read me Wonder Books, until I could finally recite them all back to you? Remember the one about the big blue whale? Remember the day I set the sofa on fire after you and Dad left for work—and burned up the inside of the house without burning down the outside? Remember how Dad tried to call the Fire Department, but the phone had melted into itself? Remember the swimming pool at the Swan Motel in Fort Smith, before the bank took it away? Remember how Dad taught me not to fear the water by jumping into the deep end himself, even though he couldn't swim? He nearly drowned, but I can swim now. Remember even further back than that? Remember before I was born, when you and Dad lived in that tiny apartment in Fort Scott, Kansas you told me about, where the big freight trains rumbled by and their engines smelled like motor oil burning on an iron skillet, and you worked as a nurse's aide while Dad rode the rails as a diesel locomotive mechanic, and you both dreamed of the life you would make together? Remember how your sister Eleanor married Dad's brother Louis, and they had nine children while you had only me? Your dad and I went for quality, not quantity, you said. Remember how you read my first novel aloud to Dad, who had never read any book himself, then had to explain to him that, yes, it was based on his own life. Do you remember what he said to me about it on the phone? I guess some of that could have happened—and next time you're home, don't forget to bring the chainsaw. Do you remember calling me a week or so later and asking: When are you going to write something just for me? I think you were jealous . . . But tell me this, Mom: In your inexorable, inescapable dreams, have you envisioned the history of the future? How, just a few days from now, I'll visit Yorgenson's Funeral Home and make advance arrangements to have your body cremated just like Dad's, your ashes shipped to me in L.A., where they will await the next opportunity for Sheyene and Truman and me to fly to the island of O`ahu, where early one blue morning all the Hellers who are left will gather on Kailua Beach, the same beach where you and I scattered Dad's remains, and we will each lower a handful of your ashes into the sea, where they will drift into the liquid currents of memory in search of the spirit of the man you lived with for almost half a century, the man who loved you in a way I will never truly comprehend and have never in my conscious life doubted.
        To the moon, Alice! To the moon!
        There are more photographs in the drawer beside me. In other drawers across the room: clothing, jewelry, papers. Material objects that recapture sensations from the past. What chance that I will come upon the one object of which I have no inkling, the object outside the realm, wherein hides what can never be found?
        And after you too are gone, Mom, what am I supposed to do with all the things I feel and remember for you? If I whisper these questions into your ear right now, will they haunt your dreams, the dreams you have left? If so, please listen . . .
        You, Mother, are the one who taught me how to read. The words you are leaving behind, the images that are leaving you, are incantatory. But they are too many. I must be selective. I must be relentless.
        Once again I reach into the drawer. As I hold up the next photograph like a communion wafer, waiting for you to nod or doze, I have no idea if what I am attempting is working, or even if it truly matters. On this day, in this room, I know only one thing.
        Thirty-nine episodes are not enough.

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