Jason looked like he might object to this characterization, but being responsible for the kid’s injuries, he decided on a different tactic. “He’s all right, aren’t you, sport,” he said, tousling his hair. “He’s a tough guy.” Whereupon the brat broke free of his mother’s grasp and tried to punch Jason where he’d punched Andy. This time, though, he was trying to punch a marine, whose crack training allowed him to deftly parry assaults from even the most malicious seven-year-olds. But the kid’s intent couldn’t have been clearer, the groining strategy apparently his default mode.

“Justin!” his mother barked, taking him by the shoulders and spinning him around to face her. “What did Mommy say about hitting people there? Didn’t she tell you it’s not nice?” Whereupon he punched her in the same place.

It had been Griffin ’s intention to say a quick goodbye to Joy and Laura, but they were now at the center of the commotion on the lawn, and he decided against it. The entrance to the wheelchair ramp was close at hand, and with everyone distracted he’d be able to slip away unnoticed, using the yew hedge for cover all the way to the parking lot. Even as he planned this, something tugged at his short-term memory like a continuity problem in a movie (hadn’t the main character’s shirt been unbuttoned in the previous frame?), though only when he started down the incline and saw the splintered railing right where the ramp made a ninety-degree turn did he realize what it was: that just a few moments ago an impatient Harve had been sitting here.

When Griffin got close, he could hear him groaning. The railing was rotten-he could see that much-and had snapped on impact. Due to the severe slope of the lawn, the porch was at this point a good ten feet above it, the top of the hedge a couple feet below. The yew was still quivering when he peered over the side. “Harve?” Griffin said. “You okay?”

The voice that answered sounded more like a child’s than a grown man’s. “Won’t… go,” it said.

It wasn’t difficult to piece together what must have happened. His father-in-law, abandoned by his daughter when the brat got clobbered, and too impatient to wait for assistance, had tried to navigate the ramp on his own and lost control of his chair. He was now planted headfirst in the hedge, his chair on top of him, its wheels up and still spinning. Actually, no, that last part couldn’t be right. The wheels were turning, all right, but that was because Harve, invisible beneath the chair but apparently still in the saddle, was pushing on them like mad, trying to power himself out of this predicament, apparently unaware that he was capsized in the yew’s branches, suspended eight feet in the air.

Griffin kneeled, leaned over and reached down as far as he could; the nearest spinning wheel was just beyond his fingertips. From somewhere behind and above there came a shriek, and he didn’t have to turn to know that Dot had returned, no doubt expecting to find her husband where she’d left him. For a woman her age, she had a hell of a set of pipes on her. “Nooo!” she wailed. “Is he deaaad?”

“Harve,” he told his father-in-law, “stop spinning the damn wheels.” Poised as precariously as he was-a large man, with the additional weight of the chair on top of him-he easily could snap one of the branches, Griffin feared, and impale himself on it.

“Won’t… go, goddammit,” the unseen Harve grunted, still fully committed to his impossible exit strategy.

Now, in addition to Dot’s wailing, Griffin heard the thunder of feet pounding up the porch steps and then down the narrow ramp. “Daddy!” screamed a frantic voice that he first identified as Joy’s, then realized, no, it must be one of her sisters’.

He reluctantly rose to his feet. The chair, alas, was out of his reach, and it probably wasn’t a great idea to grab on to the wheels anyway. The thing to do-he should’ve realized this from the start-was to extract him from below. But the urge to peer over the side into the palsied hedge was irresistible, as the crowd now gathered at the busted railing attested.

Jared was among the first to arrive and immediately dropped to his knees and leaned forward to grab hold, though the chair was just beyond his reach as well.

“That’s not going to work,” Griffin said, placing a hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “Maybe you and Jason and I can pull him out from below.”

For a moment Jared appeared to consider this suggestion. But then, getting to his feet, he seemed to really take in who’d just spoken to him, and his expression instantly morphed from thoughtfulness to rage. That would have been perplexing enough, even if Jason hadn’t been standing right next to him with the same identical fucking look on his face.

Honestly, Griffin ’s mother said. Would you look at these two morons?

It was as if they could hear her.

“You son of a bitch,” Jared said, that worm wriggling again beneath his temple, and before Griffin could object, a fist (Jared’s or Jason’s?), foreshortened, suddenly caught him flush on the cheekbone, and he felt himself lift off the ramp, his body describing a parabola in the air above the hedge. He could sense the ground coming up to meet him, but before it did he heard, or thought he heard, a loud splintering sound and a chorus of screams. What the…? he managed to think, but that was as far as he got.

Say good night, his mother advised, just as the screen went black.

10 Pistolary

The splintering sound Griffin heard as he went airborne was the wheelchair ramp collapsing under the weight of fifty well-fed celebrants. Those closest to the broken railing went into the yew, several landing on top of Harve and driving him deeper into its dark interior, where he bellowed piteously When Joy fell, the middle finger of her right hand got caught in the spokes of her father’s chair, the digit snapping like a twig. She should have been among the first to be rushed to the emergency room-most of the other injuries were only cuts and abrasions-but she refused to leave with her father still trapped in the hedge. The remaining guests gathered in a semicircle to watch Jason and Jared try to shake him loose. The hedge was far too thick, however, and its branches seemed naturally designed to funnel human victims straight down into its dark, dense center. Though they were slow to realize it, the twins’ efforts actually made matters worse by snapping some of the interior branches that were supporting their father, their fresh, sharp ends probing his soft flesh and making him howl in pain until he grew hoarse and then, finally, silent. The hotel manager urged patience while they looked for the head groundskeeper, who apparently had the only key to the locked shed where the chain saw was kept.

For a time nobody noticed Griffin, who lay unconscious beneath the hedge, with only his feet sticking out, or else they concluded he was conversing with Harve in the yew above. He came to in stages, as if from a long, luxurious nap, his senses returning one at a time, beginning with smell. He lay on his back, on soil that smelled richly of fertilizer, recently applied. His eyes were open, but there was nothing to see. Wait, that wasn’t quite true. What he was looking at, when he squinted, resembled a pen-and-ink drawing, except that its intricate lines wouldn’t stay still and were encased, at the edges, in dense fog. Wellfleet, he thought. Somehow he’d been transported back to the fog capital of the world, where no doubt he’d be expected to scatter his father’s ashes and this time do it right. But he didn’t have the ashes, Joy did, and had promised to give them back, though here he was in Wellfleet without them. Then, finally, there was a sound track, played through a crackling, blown speaker, nearby voices, lots of them, all talking and shouting at once. Why couldn’t he see who they belonged to? He was trying to sort out these complexities when he felt someone grab him by the ankles and pull him back into the world.