PARTISAN REVIEW
375
She turned, her negligee billowing, went to a panel of switches
on the wall and turned on the light of the stairs. "All right. Go to
bed now."
Owen walked past her, hearing the paper crackle in his pa–
jamas and started up the steps. The note came loose from his belt.
It was working down the leg of his pajamas. He slowed his climb,
lifting the leg with care because the cuffs of his pajamas were
stretched and no longer fit closely around his ankles.
"Owen!"
He stopped, unable to see her from where he stood, unsure
whether she could see him and felt his heartbeat pick up. "Yes."
"If
your father said goodbye to you, how does it happen that
you were downstairs looking for him?"
Owen felt caught. Finally, in spite of his desperation, or perhaps
because of it, an answer formed. "I didn't know for sure if he left yet.
I fell asleep for a while, and I wanted to tell
him
something before
he left."
"What did you want to tell him?"
"To see if he could find some pine cones for me for my science
class."
He'd forgot about the dream he mentioned. There was a long
silence. "All right," his mother said. "Go to bed. I'll turn out the
light."
Owen did not go to bed. When the door of the master bed–
room closed and there was silence, he went to the dresser, found
by touch a penlight and a school notebook that were lying on its
top and went into his closet and shut the door. He was sure his
mother wouldn't check to see if he was in bed. He took out the note.
Shining the penlight on it, he read it through. Then, for the next
several hours, he sat in the closet and committed the note to mem–
ory, as he'd committed to memory the Gettysburg Address, the
Pledge of Allegiance and stanzas of poems. Whenever he came to
an unfamiliar word, he made up his own pronunciation for it and
copied it down in his notebook in order to have the correct spelling.
By the time he emerged from the closet, morning light was begin–
ning to gray his window. He went downstairs and replaced the note
and returned to his bedroom and lay under the covers, trying to
relate the message to the changed and inexplicable relationship be–
tween
his
parents.
