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son,” and, continuing to look out the window, resumed his thoughts. He was replaying the events of the previous evening, trying to recall exactly what was said and done and by whom and why. He was pretty sure he understood Dr. Cole and knew what his intentions and needs were. And the others he didn’t linger over:they were all who and what they seemed to be. The girl, though, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, was pretty much a mystery to him. She was not who and what she seemed. But the one who was most mysterious to him, the one whose intentions and needs and behavior he understood not at all, was the man himself, Jordan Groves. Why had he taken her up in his airplane and let her fly it so dangerously close to the mountains at night? And why had he left her there at the pond, left her to walk alone back to her family’s camp at the Second Lake?
    The view from the window gave on to the Tamarack River where it swerved away from the house and grounds into a broad oxbow and widened and ran north for three hundred yards of smooth, slow-running, deep water—more a pond here than a river. Directly in the artist’s line of sight was the wooden riverside hangar he had built the summer he bought his airplane. Four years later, he still liked the sturdy, wide, four-square look of the structure. He had come in last night by moonlight reflected off the river. He had winched the airplane out of the water and onto the ramp and into the boathouse, and by the time he got up to the house, Alicia and the boys were already in bed asleep. Jordan stayed downstairs in his study for a while and read the new Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle, and, as was his habit, didn’t go up to bed himself until midnight, and when he slid in next to her, Alicia did not appear to waken, which relieved him.
    Wolf was the younger of the boys, just turned six. His brother, whose name was Bear, was eight. When his sons were born, Jordan had insisted on naming them for animals he admired—despite considerable resistance from their mother and her Austrian family, who said it might be all right for red Indians to name their children after animals, but not for white people. If Bear had been a girl, Jordan would have named her Puma. Wolfhe would have named Peregrine. He said he wanted his children to be inspired all their lives to live up to what they were called, and since he was a devout atheist he wasn’t going to name them after saints. “No Christian names,” he declared, and no family names. Aside from Jordan himself and Alicia, there was no one in either family worth emulating. If when they became adults his sons wished to go by their middle names, which as a compromise had been drawn from Alicia’s and his genealogies, that would be all right with him. But he was sure it wouldn’t happen. By then they will have become their names, he said. Just as, for better or worse, he had become Jordan, and their mother had become Alicia.
    Wolf drank from the chilled jug of milk, put it back in the icebox, and crossed the large, open kitchen and climbed onto his father’s lap. He nuzzled against Jordan’s chest and inhaled deeply the familiar smell of turpentine and paint and chemicals from the studio, his father’s own smell, as comforting to the boy as his father’s face and voice. Jordan wrapped his arms around his son and held him there.
    “Did you see the fireworks, Papa?” Wolf asked in a faraway voice.
    “I saw them from the air. On my way home.”
    “That must have been great, to see them from the airplane.”
    “Yes. It was. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back in time for you to see the fireworks,” Jordan said. “I got talked into giving someone a flying lesson.”
    “Oh. That’s okay. We had fun anyhow.”
    Jordan eased the boy off his lap and set about making breakfast for him. A few minutes later Bear made his way down the steep, narrow back stairway to the kitchen. He gave his father a friendly wave and made for the icebox and like his brother slurped