She started crying. "I miss Brad so much."

"I know you do. That's why you started using again, right? You couldn't face life without him. Like Mickey said, some couples aren't built to be apart." And then, with tears running down his cheeks, still thinking about that five-year-old cheering his lungs out at Yankee Stadium, Myron said, "Brad is dead, isn't he?"

She couldn't move. She collapsed back on the bed, her eyes staring up, unseeing.

"How did he die, Kitty?"

Kitty stayed on her back, her gaze on the ceiling trancelike. When she finally spoke, her voice was a faraway monotone. "He and Mickey were on Interstate Five heading down to an AAU game in San Diego. An SUV lost control and crossed the divider. Brad died on impact-right in front of his son. Mickey spent three weeks in the hospital."

So there it was. Myron had braced himself-had known that something like this was coming-but the confirmation still sent him reeling. He collapsed into a chair on the other side of the room. His baby brother was dead. In the end, it had nothing to do with Herman Ache or Gabriel Wire or even Kitty. It had just been a car accident.

It was almost too much to bear.

Myron looked across the room. Kitty was motionless now, the quakes momentarily gone. "Why didn't you tell us?"

"You know why."

He did. He knew because that was how he put it together. Kitty had gotten the idea from Gabriel Wire. She had seen him killed-but more important, she saw how Lex and the others had pretended that he was alive. She learned from that.

Pretending Wire was alive gave her the idea to pretend Brad was too.

"You would have tried to take Mickey away from me," Kitty said.

Myron shook his head.

"When your brother died"-she stopped, swallowed hard-"I was like a marionette and suddenly someone cut all my strings. I fell apart."

"You could have come to me."

"Wrong. I knew exactly what would happen if I told you about Brad. You'd have come out to Los Angeles. You'd have seen me strung out-just like you did yesterday. Don't lie, Myron. Not now. You'd want to do what you thought was right again. You'd have pet.i.tioned the court for custody. You'd say-just like you did yesterday-that I'm an irresponsible junkie, unfit to raise Mickey. You'd have taken my boy away from me. Don't deny it."

He wouldn't. "So your answer was to pretend that Brad was still alive?"

"It worked, didn't it?"

"And to h.e.l.l with Mickey and what he needed?"

"He needed his mother. How do you not get that?"

But he did. He remembered how Mickey kept telling him what a great mother she was. "And what about us? What about Brad's family?"

"What family? Mickey and I are his family. None of you had been a part of his life in fifteen years."

"And whose fault was that?"

"Exactly, Myron. Whose?"

He said nothing. He thought it was hers. She thought it was his. And his father . . . how had he put it? We come out a certain way. Brad, Dad had said, wasn't meant to stay home and settle down.

But Dad had based that belief on Myron's lie.

"I know you don't believe this. I know you think I lied and tricked him into running away with me. Maybe I did. But it was the right choice. Brad was happy. We were both happy."

Myron remembered the photographs, the face-splitting smiles. He had thought that they were a lie, that the happiness he'd seen in those pictures was an illusion. They weren't. On that part, Kitty was right.

"So yeah, that was my plan. Just to delay notification until I straightened myself out."

Myron just shook his head.

"You want me to apologize," Kitty said, "but I won't. Sometimes you do the right things and you get the wrong results. And sometimes, well, look at Suzze. She tried to sabotage my career by switching those birth control pills-and because of that I have Mickey. Don't you get that? It's all chaos. It's not about right or wrong. You hold on to the things you love most. I lost the love of my life to a freak accident. Was that fair? Was that right? And maybe if you'd been kinder, Myron. Maybe if you had accepted us I would have come to you for help."

But Kitty hadn't come to him for help-not then, not now. The ripples again. Maybe he could have helped them fifteen years ago. Or maybe they would have run away anyway. Maybe if Kitty had trusted him, if he hadn't snapped when she got pregnant, she would have come to him instead of Lex a few days ago. Maybe then Suzze would still be alive. Maybe Brad would be too.

Lots of maybes.

"I have one more question," he said. "Did you ever tell Brad the truth?"

"About you hitting on me? Yes. I told him it was a lie. He understood."

Myron swallowed. His nerves felt raw, exposed. He heard the catch in his voice as he asked, "Did he forgive me?"

"Yes, Myron. He forgave you."

"But he never got in touch."

"You don't understand our lives," Kitty said, her eyes on the bag in his hand. "We were nomads. We were happy that way. It was his life's work. It was what he loved, what he was meant to do. And now that we were back, I think he would have called you. But . . ."

She stopped, shook her head, closed her eyes.

It was time to go see his father now. He had the plastic bag of heroin. He looked at it, unsure what to do.

"You don't believe me," Kitty said. "About Brad forgiving you."

Myron said nothing.

"Didn't you find Mickey's pa.s.sport?" Kitty asked.

Myron was confused by the question. "I did. In the trailer."

"Take a closer look at it," she said.

"At the pa.s.sport?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

She kept her eyes closed and didn't reply. Myron took one more look at the heroin. He had made her a promise that he didn't want to keep. But now, as he held it back up, Kitty saved him from this one last moral dilemma.

She shook her head and told him to leave.

When Myron got back to Saint Barnabas Hospital, he slowly pushed open the door to Dad's room.

It was dark, but he could see that Dad was sleeping. Mom sat next to his bed. She turned and saw Myron's face. And she knew. She let out a small cry, smothering it with her hand. Myron nodded at her. She rose, headed into the corridor.

"Tell me," she said.

And he did. Mom took the blow. She staggered, cried, put herself together. She hurried back into the room. Myron followed.

Dad's eyes remained closed, his breathing raspy and uneven. Tubes seemed to snake out from everywhere. Mom sat back next to the bed. Her hand, shaking with Parkinson's, took his.

"So," Mom said to Myron in a low voice. "We agree?"

Myron did not reply.

A few minutes later, his father's eyes fluttered open. Myron felt the tears push back into his eyes as he looked down at the man he treasured like no other. Dad looked up with pleading, almost childlike confusion.

Dad managed to utter one word: "Brad . . ."

Myron bit back the tears and prepared to tell the lie, but Mom put a hand on her son's arm to stop him. Their eyes met.

"Brad," Dad said again, a little more agitated.

Still looking at Myron, Mom shook her head. He understood. In the end, she didn't want Myron to lie to his father. That would be too much of a betrayal. She turned to her husband of forty-three years and held on to his hand firmly.

Dad started to cry.

"It's okay, Al," Mom said softly. "It's okay."

Epilogue.

SIX WEEKS LATER.

Los Angeles, California

Dad leaned on his cane and led the way.

He had lost twenty pounds since the open-heart surgery. Myron had wanted him to use a wheelchair to get up this hill, but Al Bolitar would have none of that. He would walk to his son's final resting place.

Mom was with them, of course. And Mickey too. Mickey had borrowed a suit from Myron. The fit was far from perfect. Myron was last in line, making sure, he guessed, that no one fell too far behind.

The sun beat down at them with a fury. Myron looked up and squinted into it. His eyes watered. So much had changed since Suzze had first come to his office for help.

Help. What a joke when you thought about it.

Esperanza's husband had not only sued for divorce, but he was indeed going for sole custody of Hector. Part of his claim was that Esperanza kept long hours at her job, neglecting her maternal duties. Esperanza had been so freaked out by the threat that she asked Myron to buy her out, but the thought of working at MB Reps without Esperanza or Win was too disheartening. In the end, after much discussion, they agreed to sell MB Reps. The mega-agency that bought it decided to merge companies and get rid of the MB name.

Big Cyndi was using her severance package to take some time off and write a tell-all memoir. The world awaits.

Win was still in hiding. Myron had only gotten one message from him in the past six weeks-an e-mail with a short, simple message: You are in my heart.

But Yu and Mee are in my pants.

Win.

Terese, his fiancee, was still not able to leave Angola, and now, with all the sudden changes in his life, Myron couldn't go back there. Not yet. Maybe not for a very long time.

As they neared the burial plot, Myron caught up to Mickey. "You okay?"

"Fine," Mickey said, quickening his pace and putting some distance between himself and his uncle. He did that a lot. A minute later, they all came to a stop.

No headstone marked Brad's gravesite yet. Just a placard.

For a long time, no one spoke. The four of them just stood there and stared off. Cars from the adjacent highway zoomed by without a care, without the slightest concern that just yards away a devastated family grieved. Without warning Dad started reciting the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, from memory. They were not religious people, far from it, but some things we do out of tradition, out of ritual, out of need.

"Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba . . ."

Myron risked a glance at Mickey. He had been in on the lie about his father's death, trying to find a way to keep some semblance of his family together. Now, standing where his father's body lay, the boy remained stoic. His head was up. His eyes were dry. Maybe that was the only way to survive when the blows kept raining down on you. When Kitty had finally come home from rehab, she'd bolted from her son in search of a fix. They found her pa.s.sed out in a seedy motel and dragged her back to the Coddington Inst.i.tute. She was getting help again, but the truth was, Brad's death had broken her, and Myron really didn't know whether she could ever be fixed.

When Myron first suggested that he take custody of Mickey, his nephew had unsurprisingly rebelled. He would never let anyone other than his mother be his guardian, he said, and if Myron tried, he would sue for emanc.i.p.ation or even run away. With Myron's parents heading back to Florida and the school year starting up on Monday, Myron and Mickey had finally come to something of an understanding. Mickey would agree to live in the house in Livingston with Myron as an unofficial guardian. He would attend Livingston High School, his uncle and father's alma mater, and in turn, Myron would agree to stay out of his way and make sure that Kitty, despite everything, maintained sole custody of her son.

It was an evolving and uneasy truce.

With his hands clasped and his head lowered, Myron's father finished the long prayer with the words, "Aleinu v'al kol Yis'ra'eil v'im'ru Amein."

Myron and Mom joined in for that final amein. Mickey stayed silent. For several moments, no one moved. Myron looked down at that churned ground and tried to picture his little brother beneath it. He couldn't.

He flashed instead to the very last time he had seen his brother, on that snowy night sixteen years ago, when Myron, the big brother who had always tried to protect him, broke Brad's nose.

Kitty was right. Brad had been on the fence about quitting school and running off to parts unknown. When Dad found out, he sent Myron to talk to his little brother. "You go," Dad told him. "You apologize for what you said about her." Myron argued, pointing out that Kitty was lying about the birth control pills and had a reputation and all the c.r.a.p Myron now knew was not true. His father had seen through it, even then. "Do you want to push him away forever?" his father asked. "You go and apologize and you bring them both home."

But when Myron arrived, Kitty, in her desperation to escape, made up the story about Myron hitting on her. Brad went crazy. Listening to his brother scream and rant, Myron realized that he'd been right about Kitty all along. His brother was an idiot for getting involved with her in the first place. Myron started arguing back, accusing Kitty of all kinds of treachery and then, he screamed the final words he would ever say to his brother: "You're going to believe this lying wh.o.r.e over your own brother?"

Brad took a swing. Myron ducked it and, enraged himself, threw a punch back. Even now, standing at Brad's final resting place, Myron could still hear the sick, wet squelching sound as his brother's nose collapsed under his knuckles.