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way from home. Charlie, holding his hands to his side as the boundaries between blood and air dissolved between his fingers, the splashes of red on the street an inevitable map to the doorway he was found in—a boy coming home from school, the first day
with his own key, new, the bright metal tied around his neck with an old leather shoelace. The police had told her. They were very thorough.
    She had told them about the backpack. How there was money inside it. Plane tickets. Passports. She said nothing about the letters. The police had apologized to her for the mugging, the younger of the two officers, the one with the better English, taking her hand as though it were a baby bird while he explained that Rome was a safe city most of the time. “It has its share of pickpockets,” he said, “but a mugging like this is very unusual.” He told her they were doing their best to find whoever did this. Could Ella remember anything else, anything that might be useful in the investigation? She sobbed into his shoulder as he held her, one hand softly patting her back.
    The nurse prepared a needle as Charlie began to wake up.
    â€œWe can’t go home, babe.” Charlie cried like a boy, delirious with the recklessness of pain.
    â€œWe don’t have to go,” Ella said, stroking his hair as he fell asleep again. “We don’t have to go back. We won’t go. Okay, Charlie? I love you. I’ll stay right here with you.”
    Ella stayed even though the nurses told her to go back to the hotel.
    â€œI’m not tired,” she insisted, afraid of what she might see if she closed her eyes. She ran her hand up and down Charlie’s arm as he slept the thick sleep of those who might never wake up.
    His fever spiked in the morning. The nurses put a tube down Charlie’s throat and taped it to his lips. The doctor who had told Ella to be prepared asked for her signature on some papers.

    â€œWe’re trying,” he said.
    Ella signed her name. “Can I keep the pen?” she asked. She waited until the doctor left before she kissed Charlie’s ear. Then she went to the nurses’ station for a piece of paper and an envelope.
    Dear Charlie, she started.
    She told him how much she loved the way he curled up behind her in the night, the swell of his belly rising and falling into the small of her back. She told him that she really did like his cooking. She didn’t know why she said she didn’t. She told him that her favourite colour was blue, and that’s why she hadn’t repainted the house. Your breath, she wrote, smells like garlic when you sleep, and I don’t mind. She told him she was sorry. She told him about the money. The dreams.
    I love you, she signed it.
    Ella wrote the address of the little blue house on the front of the envelope in slow and thick handwriting. She took the guidebook out of her bag and looked up the nearest post office.
    She understood now why it was that you had to write down what you were going to abandon, what was leaving you. Why you might have to write it over and over again and send it all the way across the ocean. Ella turned the letter over in her hands and tried to imagine the feeling of dropping it into a mailbox. She should be prepared. She would let it go quickly, she decided. The envelope with no return address would barely touch her fingertips, leaving her hand like some pale and lovely ghost.

The DEAD DAD GAME
    I LIKED THE WAY Nate told the story. He was happy to reel it off, starting with the part where Genevieve, his first mother, collapsed on the kitchen floor with a blood clot in her lung. “It only took a second or two for her to die,” he said, slowly lowering his hand in a side-to-side motion as though his mother had been a piece of windblown paper. “She probably didn’t even feel it.” Nate was a baby when it happened, and he had almost cried himself to death by the time the landlord unlocked