Rush let his fingers investigate it. Since the accident he had learned to feel, smell, taste, and hear what he couldn't see. What he comprehended using these senses was often remarkable to his father-almost as if the boy had psychic abilities. In his occupation, Winter had to be a reader of eyes, muscle twitches, and body language. But his son seemed to have learned to read those things without being able to see them.
“What is it?” Rush demanded, giggling now with anticipation. God, Winter lived for the sound of his son's happiness.
“It's a bracelet.”
“I know that! What's it made of?”
“Guess.”
“Aw, man. No fair.” But he nodded and played the game, running his fingers over the bracelet, biting down on it, rubbing it against his teeth and his cheek. “Well, it's sort of like braided gold or silver, but it isn't. It's not cotton or wool.”
“It's from something powerful, fearless, had a mouth full of teeth and is strong of odor.”
Rush laughed, delighted. “Shakka! Shakka the lion?”
“I had it woven for you from hair I clipped from Shakka's mane.”
There was a gallery of family pictures in the Masseys' hallway-a conglomeration of old and new, prints of different sizes in mismatched frames, some black-and-white, some color. In one, Eleanor Massey was still Eleanor Ashe, a skinny little girl with missing front teeth. In another, Winter's parents were still together and Lydia held a baby Winter in her arms. In another, Winter was a Cub Scout, and framed beside that was a photo of Rush as an infant being bathed by his mother. The most recent showed Rush wearing sunglasses with his arms around the neck of a moth-eaten lion. The lion's teeth were worn down so close to the gums they looked like small whitecaps on a dark sea.
The lion had been the property of a Charlotte drug dealer, who kept him in a basement and used him to frighten children and drug runners. The federal judge had ordered Winter and another marshal to put the cat in a U-Haul van and escort it to an animal rehabilitation center in Florida. The lion was so gentle that Winter had taken Rush to the warehouse where Shakka was kept before transit was arranged and had let the boy use his hands to get to know it. The old cat's tongue had made a hivelike abrasion on Rush's cheek. Winter had read a book once that described how a man-eating lion used its tongue like a rasp to remove the skin from human prey before consuming it. He hadn't told Rush that.
“Shakka liked me, didn't he?” Rush said now. “He was really big, wasn't he?”
“Nemo sure didn't like Shakka,” Winter reminded him.
Winter had left Nemo at home that day, and when they got back to the house the dog planted his nose against Rush's chest. He growled fiercely for a long time, the fur over his spine standing like quills. Winter had been afraid at first that he was going to bite the boy, and, when he tried to pull his son away, the usually gentle dog had snapped at Winter. His behavior seemed to be a chastisement for allowing Rush so close to something that smelled like an enemy of children. Nemo's breed originated in South Africa. Some ancient warning had obviously risen up within the dog.
“How are you feeling?” Winter asked his son.
“Fine. Why?”
“Gram said you moped around all day, went to bed early.”
“Is a bracelet for a man?” Rush asked, avoiding the question.
Winter saw a corner of one of his late wife's bandanas peeking out from under Rush's pillow. They had been one of Eleanor's trademarks; she'd used them to keep her long blond hair under control when she was outdoors or working on the house. Rush had taken to carrying one in his pocket. After three years, he was down from a half dozen to a pair; one red and one blue. When it was absolutely necessary, he washed them by hand and laid them on a towel to dry.
“Sure. I.D. bracelets are for men. Lion-hair bracelets are strictly for men who need some luck. So why the moping?”
“Well, Angus is mowing yards next summer and when I said I would help, he said if I took a tin cup and some pencils downtown, people would buy them.”
“That was mean.”
“No, Angus didn't mean it like that. We were talking about ways to make money, but it made me think a lot about what I'm going to do someday. It sure as heck won't be selling pencils.”
“No, it won't. But you need to get some sleep.” Winter kissed his son's cheek, tucked him in, hung Nemo's Seeing-Eye harness on the chair, and walked out. Nemo was supposed to sleep in the harness, but tonight Rush had merely leashed him to the bed, a minor violation of the rules for Seeing-Eye dogs. In the hallway he paused to look at the picture of Eleanor standing under the wing of a Cessna 120 she had soloed in at sixteen. He kept a picture of another Cessna, the one the insurance company sent him, in his file cabinet. He still couldn't look at it without feeling lost, like being pinned under tons of earth and rocks.
He lay down on his bed in the dark. A few weeks after Eleanor's death, he had changed the room, bought a new bed, moved the furniture. He kept her jewelry in his gun safe, thinking he'd give it to his son's wife someday. Eleanor had three gold bracelets, a small strand of cultured pearls, a wedding ring, a Seiko tank watch, her flight chronometer, and a pendant made from Winter's Kappa Alpha Order fraternity pin. Nothing worth putting in a bank vault. Her favorite piece had been a pin that Rush picked out in a Walgreens. It was small, shaped like a soldier's medal, and said MOTHER on the gold-toned bar at the top, with a pink plastic heart hanging by a ribbon. Winter had asked the funeral director to pin it to her gown before the casket was closed, because she would have wanted it close to her.
Winter had not looked at his wife's body after she stopped breathing. He had not left her side from the moment he was ushered into her hospital room until he gave the nod to pull the plug and she ceased to exist. Her face had been so swollen that she hadn't looked like Eleanor, which had allowed him to imagine that some stranger was in her bed, dying or dead. She was breathing, but not on her own, and for no good purpose except to keep her organs alive for someone else. At that point he knew that he was on the edge of exactly how much he could endure.
He had managed to get through his wife's funeral by convincing himself that the casket was empty, that Eleanor was waiting for him at home, that some other woman had crashed the plane. After all, his wife was a master pilot, an instructor. In a glider she was a thing of the air, knew the secret winds, soaring on the thermals with the arrogance of a hawk. He had only once sat in front of her in a glider. He'd been certain the wings would fold up as she performed lazy loops so high above the earth. But he had loved every second of the sensation, sharing her passion.
Rush had stayed in the hospital for a full month after the crash and spent months after that adjusting to his blindness. He seemed resilient and began testing the limits of his handicap almost immediately.
Before Rush was blinded, the dark had been the one thing he was afraid of. Since he was first put into his own bedroom at the age of two, he had slept with the door open a crack, a night-light in the hallway illuminating the way to his parents' bedroom. Since the accident, Rush hadn't cared whether the door was left open or closed. Another small thing that feasted on Winter's heart.
5
New York, New York
It was almost eleven when a gimp-gaited Herman Hoffman walked up from the subway stop at 72nd and Broadway and started making his way toward the meeting. As he turned the corner, he spotted an elegant gray Towncar parked across the narrow street from the small coffeehouse. He ignored it, knowing that the driver was studying him, relaying to the man inside the shop on his mobile phone that Herman was approaching, without backup. A sign on the door said that the small business was closed. As he approached, a large man unlocked the door from the inside. As Herman slipped into the coffeehouse, he caught a reflection in the window-a small, ancient man wearing a tweed jacket, whose body seemed shaped like a question mark-the man he had become.
Herman's limp was his badge of honor, the visible remains of his courage-compliments of an ill-mannered
