Still sitting in the chair beside Danny's reading table, she let her eyes wander around her son's room. The glider's wing had been neatly mended. His desk was piled high with picture books, coloring books, old Spiderman comic books with the covers half torn off, Crayolas, and an untidy pile of Lincoln Logs. The VW model was neatly placed above these lesser things, its shrink-wrap still undisturbed. He and his father would be putting it together tomorrow night or the night after if Danny went on at this rate, and never mind the end of the week. His pictures of Pooh and Eyore and Christopher Robin were tacked neatly to the wall, soon enough to be replaced with pin-ups and photographs of dopesmoking rock singers, she supposed. Innocence to experience. Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. Still it made her sad. Next year he would be in school and she would lose at least half of him, maybe more, to his friends. She and Jack had tried to have another one for a while when things had seemed to be going well at Stovington, but she was on the pill again now. Things were too uncertain. God knew where they would be in nine months.

Her eyes fell on the wasps' nest.

It held the ultimate high place in Danny's room, resting on a large plastic plate on the table by his bed. She didn't like it, even if it was empty. She wondered vaguely if it might have germs, thought to ask Jack, then decided he would laugh at her. But she would ask the doctor tomorrow, if she could catch him with Jack out of the room. She didn't like the idea of that thing, constructed from the chewings and saliva of so many alien creatures, lying within a foot of her sleeping son's head.

The water in the bathroom was still running, and she got up and went into the big bedroom to make sure everything was okay. Jack didn't look up; he was lost in the world he was making, staring at the typewriter, a filter cigarette clamped in his teeth.

She knocked lightly on the closed bathroom room. “You okay, doc? You awake?”

No answer.

“Danny?”

No answer. She tried the door. It was locked.

“Danny?” She was worried now. The lack of any sound beneath the steadily running water made her uneasy. “Danny? Open the door, honey.”

No answer.

“Danny!”

“Jesus Christ, Wendy, I can't think if you're going to pound on the door all night.”

“Danny's locked himself in the bathroom and he doesn't answer me!”

Jack came around the desk, looking put out. He knocked on the door once, hard. “Open up, Danny. No games.”

No answer.

Jack knocked harder. “Stop fooling, doc. Bedtime's bedtime. Spanking if you don't open up.”

He's losing his temper, she thought, and was more afraid. He had not touched Danny in anger since that evening two years ago, but at this moment he sounded angry enough to do it.

“Danny, honey-” she began.

No answer. Only running water.

“Danny, if you make me break this lock I can guarantee you you'll spend the night sleeping on your belly,” Jack warned.

Nothing.

“Break it,” she said, and suddenly it was hard to talk. “Quick.”

He raised one foot and brought it down hard against the door to the right of the knob. The lock was a poor thing; it gave immediately and the door shuddered open, banging the tiled bathroom wall and rebounding halfway.

“Danny!” she screamed.

The water was running full force in the basin. Beside it, a tube of Crest with the cap off. Danny was sitting on the rim of the bathtub across the room, his toothbrush clasped limply in his left hand, a thin foam of toothpaste around his mouth. He was staring, trancelike, into the mirror on the front of the medicine cabinet above the washbasin. The expression on his face was one of drugged horror, and her first thought was that he was having some sort of epileptic seizure, that he might have swallowed his tongue.

“Danny!”

Danny didn't answer. Guttural sounds came from his throat.

Then she was pushed aside so hard that she crashed into the towel rack, and Jack was kneeling in front of the boy.

“Danny,” he said. “Danny, Danny!” He snapped his fingers in front of Danny's blank eyes.

“Ah-sure,” Danny said. “Tournament play. Stroke. Nurrrrr…”

“Danny-”

“Roque!” Danny said, his voice suddenly deep, almost manlike. “Roque. Stroke. The roque mallet… has two sides. Gaaaaaa-”

“Oh Jack my God what's wrong with him?”

Jack grabbed the boy's elbows and shook him hard. Danny's head rolled limply backward and then snapped forward like a balloon on a stick.

“Roque. Stroke. Redrum.”

Jack shook him again, and Danny's eyes suddenly cleared. His toothbrush fell out of his hand and onto the tiled floor with a small click.

“What?” he asked, looking around. He saw his father kneeling before him, Wendy standing by the wall. “What?” Danny asked again, with rising alarm. “W-W-WuhWhat's wr-r-r-”

“Don't stutter!” Jack suddenly screamed into his face. Danny cried out in shock, his body going tense, trying to draw away from his father, and then he collapsed into tears. Stricken, Jack pulled him close. “Oh, honey, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, doc. Please. Don't cry. I'm sorry. Everything's okay.”

The water ran ceaselessly in the basin, and Wendy felt that she had suddenly stepped into some grinding nightmare where time ran backward, backward to the time when her drunken husband had broken her son's arm and had then mewled over him in almost the exact same words.

(Oh honey. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, doc. Please. So sorry.)

She ran to them both, pried Danny out of Jack's arms somehow (she saw the look of angry reproach on his face but filed it away for later consideration), and lifted him up. She walked him back into the small bedroom, Danny's arms clasped around her neck, Jack trailing them.

She sat down on Danny's bed and rocked him back and forth, soothing him with nonsensical words repeated over and over. She looked up at Jack and there was only worry in his eyes now. He raised questioning eyebrows at her. She shook her head faintly.

“Danny,” she said. “Danny, Danny, Danny. 'S okay, doc. 'S fine.”

At last Danny was quiet, only faintly trembling in her arms. Yet it was Jack he spoke to first, Jack who was now sitting beside them on the bed, and she felt the old faint pang

(It's him first and it's always been him first)

of jealousy. Jack had shouted at him, she had comforted him, yet it was to his father that Danny said,

“I'm sorry if I was bad.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, doc.” Jack ruffled his hair. “What the hell happened in there?”

Danny shook his head slowly, dazedly. “I… I don't know. Why did you tell me to stop stuttering, Daddy? I don't stutter.”

“Of course not,” Jack said heartily, but Wendy felt a cold finger touch her heart. Jack suddenly looked scared, as if he'd seen something that might just have been a ghost.

“Something about the timer…” Danny muttered.

“What?” Jack was leaning forward, and Danny flinched in her arms.

“Jack, you're scaring him!” she said, and her voice was high, accusatory. It suddenly came to her that they were all scared. But of what?

“I don't know, I don't know,” Danny was saying to his father. “What… what did I say, Daddy?”

“Nothing,” Jack muttered. He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth with it. Wendy had a moment of that sickening time-is-runningbackward feeling again. It was a gesture she remembered well from his drinking days.

“Why did you lock the door, Danny?” she asked gently. “Why did you do that?”

“Tony,” he said. “Tony told me to.”

They exchanged a glance over the top of his head.

“Did Tony say why, son?” Jack asked quietly.

“I was brushing my teeth and I was thinking about my reading,” Danny said. “Thinking real bard. And… and I saw Tony way down in the mirror. He said he had to show me again.”