DeAnne looked at Step rather oddly. "Why are you telling this story, Step?"

It occurred to him that the kids might get the idea that because Zap was their brother, they'd be teased or mistreated, and surely that wasn't why he started telling it. For a moment Step was confused and couldn't answer, so he did what any confused parent does, he pretended that he intended it to be a "teaching moment."

"Why do you think I told this story, Robbie?" asked Step.

"Cause we don't care if they're mean to Zap, because we're going to walk to school with him anyway! And we're going to walk right with him and not cross the street without him because then he'd be scared!"

Robbie had found the right lesson in the story even if Step had forgotten what it was supposed to be.

Then Stevie, without even being called on, said, "I think Aunt Ella was the smartest one, even if she was retarded."

"Why?" asked Step, pleased that Stevie had come up with this on his own.

"Cause all she cared about was that Grandma Sal was crying," said Stevie. "She didn't get mad at the bad kids, she just tried to make Grandma Sal feel better."

"OK, I think we've all got the point of the lesson, haven't we?" said Step.

"We have to tell Zap that he mustn't cry!" said Robbie.

"Zap can cry if he wants," said Step. "You know that's a rule in our family, that we can cry whenever we feel like it. Stevie, what's the main point of this lesson?"

"We've got to help Zap to be part of everything and no t get left out and make sure people don't think he's retarded."

"That's very good, Stevie," said Step, "Now, it may turn out as years go by that we might find out that Zap really does have mental limitations, that he really is retarded, and that will be OK, too, because my Aunt Ella's been retarded all her life and she's a good person and she's made a lot of people happy. But chances are that Zap won't be retarded. And no matter what, we still treat him right and we're never ashamed of him."

"We're proud of him," said Robbie. "He's my very first little brother so I'm a big brother now!"

"Like me," said Stevie.

Step turned to DeAnne. "I think we've got this covered."

That ended the lesson. Robbie waved his arm around to lead the closing song and DeAnne helped Betsy say the closing prayer and then they had ice cream while DeAnne nursed Zap, shielding her modesty with a cloth diaper draped from her shoulder.

"Zap's getting his dessert, too!" cried Robbie.

"Bet it tastes an awful lot like his dinner," said Step. "And his salad, and his lunch."

"And his cornflakes!" shouted Robbie. "And his tuna fish!"

"Do I have to feed the baby in another room?" asked DeAnne. But she didn't really mind. None of their problems and worries had really gone away, but this was a good night. They were a happy family, for this hour, at least. That was enough for the day.

With only a few exceptions, that was how the autumn went. DeAnne drove Stevie and Robbie to their different schools every morning while Step stayed with Betsy and Zap. Even with two kids to take to school there was less stress in the mornings, because she didn't have to get Betsy dressed and fed, too.

Not that she could sleep in. She had to pull out of the driveway fifteen minutes earlier in the morning than last year, because so many other parents were driving their kids to school and picking them up afterward that traffic at the school was a nightmare. Fear of the serial killer had changed the lives of a lot of people in Steuben.

The parents who couldn't pick their kids up met the schoolbus at the stop. Working parents formed co-ops, and a lot of local businesses let people take their lunch hours at the time school let out so that fewer and fewer kids had to let themselves into an empty house after school.

Being a mother was a fulltime job for DeAnne now, so much so that she even let some of her church work slide now and then, giving a couple of lessons that weren't quite as well prepared as usual, though no one seemed to notice the difference. The focus of her life was now Zap-she had no choice, really. Whether it was lingering aftereffects of the phenobarbital or just Zap's native sleep pattern, he tended to sleep for eighteen or twenty-four hours straight and then wake up ravenous. This was very uncomfortable for DeAnne, of course-either she had to wake up and force him to eat at least every eight hours, or she had to pump her milk and freeze it for him. She had too much for the times he was sleeping and not enough for his first meal when he woke up.

Also, since he spent so little of his time awake, she couldn't bear the thought of him wasting any of that time lying alone in his bed. Because he didn't have the use of his arms and legs the way normal babies did, he couldn't experiment with rattles or even with his own body the way most kids did. Thus any time he spent awake and alone was completely empty, and DeAnne was afraid that he'd get bored and lose all interest in life and simply sleep himself to death. She was not about to let that happen. As far as she could manage it, there would be no empty hours. If he woke up at midnight, so did she, and stayed awake with him, talking and playing, moving his hands and feet for him, singing to him. She'd catch catnaps during the day when he was sleeping, and now and then she'd have a full night's sleep. But it was wearing her down and she didn't have much energy for the other kids. She couldn't help it-they were able to supply so much more for themselves that they just didn't need her the way Zap did. She still helped with homework and projects, as did Step, but Robbie and Betsy spent a lot of time entertaining each other-becoming quite good friends as Betsy began to catch on to some of the rules of civilized behavior. Stevie spent a lot of time alone.

Step tried to make up for DeAnne's preoccupation with Zap by playing games with the kids, but as often as not he was fixing meals or doing laundry while DeAnne napped, and so he wasn't actually involved in what the kids were doing. And whenever possible he closed himself off in his office, struggling with IBM PC assembly language until he finally realized that he could get similar results using the new Turbo C language, which amounted to throwing away all he had done so far and starting over. It was maddening work, in part because the computer was so annoyingly designed and he had to use so many kludges to make the graphics work halfway decently or to get the tiny PC speaker to produce sounds that didn't make you want to sledgehammer the machine into silence. When Step was finding a bug or puzzling out a solution to a particular problem, his concentration was so deep that he'd look up from his computer wondering if DeAnne needed him to help fix lunch, only to discover that it was dusk outside and she was already in the kitchen washing up after dinner.

Back in Indiana they had already determined that their lives worked more smoothly if she didn't make it a point to call Step to dinner. If he was concentrating so heavily that he didn't notice her calling the kids, then he wouldn't want her to interrupt him anyway.

So they were both a bit hit-and- miss when it came to the three older children that fall, and when they noticed, as they often did, that Stevie was still involved with his invisible friends to the exclusion of almost everything else, it bothered them, but they were able to console themselves that it didn't mean he was losing his mind or that anybody was out to get him. It was just a trial he was passing through, and in the end it might even strengthen him. In the meantime there was Zap and Hacker Snack and not all that much time left over.

On the first of September CNN was full of the news of Korean Air Lines flight 007, which had gone down over Soviet airspace, probably shot down by the Russians. Step and DeAnne were complete news junkies- they ate dinner with the TV blaring away in the family room so they could hear it in the kitchen.