I took Kyra over to the couch. As we passed the dining-room table I glanced at the IBM typewriter and at the manuscript with the cross-word-puzzle book lying on top of it. Those things looked vaguely foolish and somehow sad, like gadgets that never worked very well and now do not work at all.

Lightning lit up the entire sky, scouring the room with purple light. In that glare the laboring trees looked like screaming fingers, and as the light raced across the sliding glass door to the deck I saw a woman standing behind us, by the woodstove. She was indeed wearing a straw hat, with a brim the size of a cartwheel.

“What do you mean, the river is almost in the sea?” Ki asked.

I sat down and handed her the cup. “Drink that up.”

“Why did the men hurt my mommy? Didn’t they want her to have a good time?”

“I guess not,” I said. I began to cry. I held her on my lap, wiping away the tears with the backs of my hands.

“You should have taken some sad-pills, too,” Ki said. She held out her cocoa. Her hair ribbons, which I had tied in big sloppy bows, bobbed.

“Here. Drink some.”

I drank some. From the north end of the house came another grinding, crackling crash. The low rumble of the generator stuttered and the house went gray again. Shadows raced across Ki’s small face.

“Hold on,” I told her. “Try not to be scared. Maybe the lights will come back.” A moment later they did, although now I could hear a hoarse, uneven note in the gennie’s roar and the flicker of the lights was much more noticeable.

“Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me about Cinderbell.”

“Cinderella.”

“Yeah, her.”

“All right, but storyguys get paid.” I pursed my lips and made sipping sounds.

She held the cup out. The cocoa was sweet and good. The sensation of being watched was heavy and not sweet at all, but let them watch. Let them watch while they could.

“There was this pretty girl named Cinderella—”

“Once upon a time! That’s how it starts! That’s how they all start!”

“That’s right, I forgot. Once upon a time there was this pretty girl named Cinderella, who had two mean stepsisters. Their names were… do you remember?”

“Tammy Faye and Vanna.”

“Yeah, the Queens of Hairspray. And they made Cinderella do all the really unpleasant chores, like sweeping out the fireplace and cleaning up the dogpoop in the back yard. Now it just so happened that the noted rock band Oasis was going to play a gig at the palace, and although all the girls had been invited…”

I got as far as the part about the fairy godmother catching the mice and turning them into a Mercedes limousine before the Benadryl took effect.

It really was a medicine for sadness; when I looked down, Ki was fast asleep in the crook of my arm with her cocoa cup listing radically to port. I plucked it from her fingers and put it on the coffee-table, then brushed her drying hair off her forehead.

“Ki?”

Nothing. She’d gone to the land of Noddy-Blinky. It probably helped that her afternoon nap had ended almost before it got started. I picked her up and carried her down to the north bedroom, her feet bouncing limply in the air and the hem of the Harley shirt flipping around her knees. I put her on the bed and pulled the duvet up to her chin. Thunder boomed like artillery fire, but she didn’t even stir. Exhaustion, grief, Benadryl. . they had taken her deep, taken her beyond ghosts and sorrow, and that was good. I bent over and kissed her cheek, which had finally begun to cool. “I’ll take care of you,” I said. “I promised, and I will.” As if hearing me, Ki turned on her side, put the hand holding Strick-land under her jaw, and made a soft sighing sound. Her lashes were dark soot against her cheeks, in startling contrast to her light hair. Looking at her I felt myself swept by love, shaken by it the way one is shaken by a sickness. Take care of me, I’m just a little guy. “I will, Ki-bird,” I said. I went into the bathroom and began filling the tub, as I had once filled it in my sleep. She would sleep through it all if I could get enough warm water before the generator quit entirely. I wished I had a bath-toy to give her in case she did wake up, something like Wilhelm the Spouting Whale, but she’d have her dog, and she probably wouldn’t wake up, anyway. No freezing baptism under a handpump for Kyra. I was not cruel, and I was not crazy. I had only disposable razors in the medicine cabinet, no good for the other job ahead of me.

Not efficient enough. But one of the kitchen steak knives would do. If I filled the washbasin with water that was really hot, I wouldn’t even feel it. A letter T on each arm, the top bar drawn across the wrists-For a moment I came out of the zone. A voice—my own speaking as some combination of Jo and Mattie—screamed: What are you thinking about? Oh Mike, what in God’s name are you thinking about? Then the thunder boomed, the lights flickered, and the rain began to pour down again, driven by the wind. I went back into that place where everything was clear, my course indisputable. Let it all end-the sorrow, the hurt, the fear. I didn’t want to think anymore about how Mattie had danced with her toes on the Frisbee as if it were a spotlight. I didn’t want to be there when Kyra woke up, didn’t want to see the misery fill her eyes. I didn’t want to get through the night ahead, the day that was coming beyond it, or the day that was coming after that. They were all cars on the same old mystery train. Life was a sickness. I was going to give her a nice warm bath and cure her of it. I raised my arms. In the medicine cabinet mirror a murky figure—a Shape—raised its own in a kind of jocular greeting. It was me. It had been me all along, and that was all right. That was just fine.

I dropped to one knee and checked the water. It was coming in nice and warm. Good. Even if the generator quit now, it would be fine. The tub was an old one, a deep one. As I walked down to the kitchen to get the knife, I thought about climbing in with her after I had finished cutting my wrists in the hotter water of the basin. No, I decided. It might be misinterpreted by the people who would come here later on, people with nasty minds and nastier assumptions. The ones who’d come when the storm was over and the trees across the road cleared away. No, after her bath I would dry her and put her back in bed with Strickland in her hand. I’d sit across the room from her, in the rocking chair by the bedroom windows. I would spread some towels in my lap to keep as much of the blood off my pants as I could, and eventually I would go to sleep, too.

Bunter’s bell was still ringing. Much louder now. It was getting on my nerves, and if it kept on that way it might even wake the baby. I decided to pull it down and silence it for good. I crossed the room, and as I did a strong gust of air blew past me. It wasn’t a draft from the broken kitchen window; this was that warm subway-air again. It blew the %ugh $tuff crossword book onto the floor, but the paperweight on the manuscript kept the loose pages from following. As I looked in that direction, Bunter’s bell fell silent. A voice sighed across the dim room. Words I couldn’t make out. And what did they matter? What did one more manifestation—one more blast of hot air from the Great Beyond—matter? Thunder rolled and the sigh came again. This time, as the generator died and the lights went out, plunging the room into gray shadow, I got one word in the clear:

Nineteen.

I turned on my heels, making a nearly complete circle. I finished up looking across the shadowy room at the manuscript of My Childhood Friend. Suddenly the light broke. Understanding arrived. Not the crossword book. Not the phone book, either. My book. My manuscript.

I crossed to it, vaguely aware that the water had stopped running into the tub in the north-wing bathroom. When the generator died, the pump had quit. That was all right, it would be plenty deep enough already.