The mural itself was disappointing-the usual romantic imagery: camels. City kids had done it, but everything about the mural spoke to a distant past in the desert.

The mosque served a free lunch-c.u.min rice and falafel, chopped salad, and baklava. Somebody opened up the soda machine at the front of the mosque and handed out free sodas. Scarface was impressed, and he drank two c.o.kes.

"I want to be a Muslim," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"I like these guys because they scare the white guys."

"You want to scare people?"

"I already scare people," Scarface pointed out. "And I know how to pray."

When we reached the car, somebody had broken the small rear window. The backseat was covered with gla.s.s.

"Why did they go in the back window?" I wondered aloud.

"They didn't want to make too much noise," Scarface said.

"They didn't even take the stereo. They only took my fleece jacket-but it had sixty dollars in the pocket."

"Sixty bucks would be enough," he said with a tone that indicated I was a sn.o.b.

He swept the broken gla.s.s into a piece of the cardboard and dumped it carefully down a sewer grate while I taped up the back window with strips of duct tape left over from my marriage, when I'd been prepared for everything. While Scarface cut tape off the roll with his knife, he noticed a transgender woman in a blue dress and high heels crossing the street. "Jesus, what is that?" he said, grabbing my arm.

"That's a man who is taking hormones to make him look and feel more like a woman," I told him.

"I never saw anything like that before," he said. "I do not approve of that."

"Oh, come on," I said. "Lighten up."

"You approve of that?" Scarface asked, loudly enough for the transgender woman to hear. I saw, suddenly, what the transperson saw, a big kid, probably with a knife.

"Of course I approve," I said loudly.

We didn't speak again until we drove over the bridge and Scarface told me he was carsick. I took a detour to Mount Tam, and we talked and walked up a wide dirt path, higher and higher.

"So can anyone just go to San Francisco?" he asked.

"It's a free country," I said.

"Is Los Angeles in America?" Scarface wanted to go there. He wanted to know if it was true that Juvie, where his older brother went, was a town run by Jews.

"No-it stands for juvenile," I said. "Kids."

"So where are the Jews?"

"Jews live everywhere. In diaspora."

"Did somebody take their land?"

"Usually, yeah," I said.

"That's exactly what happened to Indians," said Scarface. "That's why I could never be racist against Jews like my mom is."

"There's Israel, but it's small, and other people were living there, too."

"Do the Jews have an army?"

"In Israel, they have a pretty good one."

"That's what I mean, man. Motherf.u.c.kers can't mess with their land."

"Well, and there are all these different tribes of Jews, like Native Americans, and everybody's mixed up, too, like on the rez. My mother was Jewish; my father wasn't. My sister isn't. I am-but I don't even believe in G.o.d."

"How can you not believe in G.o.d? That's f.u.c.ked-up! What stops you from doing something bad?"

"You can't just be a good person because you think G.o.d is watching-"

"Sure you can," Scarface said gently, his voice encouraging.

IF SOMEONE surgically removed my memories and let me keep one, this might be it-this day-though it was probably a mistake to take him on a four-mile round-trip hike. We started in a black blanket of fog and climbed up a steep grade on a gravelly path toward blue sky. Half a mile up, Scarface was sweating. It hadn't occurred to me that he could be out of shape. "What's the matter?" I asked.

"I've got asthma and bronchitis," he said.

"Really?"

"Yeah. And I'm obese."

A couple wearing spandex shorts and shirts rode past us on thousand-dollar bicycles. "This reminds me of the time I climbed Masada," one of them said.

"Hey, could I have a swig of your water?" Scarface shouted at the bicyclists. The couple pedaled faster.

"I'm just messing witchou!" he yelled after them.

I practically pushed him to the top, but we made it. I wanted this success, I thought, for Scarface. Before he filed for divorce, my ex-husband used to tell me that I always try to extract more from an experience than is there to be withdrawn.

When we reached the top, Scarface wasn't really able to talk anymore, and by the time we'd hiked two miles back to the car, the sky was dark. I'd planned to get him home at a reasonable hour. His mother wasn't exactly overprotective, but she was still a mother.

SCARFACE STOPPED WORKING on the mural. He just stopped coming. I drove out to his house. The little dog still stood barking on the roof of the car, but no one answered when I knocked on the door. Finally, I called Mr. Boyle, the county administrator in charge of the mural project, who read Scarface's accusation: " 'I was the only kid on the field trip. It wasn't even a field trip. It was just me.' "

Mr. Boyle said, "I can't believe you don't know even commonsense things-don't drive the kids alone, for example. Didn't you read the guidelines?"

"Guidelines for what? What guidelines?" I asked.

"The guidelines on the Web site," Mr. Boyle said. "The kid was pretty specific. It would be hard to make up the stuff he was saying-a kid like him, on a learning plan, pretty high special needs. It might be impossible to make up."

"To make up what?"

"The p.o.r.nographic imagery."

"What p.o.r.nographic imagery?"

"Did you climb up a tree to retrieve your undergarments?"

"No-that was his cousin."

Mr. Boyle said, "Look, it's not that I have any reason to believe him. It's that I don't have any reason to believe you. I'm old. I don't believe anybody."

Scarface remained in the mural, though, digging in a hole in the ground, unearthing relics from the past-an old c.o.ke bottle, an arrowhead, a coffee can, a safety razor. New kids joined the project and helped. "Paint what you see," I told them. "Don't just paint stuff people tell you is there."

I even had new favorites, smart, a.s.sertive kids-Javier, Alicia, Salvador, Nick-who basically just needed an adult to say their names and mean it.

THEN AUNT BEA DIED and left me a little money. I took every penny and booked a trip to Africa to visit Carrie over the spring break. At first, I hardly recognized my sister: She looked like a nun. Her face had the planes and angles of a clenched fist, especially under the white hat she wore. The dry air and exposure to injustice had puckered her like a raisin. She despised America-she was full of good and subtle reasons-though she remained hopeful about the beneficial effects of free-market capitalism on the local economy.

Carrie lived, with a few others like her, in a hut made of sticks and gra.s.s. Her hut smelled of the powdery body spray she's used since she was nine. It smelled of my sister-damp, sweet, childish, chemical. I kept a journal of my impressions, as if I might be responsible for making a mural of the visit. Unfortunately, I made only two entries before I got sick.

Noted date and mangrove trees early human remains special volumizing shampoo erg: sea of sand in the desert reg: gravel-covered plain antimalarial drugs, sunscreen 1 bottle Russian vodka Percocet, Welbutrin main sources of water: dew and fog oil reserves Noted C. surrounded by girls twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, whose babies ripped apart their child-size organs, or whose organs were ripped apart in other ways. Girls wait for doctor without borders to sew them up. One doctor, seventy girls; doctor travels from village to village. C.'s proj. can be expressed in algorithms of futility. b.u.t.tery Dutch doctor emerges from gra.s.s house after every fourth or fifth procedure in foul mood. Can't blame him.

C. wears white lab coat over jeans-perfect sepia handprint on sleeve. Girls crowd around. Most will never get repairs. Doctor will move to next village; girls will return to margins of home, irritating their husbands and parents, who are embarra.s.sed they exist.

Every time C. calls a name, ten girls shuffle forward, dribble pools of fluid. Their calves, under bright batik skirts, shine. Seventy girls came, equal in despair. A few now less desperate than the others. Those chosen do not show that they're glad.

C. loves this work. Also think she loves the doctor without borders.

In the evening, we sat under Carrie's mosquito net and drank quinine water mixed with her vodka. Carrie didn't want to talk about the girls or the doctor. She wanted to talk about childhood things, especially Uncle Gene. "Did he ever ask if he could kiss you?" Again, she wanted to know. An ammonia scent clung to her, bringing back a vivid memory of what my sister was to me as a small child-a p.i.s.sy smell, a drag.

"What do you want me to say? Uncle Gene was a lech-yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," I said. This line of questioning has always seemed to me beside the point. I hate when people identify their whole lives with their dysfunctional families; I refuse to be defined by mine.

"But you admitted yourself-"

"No, I didn't. Nothing terrible happened to me."

"For me, every day is like it just happened," she said.

"What happened, Carrie?"

"He pressured me. He kissed me and he touched my breast. It went on for years. n.o.body wanted to hear it. You know this."

"What do you want, Carrie? Everyone is dead-Gene, Auntie, our parents."

"I want you to acknowledge what happened to us."

"You make it sound like the Holocaust," I said.

"You minimize it because you liked it," she said.

We'd said all these words before.

Her face conveyed intense dry rays of heat. "I knew you'd come because you've made a mess of your own life," she said. "But your denial is disgusting and insane."

I felt dehydrated, sunstruck. This must have been the illness coming on. A day later, I was chilled and shaking; then for an indefinite time I was just alive instead of dead. Existence became a dim red point of light; when I put my hand over my heart, the light went out. Carrie stood behind a yellow haze, as remote as a figure projected onto a movie screen. I felt no hope at all. But I did not die.

Time moved backward and forward. I asked Carrie for an egg. She laughed bitterly. The U.S.-owned oil giant had promised to create model chicken farms, so that the community could be self-sustaining. But those in the community did not want to take the chicken coopbuilding workshop. They wanted the oil giant to build the chicken coops. As a result of the impa.s.se, the chickens grew sick and died. The eggs, my sister told me, still lay in their cradles of hay. Did I want one?

The doctor without borders came. He asked Carrie for a cup of tea. From his tone, I understood that the two of them were sleeping together. In a fever, you see things. The day Uncle Gene died, his face appeared to me in a dream.

Carrie slid a bedpan under my hip. "You're really sick, you know," she said. She brought a bottle of pills and left it on the table beside my little bed of straw. "You can have them all," I think she said.

"I can't take pills," I told her.

"Suit yourself," she said, and set a gla.s.s of water down on the table so hard that the gla.s.s cracked up the side.

Her ministrations continued while I went in and out. She boiled a chicken-head and feathers and all. We sat in a formal dining room before our mother's Spode soup plates. My plate contained the whole chicken, the feathers drenched and steaming. Carrie sat at the opposite end of the table, drinking a gla.s.s of water.

"You have to choose," she said. "Eat-or die."

I picked up my fork and knife and began to eat. Although the chicken was poisonous, it was also delicious, and made me stronger. In this way, my sister saved my life.

THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED on my birthday, a stormy night in January. My friend Georgie gave a small dinner party. We had champagne in flutes, raw ahi on thin slices of cuc.u.mber, then chicken pie and mustard greens. We told bawdy stories and listened to Portuguese fado. I wore a black silk camisole under an old wool sweater. Georgie and I both dressed in this absurd but comfortable way after our marriages broke up, and I think it had to do with feeling, as we did, hot and cold at the same time.

When the power went out, someone opened another bottle of wine. Just then, Georgie's ex-husband, who is a first responder, came in, peeling off his yellow reflective coat. We cried out gaily, "Did anything terrible happen?"

"You don't want to know," he said, and we grew sober for a moment, imagining what.

Georgie calls her ex-Carl-a superhero. Carl is a superhero: humble, strong, brave, not too emotional. These qualities, which initially drew her to him, eventually turned into the reasons she left him-though they stayed friends.

Carl washed his hands, drank his wine, and tucked into his chicken pie.

"Two rez kids, probably doing a hundred miles an hour. The driver was just thirteen years old-he's survived, so far. The other kid was thrown across the river. They can't even tell if it's a boy or a girl."

MY KIDS WERE WORKING on a new project now-flags for the main street of the town. At first when I heard them talking, I thought Scarface was the one killed in the crash. But the kid who died was his cousin, Maria. Scarface had the wheel.

How could I have forgotten? It had been nine months since I'd seen him. It was toward the end of school; I'd come back from Africa and finished the mural. Somebody had painted over the bon.o.bo and replaced it with some generic ravens circling a roundhouse. The grandma on dialysis was still there, smoking her pipe; so was Uncle Gene, on his back, facing the sky. I went to the district office to pick up my check, and when I came out, the kids were walking to their buses, and there was Scarface, taller and fatter than I remembered. I walked him to his bus, a distance of thirty feet. We didn't talk. He climbed on the bus and walked to the back row, where the Indian kids sat, stone-faced and silent. I called after him, "Hey, Scarface, have a good summer." Nothing. I climbed the three steps into the bus and yelled down the aisle, "Hey, Scarface, have a good summer!"

"You were going to get me some weed!" he shouted, his voice full of rage and hope.

I backed up and almost fell out of the bus. The driver unfolded the yellow doors and took him away. My sister would say I have a hardened, ruined heart, and maybe it's true. I'd blocked him from my mind.

ISLE OF WIGS.