For long months this was merely a nagging uncertainty in Bonito’s mind. After all, he had given up on trying to take responsibility for his parents’ happiness, so there was no urgency to figure it out. But the problem wouldn’t leave him alone, and finally he realized why.

  Father was in a conspiracy. He was meeting with people to do something dangerous or illegal. Was he planning to take over the Spanish government? Start a revolution? But whom could he meet with in Toledo that would make a difference in the world? Toledo was not a city where powerful people lived—they were all in Madrid and Barcelona, the cities his parents were named for but rarely visited. These meetings rarely lasted more than an hour and a half and never more than three hours, so they had to take place fairly close by.

  How could a six-year-old—for Bonito was six now—find out what his father was doing? Because now that he knew there was a mystery, he had to have the answer to it. Maybe Father was doing secret government work—maybe even for the I.F. Or maybe he was working on a dangerous case that might get him killed if anyone knew about it, so he only had meetings about it in secret.

  One day an opportunity came. Father checked the time of day several times in the same morning without saying anything about it, and then left for lunch a few minutes early, asking the secretary to walk Bonito home for lunch. The secretary agreed to and seemed cheerful enough about it; but she was also very busy and clearly did not want to leave the job unfinished.

  “I can go home alone,” said Bonito. “I’m six, you know.”

  “Of course you can find the way, you smart little boy,” she answered. “But bad things sometimes happen to children who go off alone.”

  “Not to me,” said Bonito.

  “Are you sure of that?” she answered, amused.

  Bonito turned around and pointed to the monitor on his neck. “They’re watching.”

  “Oh,” said the secretary, as if she had completely forgotten that Bonito was being observed all the time. “Well, then I guess you’re quite safe. Still, I think it’s better if you . . .”

  Before she could say “wait until I’m done here,” which was the inevitable conclusion of her sentence, Bonito was out the door. “Don’t worry I’ll be fine!” he shouted as he went.

  He could see Father walking along the street, briskly but not actually fast. It was good that he was walking instead of taking a cab or getting the car—then Bonito could not have followed him. This way, Bonito could saunter along looking in store windows, like a kid, and still keep his father in view.

  Father came to a door between shops, one of the sort that held stairs that led to walk-up shops and offices and apartments. Bonito got to the door and it was already closed; it was the kind that locked until somebody upstairs pushed a button to let it open. Father was not in sight.

  The buttons on the wall had name tags, most of them, and a couple of them were offices rather than apartments. But Father would not be having a manicure and he would not be getting his future read by a psychic palm-reading astrologer.

  And, come to think of it, Father had not even waited at the bottom long enough for somebody to ring him up. Instead he had taken a long time getting the door handle open . . .

  Father had keys. That’s what happened at the door, he fumbled with keys and opened the door directly without ringing anybody.

  Why would Father have a second office? Or a second apartment? It made no sense to Bonito.

  So when he got home, he asked Mother about it.

  She looked like he had stabbed her in the heart. And yet she refused to explain anything.

  After lunch he became aware that she had gone to her room and was crying.

  I’ve made her unhappy, he thought. I shouldn’t have been following Father, he thought.

  And then she came out of her room holding a note, her eyes red from crying. She put the note on the kitchen table, folded, with Father’s name on it, and then took Bonito to the car, which she almost never drove, and drove to the railroad station, where she parked it and got on the train and they went to Grandma’s house. Mother’s mother, who lived two hours away in a small town in the middle of nowhere, but with orange groves—not very productive ones, but as Grandma always said, her needs were few and her son-in-law was generous.

  Mother sent Bonito into the back yard and then cried to her mother. Bonito tried to listen but when they saw him edging closer to the window they closed it and then got up and went to another room where he couldn’t hear them without making it obvious he was trying to spy.

  Yet he knew, bit by bit, what had happened, and what he had done. From the scraps of words and phrases he could overhear, he knew there was a “she” that Father was “keeping,” that it was a terrible thing that Father had the key, and that Mother didn’t know how she could bear it or whether she could stay. And Grandma kept saying, Hush, hush, it’s the way of the world, women suffer while the men play, you have your son and you can’t expect a strong man not to wander, one woman could not contain him . . .

  And then they saw him a second time, sitting directly under the window where Mother had walked to get some air. Mother was furious. “What did you hear?”

  “Nothing,” said Bonito.

  “The day you don’t hear words that are said right in front of you, I’ll take you to a hearing doctor to stick needles in your ears. What did you hear?”

  “I’m sorry I told you about Papa! I don’t want to move here! Grandma’s a bad cook!”

  At which Mother laughed in the midst of tears, Grandma was genuinely offended, and then Mother promised him that they would not move to Grandma’s, but they’d visit here for a few days. They hadn’t packed anything, but there were clothes left there from previous visits—too small for him now, but not so small he couldn’t fit into them.

  Father came that night and Grandma sent him away. He was furious at first but then she said something in a low voice and Father fell silent and drove away.

  The next day he was back with flowers. Bonito watched Mother and Father talk in the doorway, and she refused to take his flowers., so he dropped them on the ground and left again. Mother crushed one of the flowers with her shoe, but then she picked up the others and cried over them for a long time while Grandmother said, over and over, “I told you it meant nothing. I told you he didn’t want to lose you.”

  It took a week before they moved back home, and Father and Mother were not right with each other. They talked little, except about the business of the house. And Father stopped asking Bonito to come with him.

  At first Bonito was angry at Mother, but when he confronted her, Mother denied that she had forbidden him to go. “He’s ashamed in front of you,” she said.

  “For what?” asked Bonito.

  “He still loves you as much as ever,” said Mother.

  Which left his question unanswered. That meant the answer was very important. Father was ashamed of something, ashamed in front of Bonito. Or was that Mother’s kindly-intended lie, and Father was actually very angry at Bonito for spying on him?

  For days, for weeks Bonito didn’t understand. And then one day he did. By then he was in school, and on the playground a boy was telling jokes, and it involved a man doing something bad with a woman that wasn’t his wife, and in the middle of the joke it dawned on Bonito that this was what Father had been doing with some other woman that wasn’t Mother. The reaction of the boys to the joke was obvious. Men were supposed to laugh at this. Men were supposed to think it was funny to find a clever way to lie to your wife and do strange things with strange women. By the end of the joke both women were deceived. The boys laughed as if it were a triumph. As if there were a war between men and women, both lying to each other.

  That’s not how Mother is, thought Bonito. She doesn’t lie to Father. When a man comes to her and flirts with her, she sends him away. That’s what happened with that man who liked her flatbread.

  The final piece fell into place when they were visiting Grandma again—briefly, this time—and Grandma looked at him and sighed and said, “You’ll just grow up to be another man.” As if hombre were a dirty word. “There’s no honor among men.”

  But I won’t grow up like Father. I won’t break Mother’s heart.

  But how could he know that? It wouldn’t be Mother’s heart, anyway, it would be the woman he eventually married; and how could he know that he wasn’t just like his father?

  Without honor.

  It changed everything. It poisoned everything.

  And when they came to him only a few day before his seventh birthday, and took out the monitor, and asked him if he’d like to go to Battle School, he said yes.

  Space Boy

  Todd memorized the solar system at the age of four. By seven, he knew the distance of every planet from the sun, including the perigee and apogee of Pluto’s eccentric orbit, and its degree of declension from the ecliptic. By ten, he had all the constellations and the names of the major stars.

  Mostly, though, he had the astronauts and cosmonauts, every one of them, the vehicles they rode in, the missions they accomplished, what years they flew and their ages at the time they went. He knew every kind of satellite in orbit and the distances and orbits that weren’t classified and, using the telescope Dad and Mom had given him for his sixth birthday, he was pretty sure he knew twenty-two separate satellites that were probably some nation’s little secret.

  He kept a shrine to all the men and women who had died in the space programs, on the launching pad, on landing, or beyond the atmosphere. His noblest heroes were the three Chinese voyagers who had set foot on Mars, but never made it home. He envied them, death and all.

  Todd was going into space. He was going to set foot on another planet.

  The only problem was that by the time he turned thirteen he knew he was never going to be particularly good at math. Or even average. Nor was he the kind of athletic kid who looked like an astronaut. He wasn’t skinny, he wasn’t fat, he was just kind of soft-bodied with slackish arms no matter how much he exercised. He ran to school every day, his backpack bumping on his back. He got bruises on his butt, but he didn’t get any faster.

  When he ran competitively in PE he was always one of the last kids back to the coach, and he couldn’t ever tell where the ball was coming when they threw to him, or, when it left his own hand, where it was likely to go. He wasn’t the last kid chosen for teams—not while Sol and Vawn were in his PE class. But no one thought of him as much of a prize, either.

  But he didn’t give up. He spent an hour a day in the back yard throwing a baseball against the pitchback net. A lot of the time, the ball missed the frame altogether, and sometimes it didn’t reach the thing at all, dribbling across the lawn.

  “If I had been responsible for the evolution of the human race,” he said to his father once, “all the rabbits would have been safe from my thrown stones and we would have starved. And the sabertooth tigers would have outrun whoever didn’t starve.”

  Father only laughed and said, “Evolution needs every kind of body. No one kind is best.”

  Todd wouldn’t be assuaged so easily. “If the human race was like me, then launching rockets and going into space would have to wait for the possums to do it.”

  “Well,” said Father, “that would mean smaller spaceships and less fuel. But where in a spacesuit would they stow that tail?”

  Really funny, Dad. Downright amusing. I actually thought about smiling.

  He couldn’t tell anybody how desperate and sad he was about the fact that he would probably have to become a high school drama teacher like his dad. Because if he did say how he felt, they’d make him go to a shrink again to deal with his “depression” or his “resentment of his father” the way they did after his mother disappeared when he was nine and Dad gave up on searching for her.

  The shrink just wouldn’t accept it when he screamed at him and said, “My mother’s gone and we don’t know where she went and everybody’s stopped looking! I’m not depressed, you moron, I’m sad. I’m pissed off!”

  To which the shrink replied with questions like, “Do you feel better when you get to call a grownup a ‘moron’ and say words like ‘pissed’?” Or, worse yet, “I think we’re beginning to make progress.” Yeah, I didn’t choke you for saying that, so I guess that’s progress.

  Nobody even remembered these days that sometimes people were just plain miserable because something really bad was going on in their lives and they didn’t need a drug, they needed somebody to say “Let’s go get your mother now, she’s ready to come home,” or “That was a great throw—look, after all these years, Todd’s become a terrific pitcher and he’s great at math so let’s make him an astronaut!”

  Ha ha, like that would ever happen.

  Instead, he took a kitchen timer with him out to the back yard every afternoon, and when it went off he’d drop what he was doing and go inside and fix dinner. Jared kept trying to help, which was OK because Jared wasn’t a complete idiot even though he was only seven and certifiably insane. Todd’s arm was usually pretty sore from misthrowing the ball, so Jared would take his turn stirring things.

  There was a lot of stirring, because when Todd cooked, he cooked. OK, he mostly opened soup cans or cans of beans or made mac and cheese, but he didn’t nuke them, he made them on the stove. He told Dad that it was because he liked the taste better when it was cooked that way, but one day when Jared said, “Mom always cooked on the stove,” Todd realized that’s why he liked to do it that way. Because Mom knew what was right.

  It wasn’t all soup or beans or macaroni. He’d make spaghetti starting with dry noodles and plain tomato sauce and hamburger in a frying pan, and Dad said it was great. Todd even made the birthday cakes for all their birthdays, including his own, and for the last few years he made them from recipes, not from mixes. Ditto with his chocolate chip cookies.

  Why was it he could calculate a half-recipe involving thirds of a cup, and couldn’t find n in the equation n = 5?

  He took a kind of weird pleasure from the way Dad’s face got when he bit into one of Todd’s cookies, because Todd had finally remembered or figured out all the things Mom used to do to make her cookies different from other people’s. So when Dad got all melancholy and looked out the window or closed his eyes while he chewed, Todd knew he was thinking about her and missing her even though Dad never talked about her. I made you remember her, Todd said silently. I win.

  Jared didn’t talk about Mom, but that was for a different reason. For a year after Mom left, Jared talked about her all the time. He would tell everybody that the monster in his closet ate her. At first people looked at him with fond indulgence. Later, they recoiled and changed the subject.

  He only stopped after Dad finally yelled at him. “There’s no monster in your closet!” It sounded like somebody had torn the words from him like pulling off a finger.

  Todd had been doing the dishes while Dad put Jared to bed, and by the time Todd got to the back of the house, Jared was in his room crying and Dad was sitting on the edge of his and Mom’s bed and he was crying and then Todd, like a complete fool, said, “And you send me to a shrink?”

  Dad looked up at Todd with his face so twisted with pain that Todd could hardly recognize him, and then he buried his face in his hands again, and so Todd went in to Jared and put his arm around him and said, “You’ve got to stop saying that, Jared.”

  “But it’s true,” Jared said. “I saw her go. I warned her but she did the very exact thing I told her not to do because it almost got my arm the time I did it, and—”

  Todd hugged him closer. “Right, I know, Jared. I know. But stop saying it, OK? Because nobody’s ever going to believe it.”

  “You believe me, don’t you, Todd?”

  Todd said, “Of course I do. Where else could she have gone?” Why not agree with the crazy kid? Todd was already seeing a shrink. He had nothing to lose. “But if we talk about it, they’ll just think we’re insane. And it made Dad cry.”

  “Well he made me cry, too!”

  “So you’re even. But don’t do it anymore, Jared. It’s a secret.”

  “Same thing with the monster’s elf?”

  “The monster itself? What do you mean?”

  “The elf. Of the monster. I can’t talk about the elf?”

  Geeze louise, doesn’t he let up? “Same thing with the monster’s elf and his fairies and his dentist, too.”

  Jared looked at him like he was insane. “The monster doesn’t have a dentist. And there’s no such thing as fairies.”

  Oh, right, lecture me on what’s real and what’s not!

  So it went on, days and weeks and months, Todd fixing dinner and Dad getting home from after-school play practices and they’d sit down and eat and Dad would tell funny things that happened that day, doing all the voices. Sometimes he sang the stories, even when he had to have thirty words on the same note till he came up with a rhyme. They’d all laugh and it was great, they had a great life . . .

  Except Mom wasn’t there to sing harmony. The way they used to do it was they’d take turns singing a line and the other one would rhyme to it. Mom could always make a great rhyme that was exactly in rhythm with the song. Dad was funny about it, but Mom was actually good.

  Grief is like that. You live on, day to day, happy sometimes, but you can always think of something that makes you sad all over again.

  Everybody had their secrets, even though everybody else knew them. Jared had his closet monster and its elf. Dad had his memory of Mom, which he never discussed with anyone. Todd had his secret dreams of going to other worlds.

  Then on a cool Saturday morning in September, a few weeks after his thirteenth birthday, he was out in the side yard, screwing the spare hose onto the faucet so he could water Mom’s roses, when he heard a hissing sound behind him and turned around in time to see a weird kind of shimmering appear in midair just a few feet out from the wall.

  Then a bare child-size foot slid from nowhere into existence right in the middle of the shimmering.