77 Shadow Street

Besides, he was never going to work in music. His dad was a famous singer, and his mom was a semi-famous songwriter, and Winny never wanted to be famous for anything. Being famous and never knowing what to say would be the worst, everybody hanging on your every word but you didn’t have any words for them to hang on. That would be like falling facedown into manure in front of everybody like twenty times a day, every day of your life. Everyone in music always seemed to know what to say. Some never shut up. Forget music.

Winny might be a sissy like his dad worried he would be. He didn’t know. He liked to think he wouldn’t be. But he’d never been tested. Four days a week, he went to the Grace Lyman School, which was founded by Mrs. Grace Lyman, who died like thirty years earlier, but it was an exclusive school even though she was dead. Of course, she wasn’t still at the school. They didn’t keep her corpse around in a big jar or anything. That would have been cool, but they didn’t. He didn’t know where her corpse was. Nobody ever said. Maybe nobody knew. Grace Lyman was dead, but they still ran the school by her rules, and one of her rules was zero tolerance of bullies. If he never came face-to-face with a bully, he couldn’t be sure whether he was a sissy or not.

He might even be a killer. If some bully started pushing him around, really getting him worked up, maybe he would just go berserk and cut the guy’s head off or something. He didn’t think he was a berserk killer, but he had never been tested. One thing Winny had learned from books was that you had to be tested in life to discover who you were and what you were capable of doing. Hopeless sissy, noble warrior, maniac—he could be anything, and he wouldn’t know until he was tested.

One thing he could never be was Santa Claus. Nobody could be Santa Claus. Santa Claus wasn’t real like the FedEx guy. This was a recent discovery of Winny’s. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. At first, he was sad, he felt like Santa had died, but the sad thing didn’t last very long. A person who never existed couldn’t die, you couldn’t grieve for him. Mostly Winny felt like an idiot for having believed the whole stupid Santa thing as long as he had.

So now he couldn’t honestly say his dad came around as seldom as Santa Claus because in truth Santa Claus never came, but sometimes his dad did. Of course, he hadn’t seen his dad in a long time, so maybe it would turn out that his dad never existed, either. Winny got a phone call now and then, but that could be a fake-out, the guy on the other end could be anyone. If his dad came for a Christmas visit, he would bring Winny what he always brought: a musical instrument or two, a stack of CDs, not just his own but also CDs by other singers, and a signed publicity photo if he had a new one. Every time Farrel Barnett got a new publicity photo, he made sure that Winny received one. Even though Santa Claus didn’t exist, he brought better presents than Winny’s dad, who was most likely real, though you never could tell.

Winny had almost decided which of the three books to read when the floor and walls shuddered. The lamp on the table beside his chair had a pull chain, and it swung back and forth, clinking against the base. At the windows, draperies swished a little, as if stirred by a draft, but there was no draft. In the open shelf of his bookcase headboard, Dragon World action figures vibrated against the wood. They jiggled around as if they were coming to life. They were jiggling a lot. But of course they were even deader than old Grace Lyman.

Winny sat through the shaking, the bright blasts of lightning at the windows, and the booming thunder. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t going to wet his pants or anything. But he wasn’t calm and collected, either. He was in- between somewhere. He didn’t know the word for how he felt. The past couple of days, things were kind of strange in the Pendleton. Things were weird. But weird didn’t always have to be scary. Sometimes weird was really interesting. Last Christmas, his dad gave him a gold-plated saxophone, which was just about as big as Winny. That was more than a little weird, but it wasn’t either interesting or scary, just weird in a stupid kind of way.

He had kept secret the weird and interesting thing that happened to him twice in the past two days. Although he wanted to share his strange experiences with his mom, he suspected that she would feel she had to tell his dad. For all the right reasons, she was always trying to keep old Farrel Barnett involved in his son’s life. For sure, his dad would overreact, and the next thing Winny knew, he would be seeing a shrink twice a week, and there would be some kind of custody battle, and he would be in danger of Nashville or Los Angeles.

As the shaking came to an end, Winny glanced at the TV. It was dark and silent. Although the acrylic screen wasn’t polished enough to reflect him as he sat in the armchair, it didn’t appear flat but instead seemed to have forbidding depths, like a cloudy pool of water in the shade of a forest. The glow of his reading lamp, floating on the screen, seemed to be the pale distorted face of someone drowned and drifting just below the surface.

Twyla hurried from her study to Winny’s room at the farther end of the big apartment, which contained over thirty-five hundred square feet of living space in eight rooms, three baths, and a kitchen—one of the two largest units in the building. She knocked on his door, and he told her to come in, and when she crossed the threshold, she found him in the armchair, legs tucked under himself, three books in his lap.

He was luminous, at least to her, although she thought not only to her, because she had often seen people staring at him as if his appearance compelled their attention. He had her dark hair— almost black—and his father’s blue eyes, but his looks were not the essence of his appeal. In spite of his shyness and reserve, he possessed some ineffable quality that endeared him to people on first encounter. If a boy so young could be said to have charisma, Winny was charismatic, though he seemed to be oblivious of it.

“Honey, are you okay?” she asked.

“Sure. I’m all right. Are you okay?”

“What was that shaking?” she wondered.

“You don’t know? I figured you’d know.”

“I don’t think it was an earthquake.”

He said, “Maybe something blew up in the basement.”

“No. That would have set off an alarm.”

“It happened before.”

“When?”

“Earlier but not as bad. Maybe someone’s blasting somewhere. Some construction guys or someone.”

His bedroom had a twelve-foot-high coffered ceiling with an ornate gilded-plaster medallion in each coffer and exquisite panels of wainscoting with a gilded ground overpainted with a Japanese-style scene of dragonflies and bamboo, original to the Pendleton.

This almost daunting elegance was balanced by Winny’s toys and books, but Twyla wondered—and not for the