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"Okay," I said, feeling happy I was sure no other man I’d ever knoould have concerned hi to sleep now, and I’ll give you a report" I settled ainst round I saw rass

Chapter 13

HOMERO

13 Crybabies

His naone He understands that this is his own fault He took a pen to paper and changed it, canceled his ancestors, and now his grandchild-Codi’s child-has been erased like so too, rather than flesh and blood He knows she’s no longer carrying it He’s aware of the signs

The red darkroo sun, very old: red dwarfs, they call thee He sometimes reads astronomy nohen he can’t sleep But at this moment, outside this sealed room, it’s daytime He considers carefully the ties, a ritual he performs a dozen times daily to keep hio, when Codi lost the baby He has photographed the eyes of soyears now, the way he used to lose track when he sat in the dark movie theater for too many hours He has always loved the dark

The liquid feels cool on his hands, though it’s a cheood for the elasticity of human skin He should use the Piper forceps froraph into the fixative and stares at the lines And frowns They are a precise copy of what the real world offered his caacross a square of pale, cracked ground He found the i in the arroyo, and immediately saw the illusion he could draw out of it: a river in the desert He’d seen exactly this sight, in aerial view It was years ago, in wartie near Yuma; a soldier lay wounded out there and couldn’t be odones dunes, a dead ocean of undulating sand The pilot said it was harder to fly over dunes on a hot day than through a tornado; the plane shuddered until its rivets creaked Then suddenly they were over the Colorado River agricultural plain Helucky as a spaceht, a co an unearthly path through the bone-dry land

He can’t remember the wounded soldier He closes his eyes and tries, but he can’t Possibly so the soldier back But he reitates the photograph in its stop bath, lost in technical possibilities He knows there ure this cactus shadow into that other vision, which no longer exists outside his in in his ht be the only raph the past

He stops suddenly, feeling a presence outside the door

"Codi?" He listens "I’, it will be a fewIt’s a Mondayschool He drops the print into the fixer, annoyed, and goes back to the enlarger to try again He should lock that door to guard against accidents What a shock that would be to the girls, a locked door They have always had rules about this; a closed door is a sacred thing Privacy is respected There is no call for bolted doors in the Noline household But she still locked hiht for more than four hours When he walked by he could see that the upper bolt was turned She’d gone in right after dinner There are rules about this

"Codi?"

He listens again, but there is no sound at all

He knocks "I just want to know that you’re all right"

"I’ softly "I can hear that you’re crying," he says "Your sister is concerned You could just tell us what’s wrong"

"Nothing’s wrong I’ ht"

That isn’t true, he doesn’t use that word He tells theirls But he hasn’t needed to tell them that for years

In another minute she calls out quietly, "Is Hallie out there? I need to talk to her"

Hallie is in her roo She doesn’t seem especially concerned; Codi has been so ue but there is a new distance between the Hallie behind for the ti They both seem lost All three of them, really: a marooned family, shipwrecked on three separate islands Before, when the girls were close, he worried about ould happen when they lost each other Now they have