once. Just watching, thinking, wondering. That was the kind of boy he was. And she realized that he was, in some sense, already lost to her-had outgrown her in some essential way. He wasn’t keeping secrets. If she had known to ask him if he was interested in hypnosis, he would have told her. He just hadn’t offered the information because she hadn’t asked.

And the obvious question was: What else was he thinking about? What else had he already learned that no one even suspected?

Edgar’s career as a hypnotist continued for several weeks. At the high point, he mesmerized little Alex Franklin into throwing a snowball into the playground teacher’s ear. When Trudy investigated further, it turned out that Alex Franklin had made that claim. Edgar had only told the boy, deeply under the influence of his swinging timepiece, to take a bite of a snowball that looked more than a tad yellow. Instead, Alex had extended his arms like Frankenstein’s monster and trundled toward the teacher, then wound up and let fly. Edgar hadn’t expected that. The whole hypnosis business was unpredictable, he’d confessed.