"Are you okay, Sal?"

"Yes. I'm surprised he didn't use a gun, that's all. Since he really meant it."

"His dad said they found an old bear rifle in the cabin, but it hadn't been fired."

"So God is capable of mercy."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Sal, the funeral's Monday. I think I'm going."

"I'm sorry. I know you guys were friends."

"Are you interested in coming?"

"I didn't know him that well."

"I realize that. I'm asking for me, honey. For moral support."

"This is kind of sick, isn't it? Trying to con me into attending a funeral when you don't even bother calling to say hi?"

"Lillith is going to be there."

I didn't say anything.

"If you take the train up I'll drive you back to the city."

"All right," I said.

Greenwich was the first stop, an hour from New York. Since it was off-peak I got a triple seat to myself in the back of the cara"I could tell that it used to be a smoking one because it was never possible to completely get the smell out of the upholstery. I thought of Uncle Richard and all our illicit cigarettes together. I'd sent him a postcard of the Statue of Liberty doing a jig, telling him that I had a feeling my fortunes were going to change. It's not coincidence that fortune means both luck and money, he'd informed me once.

There was a girl several seats ahead of me, sprawled out with her socked feet up on the seat. She was intently reading a Penguin paperback, making notes in it with a fat pen. She looked smart, serious, unstoppable. Her shoulder-length dark hair needed washing, and she had on a Yale sweatshirt. When the conductor came by she handed him her ticket without looking up. I couldn't remember ever in my life feeling as confident as she looked.

The other people in my car were a family, a mother and three kidsa"two young daughters and a baby whose sex was indeterminate because it was bald and wearing a yellow blanket. The two little girls, in party dresses with sashes and patent leather Mary Janes, kept getting out of their seats and running up and down the aisle. "How much longer?" "Where are we now?" they kept asking, and their mother said to me apologetically, "We usually drive."

They got off at my station, leaning out over the platform as the train slowed down, so that I automatically reached over and took the smaller one by the shoulders. She ignored me and began screaming: "There he is! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" As we got off, I heard the older one whisper to her mother, "Mommy, what's the matter with that lady?"

By the time the cab dropped me off in front of the church I had regained my composure. Standing at the back of the chapel, I spotted Mel in a pew toward the back. When I slid in beside him he smiled, took my hand, and gave it a squeeze. He was wearing a pale gray linen suita"I hadn't known he owned a suita"and the sapphire stud in his ear. The white cuffs of his shirt looked so soft and spotless I wanted to stroke them. Unlike me, he seemed perfectly at home in church. His parents were strict Roman Catholics. He'd told me once that he still felt guilty using condoms.

I didn't recognize the woman on his other side until she leaned and mouthed "Hi" and I realized with a shock that it was Lillith. She had gained at least twenty-five pounds, had her hair up in a tortoiseshell clip, and was wearing gold shell earrings, all of which gave her an almost matronly look. But her wrists and ankles and those tiny feet in their navy pumps were just as breakably delicate as I'd remembered.

My main feeling about the service was that it had little to do with the Douglas I had known. The old Episcopal chapel, chilly enough to make you shiver although it was over eighty degrees outside, the friends and relatives with their long faces that seemed designed for mourning, the dark burnished coffin with brass handles like furniture, covered with sprays of white lilies, like Easter. Subdued, conservative, in the best of tastea"everything Douglas would have loathed. I tried to remember if my father's coffin had had flowers. Somehow I thought so, but I, who had such an eye for detail, couldn't conjure the scene up in my mind.

The minister kept calling Douglas "this young man," which made me wonder if the guy had even known him. "Let not this young man's sufferings have been in vain." I thought about that night in the hallway when Douglas had dragged me into the phone booth, the smell and feel of him, which was not so different from other boys after all. Then I remembered my last session with Valeric, when I'd told her about Fran and my irrational disappointment that it was not me she had fallen in love with. My shrink had said very gently: "Sally, there is caring and attention in this world that is not sexual."

I looked for family members and finally recognized Douglas's Jack Lemmon look-alike father in front, dressed in banker's dark blue. He seemed terribly pious, hunching down low for the prayers and staring blankly ahead the rest of the time. There were two dark-complected women in the same pew who matched the description of his mother, elegant, he'd sneered to us in group, so fucking elegant you could eat whipped cream off her asshole.

Family was fatal but they created you after all. Who would I be if it hadn't been for Monkey King, if I didn't have his breadth and bones and blood, if he hadn't made his mark on me? It was useless to try to imagine how things would have turned out had I been born to another family, not only useless but impossible. I was what I had come from. When I had tried to leave I'd ended up in other families that would define me in different waysa"my friends at boarding school, Carey, my group at Willowridge, Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard. I was destined to leave them all and at the same time never to leave. There was no escape, except for that one I had tried to take, that Douglas had succeeded in taking.

I imagined him planning this, giving his father's credit card number to reserve the cabin, packing the bear rifle into a duffel, his only luggage. On the bus down, sitting alone because no one dared take the seat beside him, not caring that people shunned him, because he was aiming so precisely now, aiming past them to the end.

One of the dark women got up to read the Twenty-third Psalm.

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil I was thinking of a painting in progress, red with violet in it, the strokes as sinuous as the cold flames of hell, if I believed in such a place. But I didn't, and not in heaven either.

The minister said: "Let us say a silent prayer for the soul of Douglas Abercrombie and for all those dearly departed."

Although I could not pray for Monkey King, I could pray for my father. And while I was sitting there I thought of the others to whom I'd never had a chance to say good-bye: Nai-nai, Darcy, soon Uncle Richard, and of course, as Hopkins said, myself. Sealy. It is Margaret you mourn for.

Douglas's mother turned out to be the woman who'd read the psalm. She stood beside his father in the back of the church as we filed past to offer our condolences. "A tragedy," I kept hearing. I supposed there were a limited number of things to say in a situation like this, and Douglas's life, after all, had been so short. I tried hard to think of a correct remark. Had any of the mourners at Daddy's funeral been as ill at ease as me?

When our turn came Mel spoke for all three of us. "We knew your son at Willowridge. We're all so sorry." For all the father knew we could have been staff. I could see that Mel, as well as being comfortable in church, was familiar with the rituals of death. That was one of the advantages of coming from a large family.

Douglas's father extended his hand to each of us in turn, his grip firm but clammy. His mother's hand was limp and warm and lotiony and she barely looked at us. I could smell her perfume.

"Cold bitch," Mel said when we were outside.

"What do we want to do now?" I asked. It was so strange, the three of us standing there in the sunlight of this lovely woodsy town, stranger than it had been first seeing Mel in Florida.

Lillith shaded her hand over her eyes and said, "I've got to be getting back. I only have a two-hour pass." I still couldn't get over her plumpness. It was as if she were a different person.

"We'll drop you off at the train station," Mel said. The teal Oldsmobile was around the back, in the church parking lot. "Sorry about this old heap," he said to me, as if I'd never seen it before, as if we hadn't logged hours in it together. "Someday I'll get a silver Triumph."

"Don't," I said.

Because she was getting out first Lillith insisted that I take the front seat, and I had to crane my head around to look at her.

"Well," Lillith said. "He made it." Her tone was matter-of-fact. I knew what she meant. Douglas had made it where we had failed. I had tried only once, she had tried at least once a year since she'd hit puberty.

"That was bizarre," I said. "The ceremony, I mean. Meeting his family."

Lillith said: "It's always bizarre to meet the family."

"Was there any warning?" I asked. "Did anyone know?"

"He was pretty incommunicado," said Mel. "You should have seen him after you guys left. He looked like those people you see in pictures of death row, who don't give a shit anymore, don't exercise or anything."

"How come they discharged him?"

"Why else? His insurance ran out."

"They shouldn't have let him go."

"What could they do? His family isn't poor, but you know Willowridge costs an arm and a leg."

No one said anything for a while, and then I asked Lillith how she was doing.

"Same old same old," she said. "I'm a fucking walking chemical factory. There's this new drug, I can get it for free if I'm in the FDA trial, so they're giving me that plus lithium. It kind of spaces me out."

"Sorry."

She yawned. "Oh, and I have a part-time job. They make you, at this place. I tutor math at an elementary school."

"I didn't know you did that." It didn't seem, somehow, to jibe with Joan of Arc. Then I remembered. "I got your postcard. The one with the ice cream sundae. It took a while."

"I got yours." There didn't seem to be anything more to say, and I was actually relieved when we pulled up in front of the train station. I missed the old Lillith, not like she was at the end, unintelligible, but the zany girlie one who had made food sculptures and a string bikini and braided my hair.

After we'd let her out and watched her walk onto the platform Mel leaned back in his seat and stretched. "You hungry?"

"Not really."

"Maybe by the time we get to New York you will be."

"Yeah."

I felt his fingertips brush the back of my neck and got a lump in my throat.

"Hair's getting long," he said.

"I know, I keep forgetting to have it cut." We watched the train pull up and Lillith get on. "How's the prom queen?"

He didn't miss a beat. "Bethie? She's fine. She's decided she wants to go to dog-grooming school."

"Sounds like a hot career to me."

"Yeah, well, you know we're not serious."

"Like it wasn't serious with us?"

Mel was silent for a moment. Then he said: "You know I'd slay a dragon for you, Sally."

And I for you, I thought, but didn't say. Instead I asked, "You want your poetry book back?"

"What? Oh, that. No, no, you keep it. Think of it as a memento."

The drive to the city was much too short. Mel told me funny stories about the restaurant, where he was working that summer, and then tuned the radio to a salsa station and translated the songs for me.

"You speak Spanish?" I asked, and he nodded.

Miracle of miracles, there was a parking space right in front of my building. Mel eyed the street dubiously before we went up and then watched, incredulous, as I went through my ritual with the three locks. Inside, he shucked his jacket and draped it over the baby rocking chair. Everyone loved that chair. When he sat down he said, "This is more comfortable than it looks."

"It's stronger than it looks too."

"Are you implying that I'm fat?"

"Dapper little Mel? Who are you kidding?"

" *Little'? You're the queen of insults today, aren't you?" He pulled me onto his lap and we rocked, both our feet on the floor, our legs tangled up. I could never resist him.

"Just let me get out of this skirt," I finally said.

"Don't close your eyes," Mel said.

He made me come with his hand, telling me precisely and graphically what he was going to do once I did. Then he made good on his promise. This time it was Mel entirely, his lean face, his eyes with their charcoal-rimmed pupils, his boy smell, his patient artful touch. I was sitting in the chair and he knelt in front until I came again in a long drawn-out wave.

"I love you," I said as I came.

We were sitting naked in bed eating an omelette scrounged up from leftovers in my refrigerator. Since I only had one full set of silverware I gave him the fork and used a pair of chopsticks. I'd forgotten the beautiful way he ate, with such delicate bites.

"So," I said, "in your regular day, do you ever think about me?"

"All the time. You're pretty hard to forget."

"I miss you."

"I miss you too, honey."

"But we were right in Florida, weren't we. About it not working."

"Yes," he said.

"Age difference."

"That, and everything else."

"We could have tried."

"We did try."

"What if I said I couldn't live without you."

He ran his fingers over my bare shoulder. "I wouldn't believe you."

"Why did you want me to come to the funeral?"

"I told you. I needed you."

"And what if I suddenly called one day and said I needed you?"

"I'd be there for you, honey."

I sighed. "You're so young."

"Doug was my best friend there, you know, before he tried that first time. We told each other things. Like you and I do."

"You couldn't have saved him. Take it from one who's been there."