I began to screw it up. The writing, good for a long time, went bad. The relationship with your mother, always difficult despite good intentions on both sides, grew strained. Arguments ended without resolution, without making up. You don't appreciate me, we said to each other. You don't appreciate what I do. The boys began to whisper among themselves: What's the matter with Mom and Dad?
        No one outside the walls of the big old crumbling park-side house saw any of these things, though they festered for years. Only one thing was clear to me: Despite what others saw in the daily rushes, the movie of Steve's life was not a sentimental drama directed by Frank Capra. It was another kind of film altogether, a kind I hadn't seen before and couldn't categorize. I tell you this, my long-awaited one, because, since you can now read these words, you have a right to know. And because it was into this kind of film—strange and dark and ambiguous, despite so much white, white light—that you were cast.

        OK, now, for those of you who just joined us, Katie here is going to show us this morning how to make holidazzle eggs, ourselves, at home. Wow, Katie, I gotta admit I was a little bit surprised when I first picked this up. This is an empty egg.
        That's right, Dale.
        Well, how do you get the egg . . . there WAS an egg in there, right?
        Yeah.
        OK. Well, I don't . . . how do you . . . I mean, you don't have an empty chicken somewhere that lays empty eggs?

        Perhaps you recognize that one: the local daytime talk show Mrs. Lundegaard is watching when the kidnapper with the dark ski mask appears on the snowy deck outside her living room. The glare of the white, white world shines on Mrs. Lundegaard through broad panels of glass, filling the entire living room with light, moments before the kidnapper himself crashes into it.
        The house we've rented here on the Hawaiian island of Lana`i on this, your very first summer, is also full of light. That's the only thing your mother likes about it.
        “There's no carpet, no rugs,” she tells me the moment our landlord, Ron, has left. She's standing in her new white sneakers on the landing of the rough, unfinished plywood stairway that leads to the second floor. “The boys are going to get splinters.”
        Our suitcases are piled on the vinyl tile floor at the base of the steps. I'm standing in front of the blue sofa in the small adjacent living room, awash in white morning light from three different windows. Nestled in my arms, you glow a brilliant pink. After only four weeks in the wide, white world, you must be shielded from its direct glare, which your exposed skin drinks the way it used to drink sound in the darkness of your mother's womb. My face eclipses the source of most of this light, but not all, and your blue eyes squint as they gaze up in my direction. Do you see me yet? Or am I just a blurry satellite orbiting the drifting center of your liquid universe?
        “They can wear thongs,” I suggest.

                                4