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problem.
    But when things began to slide with Stephen, he laughed at my solution, reached into his pockets, and tossed dollar bills at me. Where did the money come from?
    “Appropriate occasion, Mom?” he sneered. “That's every fucking minute of my life.”
    From my bedroom I can look down the hall and into Stephen's room, exactly as he left it, on the wall facing me a huge poster of Malcolm X with the caption, “By Any Means Necessary,” the only noise from there, his hamster on his wheel.
    One evening as I'm working with the translation, eatingsomething from a can, I realize that the wheel has gone silent. The animal Stephen has named for a famous surfer lies on the floor of his cage. The right side of his head is horribly swollen. He looks to struggle to right himself. I reach into the cage and try to set him on his feet but he falls to the side again and again.
    Filling a syringe with a bit of water, sugar, and a codeine tablet, I hold the little flailing thing and inject the liquid into his mouth. After a few minutes he quiets.
    I take him back to bed with me, place him on my chest, and lie back. When I wake he's dead.
    I keep him with me awhile, examine him closely, sadly, the way one could never examine a body were it alive. I pry open his mouth to see the fine teeth, the tiny perfect tongue, his pouches full of food; he who was born, lived, and died in a cage, who meant little to his owner, this animal being a replacement for a previous beloved hamster named Fergie.
    When that animal died, not unlike this one, of a massive swelling of the right eye—some sort of hemorrhage, perhaps—Stephen had grieved as intensely and openly as one would expect of this child.
    So Fergie's death was surrounded by pomp and ritual, including a secret burial under a yew tree at the front of our apartment house—secret because the landlords forbid pets in the apartment. If they visited for any reason, we put Fergie's elaborate bright orange-and-yellow plastic Habitrail in the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn and the door closed.
    Stephen even chose a tombstone, a piece of hand-sized black shale we'd brought back from Cornwall, and hewrote on the stone, in white-out, Fergie's name and death date.
    Stephen had never attended a funeral, and so when I asked him to speak a few words over Fergie's grave—in a downpour, by the way, though we were protected under the huge yew—Stephen confused grief, as many of us do, with shame, and began confessing things—that he had smoked cigarettes, stolen money from my purse, that he had touched a girl on her breasts.
    I doze again, dream in two languages …
per ch'oi mi volsi e vidimi davante /e sotto i piedi un lago gelo / avea di vetro e non d'acqua sembiante …
fall through the high drift, the cloud regions of the bells of medieval Italian to the jackhammer pounding of late-twentieth-century American English, the hamster on my chest.

Spring, 1992
    Where do the guns come from?
    I'm driving home, down from Portsmouth, Newbury-port. I've been looking for houses to rent, houses away from the city and its gangs and guns, but close enough for me to commute into work in Medford.
    Where do they come from?
    Stephen will be returning to me at the end of spring semester. He is in more trouble than ever. His father has thrown up his hands.
    It's early April, a Sunday. Up from Providence. Nothing. Traffic, raining. Houses beat up, or the rent's too high. But I will find something. Sooner or later I will find a house for us.
    In these few months while Stephen has been away, I've had a rest. I've slept, read, taken long walks in recovery. I've begun rigorous workouts at a gym. I am in training for my son's return.
    As I've grown stronger, my fatigue and fear have given way to cautious engagement with the future. I understand now that no one has the answer to my son's troubles. My belief that answers come from others—from therapists, school counselors, or teachers, from the law—has paralyzed me.