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listen without being caught at it, wrap yourself around the endless bumpers they're crashing into and hope you can limit the bruises. After nine minutes with him I'm wasted, pretty much; he may be almost sixteen, but I have some idea of how a parent feels, watching an infant race across the rug to pit bulls and light sockets. I wonder if that's how Kenny feels; we've never discussed it. I should ask him, as in a few weeks Wesley will be gone. As for this minute, what I want to do is shout in his ear T hat's your kid up there! Listen! But I don't do it. I flip the pillow, and slip on a mask, and just as I curl up I hear new sounds, creaks from the door at the top of the stairs, the one that opens to the roof. Then I hear foot steps, careful ones, and he comes into the living room. Kenny sleeps on; I imagine I hear Wesley sigh. He needs, he needs; I've known it for a while now, but what? He said it downstairs, that he needed to talk, but that's had to wait. For a moment, nothing, then I hear him go to the kitchen. Should I bound from bed and, saying nothing, put some pecorino on a plate with a pear, and then scoot back inside?
       But I stay where I am; something tells me to listen, no more. I hear him as he tiptoes down the hall to our door, sense his weight shift as he wonders if we're awake and if he can whisper our names. I want to whisper, "Wes? Everything okay?" but I don't, because I shouldn't, and because I know it's not.
       Kenny turns, reaches, confident in sleep that he'll find the shape of me. And I'm scared to breathe. If you breathe, it breaks! Laura, in The Glass Menagerie , referring to the horn of the prized glass unicorn she shows to The Gentleman Caller. I know the whole thing by heart, having been Tom four times. All the notes, all the words.
       Another creak, and if a creak can be ambivalent, then this one is. What will he do now? I wonder. Go back to the roof ? To his narrow bed? When he came here I finally threw out the thousand ten-year-old head shots I kept in his room and gave Lenny the cache of pre-condom porn, from the time when unsafe meant drinking before driving; I kept, mounted on the wall, the wire-work horse head I wore in the tour of Equus , for the deaf. But other than that it's his room now, and he's colorized, not so much with stuff as with Eau de Teen —hormones, sneakers, secrets, a scent sour and sweet at once. A good housekeeper would set out bowls of baking soda to soak it up. It's too bad we don't have one. We just have me, with my limited English skills. So is that where he's headed?
       No. It's the kitchen again, and I know all its sounds; seeds drop ping from loaves, cheeses maturing, spoons as they shift in their sleep. I hear him open the fridge and clatter about in it, and I hear him turn on the tv. And even though he keeps the volume thoughtfully low I know the music embarrassingly quickly; embarrassing because you learn, as you march through life gaily, that it's wise to build a muscle to mock your own talents before others do it for you; which they will. The Shame Buzzards, as Lenny and I refer to them, are always circling, hovering, waiting to swoop; the best move to ward them off is to cry out, Hey! I'm ashamed, already! Don't eat me yet!
       But I know the music and, of course, the movie, too. It's T he Nun's Story , with Audrey Hepburn, who my close friends know was actually my mother. It's my Guns of Navarone , really, a boyhood touchstone. Audrey plays Sister Luke, a nun in a Belgian convent before the war. She gets sent by some Old Character Actress to the Congo, where she assists and falls into hot sub-texty love with Dr. Peter Finch. At the end she leaves her cloister because it's too safe; the world's in big trouble and she knows it's not where she's needed. So at the very end, after Old Character Actress fails to talk her out of it, she steps through a door, with the suitcase she came with years before, off to the next place with no other place