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disappearance that Jeremy began to hear voices, though none of them would be the voice he wanted most to hear: the voice of his mother.
    Jeremy’s father did not speak Zyla’s name, nor did he try to find her and bring her back. He made his oil deliveries, but he no longer sang his songs. His supervision of Jeremy was absent-minded.
    Then, about five years ago, Jeremy heard his mother’s voice,faint and sorrowful, but, still, he was certain that it could be no one other than his mother.
I’m sorry
, the voice said.
I’m sorry, sorry, sorry
.
    The voice fell silent then.
    Perhaps ten days thereafter, Jeremy’s father received in the mail an envelope with no return address. It contained a
Todesanzeige
—an obituary—scissored from a paper in Saskatchewan, Canada. I have seen the document myself—Jeremy brought it out one day to show me. It announced the death of Zyla Johnson Newgate, who had suffered death by drowning after her canoe capsized among rocks and boulders in fast-moving water. She was survived by her husband, Theodore Newgate, and two stepchildren, aged seven and nine. A photograph of the woman was positioned above the text. It was of Jeremy’s mother.
    When Jeremy arrived home from school that afternoon, he saw the obituary lying on the table. Even after reading it again and again, he was hardly able to believe its meaning. He put his head on the table and closed his eyes. Some moments went by, and then all at once he became aware of the deep and strange stillness of the house. He went to look for his father. He found him in his bed completely covered with blankets.
    “I’m awful cold,” he told Jeremy.
    “She married and became somebody else’s stepmother,” Jeremy said. “I didn’t even know you were divorced.”
    “Neither did I,” his father said. His eyes were red.
    That his father had been crying scared Jeremy. He had never seen his father cry before.
    Jeremy looked again at the picture of his mother in the newspaper. “Guess she didn’t find her happy ending.”
    The only sound in the room was the tick, tick, tick of the clock. Finally, his father said, “You can’t tell anyone what’s happened to your mother.”
    “Why?”
    A second passed, then another. “Because I’m asking you not to.”
    “Okay,” Jeremy said. “What do I tell people?”
    “Nothing.” His voice, to Jeremy, sounded not quite alive. “No one needs to know anything.”
    Jeremy thought it was strange that his father wanted to turn his mother’s death into
Their Secret
.
    “Okay?” his father asked.
    “Okay,” Jeremy said.
    “I need to stay here,” his father said. He stared up at the ceiling. “Here in this room. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Jeremy counted the ticks of the clock. He had reached one hundred ten when his father said, “Here’s what you tell people. Tell them that I have a rare sickness that not even the doctors can understand and I just want to be left alone. Okay?”
    Jeremy nodded, and his father closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jeremy,” he said in a whispery voice. “I’m sorry for you and I’m sorry for me and I’m sorry for Zyla.”
    This was the first time in five years he had spoken her name, and he would never speak it again.
    Jeremy sat in a chair beside the bed until his father fell to sleep, and then he slipped back into the kitchen, for an idea had occurred to him, one that, when he again read the obituary and inspected the calendar on the wall, proved to be true: theafternoon that his mother died was the very date that he had heard his mother’s voice whispering that she was
sorry, sorry, sorry
.
    Jeremy climbed into the attic to be with his mother’s books, and that night he dragged his bedding up the ladder. Ever since that darkening day, the attic above the bookstore had been Jeremy’s private room and the apartment behind the bookstore had been his father’s sanctuary, and also his prison.

    After saying
au revoir
to Ginger Boultinghouse, Jeremy pulled out the