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window. He would scoop up Zachary, who was always a little too thin, and speak with measured softness about the silly inventions of our brains while we sleep, then get right up to his ear and begin with the noises. The finest impressions of farts anyone in their neighborhood had ever heard, high trilly toots and trembling wet ones, plus a bassoon-like moan for good measure. It had never failed. In his dream Edward was brilliant and electric as he cradled his brother, who giggled and shook and held his little penis to keep from peeing.
    Edward, turning against his flannel sheets, couldn’t understand why the sounds continued, until finally the banging on his flimsy door wrestled him awake.
    When he opened the door, Paulie was standing there gushing red, and it took a moment in the sudden and grainy light of the hallway to identify the source. The kid’s hand was bleeding, saturating the fold of shirt he’d hid it in.
    “Well for fuck all,” said Edward. “Get in here already.” Between cries and yelps he gathered that Paulie had somehow managed to drop his keyboard on his foot, which had set off a chain of events including a brush with the sharp edge of the kitchen counter, the swing of a cabinet door, and a cascade of glass. His face was contorting repeatedly, as though on a loop.
    “I knew you were up!” Paulie spouted while Edward led him to the bathroom, and Edward understood the bumbled apology in the statement. He sat the kid on the toilet and calmly opened drawers, surprised at how easily he could assume the role of caretaker. Then he kneeled before Paulie and got his closest look yet at the upturned eyes, the undersized teeth, the signs of aging present on his forehead and around his mouth and in the sag of his ears: the kid was much older than Edward had assumed, maybe halfway into his thirties. Edward asked him to take deep breaths then showed him how—in for one, two, three, four, five, then out—while he examined the wound, applied antiseptic, wrapped gauze around it. Afterward, Paulie remained shocked by the sight of his blood’s great escape, and Edward took the initiative.
    “Come on,” he said. “Let’s watch some bad TV.”
    In the living room, Paulie revived and quickly grew curious as he moved from the couch to the stack of DVDs beneath the television. Edward held his breath while Paulie destroyed the alphabetization, formed leaning piles on the floor, ran his hands over every cover, mouthing titles with a blank face. Edward let his attention drift from Paulie back to the screen: a bus threatened by a ticking bomb couldn’t stop, and a brunette actress he’d once insulted in a bar grew progressively more anxious.
    Paulie squealed and Edward panicked, but the source of the cry was not the wound on the kid’s palm. It was
the thing
, its DVD cover: the leading man in the Santa hat, the beauty struggling with her holiday accoutrements, the character actor with the busy eyebrows. Edward had been sure he’d hidden it.
    “My
favorite
!” Paulie said, his whole face open with joy. Instead of taking the case from him, instead of suggesting another film, Edward admitted what he’d sworn never to again.
    “
Santarella
?” he said. “I wrote that.”
    The bubbly pleasure drained from Paulie’s face. He looked at Edward like tourists look at the
Mona Lisa
, searching and wary as they wait to be touched by glory.
    “Eddy,” he said. “
What
?”

T HERE WEREN ’ T WORDS for it like there are now, weren’t aisles in bookstores where people dog-eared pages that suggested the roots of their psychic pain, where they grubbily fingered titles offering recovery; there weren’t these cloying instructions that led a person directly from guilt to forgiveness, as though taking one left, then a right. Edith simply saw what she saw, shortly before evening in October of 1960, and never forgot.
    Jenny, on the bed, ten years old, her reddish hair gilded by the late afternoon. Her treasured gingham