his mother and then his brother, brought Eric to tears. He cried on the mattress and then rolled onto the floor. He caterwauled and howled, whined like a motherless cub, and shouted unintelligible sentences at the Infinite. Minas held his son, and even then, in the boy’s most miserable state, his father marveled at the depth of feeling that Eric was capable of. His sorrow seemed to diminish Minas’s own fears and losses. It was as if Eric was deserving of more care and consideration because he was more, much more, than other humans.
They sat there on the floor of the boy’s destroyed room, Minas thinking of how much they had both lost and Eric howling like some animal faced for the first time with a giant harvest moon.
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Late in the afternoon Minas drove Eric down to the beach at Malibu. The boys had always liked it there, and so the father thought it might be good for his son.
“Why did you let them take Tommy?” the child asked his father on the drive.
“I couldn’t stop them, Eric. They had the law on their side.”
“
“And you should have too. Tommy is our family. You can’t let family go.”
They walked down the beach on sand left wet by the receding tide. Minas was wearing a yellow shirt and dark-blue pants. His shoes were made of woven brown leather; a thick golden watch hung from his right wrist.
Eric had taken off his shoes in the car. His T-shirt was yellow like his father’s pullover, but his pants were tan and rolled up past his ankles.
“Can I go visit Tommy?” the boy asked his father while scanning the waterline.
“Maybe after a while. His grandmother wants him to get used to being with them before letting us come see him.”
“He’s gonna be with them every day,” Eric said. “He’s gonna be used to them anyway.”
“We’ll see,” Minas Nolan said to his son.
At that moment Eric gasped and ran out into the shallows of the retreating Pacific.
“Eric,” Minas Nolan said, but before he could go out after his son, the boy was coming back with something wriggling in his hands.
It was a bright-green fish with brownish bumps along its back and big googly eyes that seemed somehow to contain mammalian intelligence. The tail was long and elegant, with a fin at the end shaped like a Japanese fan. The body was thick, 7 1
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and the fins below were so long and powerful they might have been used as legs.
“What is it?” Minas Nolan asked, forgetting his losses for a moment.
“A fish,” Eric said bluntly. “It was stuck in the sand.”
“But what kind?” his father asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. It’s certainly not a California fish.
Maybe it’s from the tropics or the deep sea. Maybe this is some fish dredged up by an undersea storm, a fish nobody’s ever seen before.”
With a careless motion, Eric tossed the googly-eyed green fish back into the water, whereupon it darted away.
“I don’t like fish,” the boy said simply. “Let’s go home, Dad.”
That n i g h t E ri c had his father write a letter to his brother, Thomas.
Minas wrote the letter in bold characters that Eric could examine when he was done. They put the letter in an enve-7 2
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lope, which Minas addressed and Ahn sent off to Madeline Beerman.
Madeline received the letter, but she never gave it to Thomas. She put it, unopened, in the bureau drawer next to her bed.
E ri c returne d to his life. At school he was the most popular boy in his class. He won every game he played at recess and was always chosen by the teacher to help clean the erasers and pass out papers.
Sometimes at night he would flip a coin with Ahn. It was a simple game. He’d flip an old Indian head nickel his father had once given him, and either he or Ahn would call heads or tails before it settled on the floor.
Eric won almost every time. Ahn was astonished by this.
Even though she had little formal education, she knew that he shouldn’t win any more than she did. But there it was —
