"Come on, Jack," said Tucker. "It's not such a big deal. I asked you to stop bouncing the ball and you wouldn't. And now you have. I wasn't going to give you a beating."

"I'm not scared of that," said Jackson. "Lizzie said that if you strain your heart, you'll die. I don't want you to get out of bed."

Well, thank you, Lizzie.

"Okay," Tucker said. "So don't make me."

Whatever works, he thought wearily. But it was going to be hard to pretend from now on that he was just your regular elementary-school dad.

Jesse and Cooper turned up later that afternoon, looking disheveled and bewildered and resentful. They were both wearing iPods; they were both listening to hip-hop with one ear. The other white buds, the ones they'd removed in the clearly unexpected event that their father might say something they'd want to hear, hung loose by their sides.

"Hey, boys."

Mumbled greetings were formed in his sons' throats and emitted with not quite enough force to reach him; they dropped somewhere on the floor at the end of his bed, left for the cleaning staff to sweep up.

"Where's your mother?"

"Huh?" said Jesse.

"Yeah, she's okay," said Cooper.

"Hey, fellas. You don't want to turn those things off for a little while?"

"Huh?" said Jesse.

"No thanks," said Cooper. He said it politely enough, so Tucker understood that he was turning down something else entirely-the offer of a drink, maybe, or an invitation to the ballet. Tucker performed a little mime restating his desire to converse without the hearing impediments. The boys looked at each other, shrugged and stuffed the iPods into their pockets. They had acceded to his request not because he was their father, but because he was older than them, and possibly because he was in a hospital bed; they'd have done the same if he were a paraplegic stranger on a bus. In other words, they were decent enough kids, but they weren't his his kids. kids.

"I was asking where your mother was."

"Oh. Okay. She's outside in the hall." Cooper did most of the talking, but always managed to give the impression that he was channeling his twin brother somehow. Maybe it was the way they stood side by side, staring straight ahead, arms dangling from their sockets.

"She doesn't want to come in?"

"I guess."

"You don't want to get her?"

"No."

"That was my way of saying 'Would you get her?' "

"Oh. Okay."

They both walked to the door, peered right and then left, and beckoned their mother toward them.

"He wants you to, though." And then, after a pause long enough to accommodate dissent, "I don't know why."

"She doesn't really want to come in," said Cooper.

"But she's coming in," said Jesse.

"Okay."

She didn't come in.

"So where is she?"

They had readopted their previous positions, standing stiffly side by side, staring straight ahead. Maybe when they'd turned their iPods off they'd somehow turned themselves off, too. They were in standby mode.

"Maybe the restroom?" said Cooper.

"Yeah, I think so," said Jesse. "The restroom. And maybe there was someone in there already?"

"Oh," said Tucker. "Sure."

Tucker suddenly became wearied by the pointlessness of the exercise that Lizzie had planned. These kids had flown thousands of miles to stand in a hospital room and stare at a man they no longer knew very well at all; this debate about whether their mother had gone to the bathroom or not was the most animated conversation the three of them had managed so far. (Tucker would miss it when it was over, but to extend it any further would probably entail scatological detail that he wouldn't feel comfortable with, although the boys might enjoy it.) And then, in a moment, the ambient room temperature would become further chilled by the arrival of an ex-wife-not one he was particularly afraid of, nor one that bore him a great deal of ill will, as far as he knew, but not a person he'd had any real desire to see again during the time remaining to him on the planet. And then, sometime in the next hour or two, this ex-wife would bump into another one, when Nat came back with Jackson. And these two boys would stare at a half sister they'd never seen before and mumble at her, and . . . Jesus. There had been a part of him that was half joking when he'd asked English Annie to get him out of here, but that part was gone now. There was nothing funny about this.

The door opened, and Carrie peered around it cautiously.

"This is us," said Tucker cheerily. "Come on in."

Carrie took a few steps into the room, stopped and stared at him.

"Jesus," she said.

"Thanks," said Tucker.

"Sorry. I just meant . . ."

"It's okay," said Tucker. "I got a lot older, plus the light in here isn't so flattering, plus I had a heart attack. I accept all of these things with equanimity."

"No, no," said Carrie. "I just meant, I guess, Jesus, it's been a while since I saw you."

"Okay," said Tucker. "Let's leave it at that."

Carrie, of course, looked good, healthy and sleek. She'd put on weight, but she'd been too skinny when he'd left her anyway, due to the misery he'd inflicted on her, so the few extra pounds indicated only psychic health.

"How've you been?" she said.

"Today and yesterday, not so bad. The day before, not great. The last few years, mostly not so bad."

"I heard you and Cat split."

"Yeah. I managed to mess up another one."

"I'm sorry."

"I'll bet."

"No, really. I don't suppose we have a whole lot in common, but we all worry about you. It's better for us if you're in a relationship."

"You're all in some sort of recovery group together?"

"No, but . . . You're the father of our children. We need you to be okay."

Carrie's choice of words allowed him to imagine that he was some kind of polygamist in an isolated religious community, that Carrie was here as the elected representative of the wives. It was certainly hard to think of himself as a single man. He tried, for a moment. Hey! I'm single! I have no ties to anyone! I can do what I want! Nope. Wasn't working, for some reason. Maybe when he was off the drip attached to his arm he'd feel a little more footloose.

"Thank you. How have you been, anyway?"

"I'm fabulous, darling, thank you. Work's good, Jesse and Cooper are good, as you can see . . ." Tucker felt obliged to look, although there wasn't too much to look at, apart from a brief flicker of animation at the sound of their own names.

"My marriage is good."

"Great."

"I have a fantastic social life, Doug's business is solid . . ."

"Excellent." He was working on the basis that if he threw enough approving adjectives in her direction she'd stop, but this policy showed no signs of working.

"Last year I ran a half marathon."

He was reduced to shaking his head in speechless admiration.

"My sex life is better than it's ever been."

Finally the boys came out of standby. Jesse's face creased into a mask of distaste, and Cooper crumpled as if he'd been punched in the stomach.

"Gross," he said. "Please. Mom. Stop."

"I'm a healthy woman in her thirties. I'm not gonna hide."

"Good for you," said Tucker. "I'll bet your bowels work better than mine, too."

"You'd better believe it," said Carrie.

Tucker was beginning to wonder whether she had actually gone crazy at some point in the last decade. The woman he was talking to bore no resemblance to the one he used to live with: the Carrie he knew was a shy young woman who had wanted to combine her interest in sculpting with her interest in disabled children. She loved Jeff Buckley and REM and the poetry of Billy Collins. The woman in front of him wouldn't know who Billy Collins was.

"There's a lot to be said for being a suburban soccer mom," Carrie said. "No matter what people like you think."

Oh, okay. Now he got it. They were fighting some kind of culture war. He was the cool rock 'n' roll singer-songwriter who lived in the Village somewhere and took drugs, and she was the little woman he'd left behind in Nowhere County. The fact was that they lived remarkably similar lives, except Jackson played Little League, not soccer, and Carrie had almost certainly been to NYC more recently than he had. She'd probably even smoked a little pot at some time in the last five years, too. Maybe everyone was going to come in here swinging their insecurities like baseball bats. That would certainly spice things up a little.

They were saved by the return of Jackson, who ran the length of the room in order to punch both Jesse and Cooper in the stomach. They responded with smiles and whoops: finally, somebody was speaking their language. Natalie's entrance was a little more stately. She waved a greeting to the boys, who ignored her, and introduced herself to Carrie. Or maybe she was reintroducing herself, Tucker couldn't remember. Who knew who had already met before? They were definitely checking each other out now. He could tell that Natalie had absorbed Carrie completely and then somehow spat her out again, and that Carrie knew she'd been spat out. Tucker accepted completely that women were the fairer and wiser sex, but they were also irredeemably vicious when the occasion demanded.

The boys were still fighting. Tucker noted gloomily that Jackson was responding to the appearance of his half brothers with enormous relief and enthusiasm; their chief attraction was that they showed no signs of being about to die, unlike their father. Kids could smell these things. The rats who left sinking ships weren't morally culpable. They were just wired that way.

"How was the zoo, Jackson?"

"It was cool. Natalie bought me this." It was a pen with a monkey's head precariously attached to its cap.

"Wow. Did you say thank you?"

"He was impeccably behaved," said Natalie. "A pleasure to be with. And he knows more or less everything there is to know about snakes."

"I don't know how long all of them are," said Jackson modestly.

The boys stopped wrestling, and a silence fell on the assembled company.

"So here we all are," said Tucker. "Now what?"

"I suppose this is where you read your last will and testament," said Natalie. "And we find out which of your kids you love the best."

Jackson looked at her, and then at Tucker.

"It was Natalie's idea of a joke, son," said Tucker.

"Oh. Okay. But I suppose you'd tell us you loved us all the same," said Jackson, and the tone of his voice implied that this state of affairs would be unsatisfactory and possibly mendacious.

He'd be right, too, thought Tucker. How could he love them all the same? Just seeing Jackson and his ill-concealed bundle of neuroses in the same room as those two solid and, let's face it, dull and kind of dumb boys exposed the lie for what it was. He could see that fatherhood was important when you actually were a father-when you sat with kids in the middle of the night and convinced them that their nightmares were as insubstantial as smoke, when you chose their books and their schools, when you loved them however hard they made it for you to feel anything other than irritation and occasionally fury. And he had been around for the twins during the first few years, but ever since he'd left their mother, he'd cared for them less and less. How could it be any other way? He'd tried to pretend to himself that all five of them were equally important, but these two annoyed and bored him, Lizzie was poisonous, and he didn't really know Gracie at all. Oh, sure, most of this was his fault, and he'd like to think that, if he and Carrie had survived, Jesse and Cooper wouldn't be quite so fucking characterless. But the truth was that they were fine. They had a perfectly serviceable dad with his own car-rental company, and they were mystified by everybody's insistence that their relationship with a man who lived far away was somehow important to their well-being. Meanwhile, Jackson tweaked some kind of nerve in his dad's gut simply by turning the TV on when he was still half-asleep in the morning. You couldn't love people you didn't know, unless you were Christ. Tucker knew enough about himself to accept that he wasn't Christ. So who did he love, apart from Jackson? He ran through a quick mental checklist. No, Jackson was pretty much it, nowadays. With five kids and all the women, he never thought for a moment that a shortage of numbers was going to be his particular problem. Weird how things turned out.

"I'm pretty tired," he said. "How about you all go and visit Lizzie?"

"Will Lizzie want to be visited by us, though?" Carrie asked.

"Sure," he said. "That's part of the point of all this. That we get to know each other as a family." And if it all happened in somebody else's hospital room, then so much the better.

They came back a couple of hours later, giggly and apparently melded together into a coherent unit. They had picked up an extra member, too, a young man with a ridiculous bushy beard who was carrying a guitar.

"Have you met Zak?" said Natalie. "He's your something or other. Your common-law son-in-law."

"Big fan," said Zak. "I mean, really big."

"That's nice," said Tucker. "Thank you."

"Juliet changed my life." changed my life."

"Great. I mean, great if your life needed changing, that is. Maybe it didn't."

"It did."

"So, great. Happy to have helped."

"Zak wants to play you a couple of his songs," said Natalie. "But he was too shy to ask, himself."

How bad could death be, really, Tucker wondered. A quick heart attack and out, and he would have avoided hearing songs by bearded common-law sons-in-law for his entire life.