He went to his son, and because there was no one there to see him do it, not even Rachel, he kissed his fingers and then pressed them lightly and briefly to Gage’s cheek through the bars of the crib.

Gage clucked and turned over on his side.

“Sleep well, baby,” Louis said.

He undressed quietly and slipped into his half of the bed that was for now just two single mattresses pushed together on the floor. He felt the strain of the day beginning to pass. Rachel didn’t stir. Unpacked boxes bulked ghostly in the mom.

Just before sleep, Louis hiked himself up on one elbow and looked out the window. Their room was at the front of the house, and he could look across the road at the Crandall place. It was too dark to see shapes-on a moonlit night it would not have been-but be could see the cigarette ember over there. Still up, he thought. He’ll maybe be up for a long rime. The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.

Against what?

Louis was thinking about that when he slipped into sleep. He dreamed he was in Disney World, driving a bright white van with a red cross on the side. Gage was beside him, and in the dream Gage was at least ten years old. Church was on the white van’s dashboard, looking at Louis with his bright green eyes, and out on Main Street by the l890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.

7

The next two weeks were busy ones for the family. Little by little Louis’s new job began to shake down for him (how it would be when ten thousand students, many of them drug and liquor abusers, some afflicted with social diseases, some anxious about grades or depressed about leaving home for the first time, a dozen of them-girls, mostly-anorexic… how it would be when all of them converged on the campus at once would be something else again). And while Louis began getting a handle on his job as head of University Medical Services, Rachel began to get a handle on the house.