Looking back, I suppose I was depressed. I had lost Wesley as I had lost my mother. Both too young. Both too soon. Perhaps dallying with death was a way of feeling closer to where they’d gone. I don’t know. It doesn’t always make sense, the way you miss somebody. Sometimes, hurt seeks hurt.

  ✶

  Anyhow, my dad and I were in the car heading to Florida, and somewhere around North Carolina, he started pushing college again.

  “You need a degree to get a good job.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t want to be a plumber the rest of your life, do you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s been a year, Alfie. What do you want to do?”

  I wanted to say music, which was the only thing that really interested me. But with my father, there were only two acceptable answers. Lawyer or accountant. People will always be suing each other, he would say, and they’ll always need to count their money. Steady work. That’s what you want, Alfie.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” I said.

  “You still don’t know?”

  “I’m sorry.” I exhaled in frustration. “What did you want to do when you were my age?”

  He shifted his hands on the wheel. His voice dropped.

  “I wanted to be an opera singer.”

  I did a double take. “Really?”

  I knew my father had a good voice. It was deep and resonant, and when my mother was still alive, he would sing to her now and then. Sometimes, when he’d reach the end of the song, he’d spread his arms out wide and get really loud, and I swear I could see his voice bounce from one wall to the other. He did this once when we lived in Mombasa, and when he finished singing, there were five villagers at our door, asking if everything was all right.

  “Don’t act so surprised,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I knew my stuff. I listened to Beniamino Gigli. And Björling. I even took lessons for a while with a man who’d met Caruso.”

  “So you were good?”

  “I wasn’t bad.”

  “Why didn’t you do it then?”

  “What?”

  “Become an opera singer.”

  He glared at me.

  “Something called World War II, remember?”

  I looked down at my feet. I knew my father had fought in the South Pacific. Infantry division. He didn’t talk about it much.

  “But what about after the war?” I said, softly. “Couldn’t you have been an opera singer then?”

  “After the war, things were different.”

  “Oh.”

  I paused. Perhaps I’d miscalculated my father’s disapproval of the arts.

  “You know,” I said, “maybe I could study music at college?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Alfie,” he said.

  ✶

  We never did see Disney World. My father drove there, took one look at the massive line of vehicles trying to enter the parking lot and grumbled, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He turned the car around and headed south. He wasn’t the most patient man in the world.

  We wound up driving four more hours, all the way to Miami, with me staring out an open window, hot wind blowing on my face. I was thinking about Wesley, which made me quiet, and I guess my dad thought I was upset about skipping the Magic Kingdom, which I wasn’t.

  “Tell you what,” he said when we reached the Miami city limits. “Let’s go to the zoo. They have a big zoo here. What do you think?”

  What I thought was, The zoo? What am I, five years old?

  What I said was, “Yeah, sure.”

  I had no idea how that trip would change my life.

  ✶

  There are years you think about for moments, and moments you think about for years. What happened next is a moment that never leaves my heart.

  I entered that zoo bored, hot, and grimy. My father found a little pavilion where they served beer, and he sat down to drink one. I wandered around. The zoo was in lousy shape. Apparently, they’d endured a hurricane and never fully recovered.

  I meandered past a small reptile house badly in need of paint, and a monkey village where I didn’t see any monkeys. I passed a weary-­looking mother pushing two kids in a double stroller, and heard them scream at the sight of a pink flamingo. I thought back to the time I’d scaled a wall to face a lion. It seemed so pointless now. Nobody knew I’d done it but me, and nobody truly knew me at all. The one person I had shared my secret with was gone.

  I was shaken from these thoughts by a sudden blast of noise. I recognized it immediately: an elephant’s trumpet. I moved in that direction until I saw its dark gray outline shifting behind some trees. When I got closer, the elephant emerged in full view. From the size of its tusks, it seemed fairly young, and from the angle of its forehead I guessed it was female. It stared at me for a few long moments, and I smiled, as if trying to be friendly, which was dumb.

  Then I heard another sound. Clicking. Rapid clicking.

  I turned to my right and saw, about thirty feet away, a young woman shooting a long-­lensed camera. She wore a purple tank top and denim shorts. She had a second camera around her neck, and I figured she was getting some elephant photos. But when I glanced again, it seemed her camera was pointed at me.

  I stepped back from the railing to make sure I was right. Sure enough, she shifted in my direction.

  I took a few steps closer as she adjusted her lens. I still couldn’t see who she was. Finally, I yelled out, “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “It is you, isn’t it?” she yelled back.

  “Who?”

  “Alfie?”

  I recoiled.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Come on.”

  “Come on, what?”

  “Lallu!”

  “Lallu?” I mumbled.

  She lowered the camera, and I blinked at the sight of the loveliest face I would ever encounter. Full lips. Voluminous black hair that fell over her forehead and shoulders. Cheeks that pushed all the way up into her green eyes when she smiled, and a smile so welcoming it sent little lightning bolts into my skin. For the first time in a long time, whatever funk or depression or ennui I was suffering evaporated. It wasn’t that she was so beautiful, but rather, after all these years, still so familiar.

  “Princess?”

  She threw her head back and laughed.

  “I haven’t heard that name since I was eight years old.”

  She moved toward me then, her cameras swaying across her torso, and held out her hand like a queen.

  “My actual name is Gianna,” she said. “Gianna Rule.”

  “I’m Alfie,” I rasped.

  “I know,” she said.

  Nassau

  “Finally!” LaPorta declared. “We meet the mystery woman! Now I gotta pee.”

  He rose to his feet. “By the way, they’ll be here shortly.”

  “Who?” Alfie asked.

  “The police. That’s how it works. They give me a little time to try and get to the bottom of things, then they take you to jail and see if that shakes a confession out of you.”

  He paused. “Jails aren’t great here. Just so you know.”

  LaPorta hoped for a reaction, but Alfie simply exhaled. This guy, the detective thought, what’s it gonna take to shake him?

  The truth was, the evidence they had against Alfie was circumstantial. He had won three straight roulette plays, each time betting a single number, the highest payoff with the longest odds. He’d cashed out immediately and had gone to a bank to make a wire transfer. The next morning, the police had caught up with him outside a travel agency where he’d been buying tickets to Africa. Suspicious, yes. But so far, no proof of illegality.

  LaPorta had never seen anyone hit a single roulette number more than once in a night, much less three times in a row. The only explanation was rigging the wheel itself, or a scam involving the croupier, who had been picked up and was, at this very moment, being interrogated in another room, now that LaPorta’s Bahamian cohorts had finally arrived.

  He privately hoped the croupier would implicate Alfie, although he had to admit, the notebook was entertaining. More fun than the typical “I swear I didn’t do it!” LaPorta remembered a quote he’d read during his training. People will forgive you anything but boredom. This Alfie guy was anything but boring.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” LaPorta said. “Then you can tell me where to find Gianna Rule.”

  “She had nothing to do with the roulette winnings.”

  “Right,” LaPorta said, stepping out. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  He locked the door behind him.

  “Where would I go?” he heard Alfie say.

  The Composition Book

  Things my mother said she loved about me:

  “The way you remember every little thing that happened.”

  The afternoon I remet Gianna, all the other girls I had liked, dreamed about, or made a fool of myself in front of suddenly moved behind the clouds. She was the only star in the sky. We spoke for more than an hour by that elephant exhibit, leaning on the railing, shifting positions, finding a bench, shifting again. There was a rhythm to our conversation that felt like old music. She asked. I answered. I asked. She answered. Her family had left Kenya eight years earlier and moved to Morocco, then Italy, then the Philippines, where her mother was from, now America, all because of her father’s work. She said at times she felt like a “Tuareg nomad,” two words I’d never heard anyone use to describe themselves. She was hoping to stay put for a while by going to college at Boston University, where she planned to study literature. But mostly she wanted to be a photographer. I kept staring at her lips. Her teeth. Her eyes.

  “What do you want to take pictures of?” I asked.

  “Wildlife. Natural habitats.”

  She grinned. “Old boyfriends.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I wasn’t really your boyfriend.”

  “I didn’t mean you.”

  I felt myself turning crimson.

  “Oh . . . I . . .”

  “Ha. Look at your face!” She laughed again with that perfect smile and rapped my arm with her fist.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry. Weren’t we going to get married one day and buy a house in Mombasa?”

  “You remember that?”

  “Yep. I’m like her.” She nodded to the elephant. “I never forget.”

  ✶

  When I finally got back to my father, there were four empty beer cans on the table and he’d unbuttoned his shirt due to the heat.

  “Where the hell did you go?” he barked.

  “I was checking out the elephants.”

  He shook his head, exasperated. “Elephants?”

  “Yeah.”

  “To wait this long, I could have stayed in Disney World.”

  “Sorry.”

  He looked away, his face scrunched in anger.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking. Maybe I do want to go to college.”

  His expression changed. So did his voice.

  “Oh, yeah? Well. Good.”

  Then he asked, “Where?”

  “Boston,” I said.

  Three

  The Composition Book

  I’ve noticed something about dying, Boss. When you come into this world, you have all these people who want to take care of you, and you don’t know any of them. Then, when you’re leaving this world, you have all these people you do know, but few of them want to be bothered.

  I went to a facility last week. It was recommended by my doctor. Plenty of windows. Good light. But sad. Sad in that dreary, dragging manner of old folks’ homes, with their carpeted hallways and low-­volume conversations and lingering smells from the last meal cooked, like fried fish or macaroni and cheese.

  I’ll be heading there soon. I have no choice. This disease I have will render me immobile and noncommunicative. They’ll keep me fed and hydrated (sounds like a plant, now that I write it). And pretty soon, I’ll be gone.

  It’s OK. I’ve accepted it. To be honest, I think I’ll miss walking more than talking. The only person I enjoy speaking to anymore is you.

  I hope that doesn’t embarrass you, Boss. This all ties back to the story. You see, before we left Florida, my father and I went to visit my grandmother in a nursing home, much like the one where I’ll soon be heading. It was in a town called Hollywood, which I expected to look like the California version. It did not. Back in the 1970s, Hollywood, Florida, was a sprawl of ranch homes, palm trees, a pink-­cement ocean promenade, and an Indian reservation.

  My mother’s Mom, Nina—­who I always called “Yaya Nina”—­was born in Greece but immigrated to America with her family when she was young. She grew up in the Florida heat and, the story goes, married the first man to ever take her to an air-­conditioned movie theater, my grandpa Billy. They moved to Virginia, where he worked as a fisherman. They had one child together, my mother, and not long after she became the first in the family to go to college, Grandpa Billy died. Heart attack. I never got to meet him. He was buried at sea. Yaya Nina moved back to Florida. She never left.

  Before my mom died, we used to visit Yaya a lot, but after that, there wasn’t much contact beyond birthday cards and a phone call at the holidays. The last time I’d seen Yaya was at my mother’s funeral. She’d stayed at our house and baked me shortbread cookies filled with orange jam. At one point we were in the kitchen together—­she was smoking, which she often did—­and she said something curious. She was holding one of the framed photos we had put around the house, a picture of my mom in Kenya, reading the Bible to the village kids.

  “She didn’t have to go all the way to Africa, you know,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She could have helped people here.”

  I thought about that. Maybe if she had stayed in America, she would still be alive. This was before I understood that all the magic in the world couldn’t delay death.

  “Did you ever tell her that, Yaya?” I asked.

  “No.” She looked away. “But I will.”

  ✶

  It was my idea to visit Yaya Nina, seeing as we were in Miami and so close. My dad agreed without much fuss, I’m guessing because he was happy about my college news.

  “She might not recognize you,” he warned.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s been eleven years. I don’t know what kind of shape she’s in.”

  We had to look up the facility in the phone book. It was a single-­level, red brick structure, with pale green carpet and easy-­listening music playing over the speakers. We asked for my grandmother at the front desk. When they brought her out, she was in a wheelchair, and since we hadn’t called ahead, I thought she’d be surprised to see us. But she quickly took my hand and smiled, causing her face to wrinkle into so many lines, it seemed as if she were drawn with an Etch A Sketch. Her cheekbones nearly pushed through her tanned skin, and her straight hair, silver and white, still hung over her forehead in bangs. Her grip was strong.

  “You, I want to talk to,” she told me, ignoring my dad.

  She motioned the orderly to take us down the hall, and I looked back at my father, who nodded as if to say, Do as she wants. We left him in the lobby, went to her room together, and started talking.

  That conversation changed everything.

  ✶

  “You got big,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Very tall now.”

  “I guess.”

  “And what are you going to do with your life?”

  “I don’t know. I like music.”

  “Mmm. Like your mother.”

  She pointed to a glass of water, which I retrieved from her bureau. She took a long sip, then put the glass down so deliberately, you’d have thought it contained explosives.

  “So, Alfie,” she said. “Got any cigarettes?”

  “Yaya!” I laughed. “They let you smoke in here?”

  “Of course, not. That’s why I asked.”

  She ran her gaze up and down my body. I remembered as a child feeling that whenever she looked at me, there was something she wasn’t saying. I felt that way now.

  “You have to understand,” she suddenly blurted out, “I was very angry at your father! Keeping us apart all these years! Last time I saw you, you were a child. Now look! Look at what I missed! Terrible!”

  Her voice rose to a frustrated pitch. “I shouldn’t have screamed at him. But I couldn’t help it! I was mad!”

  “When did you scream at him?”

  “Just now. When you came in.”

  “Yaya,” I said softly, “you didn’t say a word to him.”

  She waved her fingers dismissively.

  “The first time. I reamed him out pretty good.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She stared straight at me, boring her eyes into mine. I felt myself shiver. Then, as if finishing a test, she relaxed and leaned back.

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  She grinned.

  “You can do it, too.”

  ✶

  It turned out, Boss, that my grandmother had the same power as me. So did her brother and her father, she said. There was no explanation, other than it seemed to pass from a loved one just before they died, as if knowing, with death looming, that it needed a new host.

  “When was your first time?” Yaya asked me.

  “Mom’s last day.”

  “You saw that twice?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded and looked to the window. “Makes sense. It’s usually a heartbreak that starts it. You want so badly to undo something. And then . . . it just happens.”

  She shrugged. “Your mother’s power must have passed to you, just like my father’s passed to me.”

  “Are we the only people in the world who can do this?”

  “I don’t know anyone else. Do you?”

  “Yaya, I didn’t know you could do it until just now.”

  “Yes, well.” She clasped her hands together. “Now you do.”