My eyes are on Lucy’s face as she stares stonily at the Japanese sitcom no one is watching. Then she looks at me and I don’t like what I’m seeing. I feel iced water around my heart. I hear a whisper of doom.

Something is wrong!

“I watched Carrie point a spear gun at me and pull the trigger.” I feel as if I’m defending myself to Donoghue, and I don’t like it. “She looked right at me from no more than twenty feet away and I watched her shoot me. I heard the first spear hit my tank and then the second spear hit. Except I didn’t hear that one. I felt it. I felt it like a cement truck slamming into my thigh.”

“It must have hurt so bad!” Desi exclaims, as if what I’ve said is new information.

It’s not. We’ve had many conversations about my being shot and what it means and did it hurt and was I afraid of dying? He wants to know all about death as he struggles to understand how it’s possible that he’ll never see his mother again. It’s not been easy for me to handle his questions.

I understand biological death. It’s provable. A dead organism isn’t going to limber up and get warm again. It’s not going to move or speak or suddenly walk into a room. But I’m not going to talk to Desi about the clinical finality of nonlife, of physical nonexistence. I’m not going to instill fear and fatalism into the mind of a little boy who just lost his mother.

It would be selfish and unkind of me not to use a metaphor, an analogy or two that might offer hope and comfort. Death is like a trip to a place that has no e-mail or phone. Or maybe think of it as time travel. Or something you can’t touch like the moon. I’ve gotten rather good at giving Desi unsound pathological explanations that I halfway believe.

Marino drops the tube of anti-itch gel on the kitchen counter. “Come on, big buddy.”

Janet is rubbing Desi’s back. “You must be getting stir-crazy. How ’bout a little fresh air before it rains?”

“No.” He shakes his head.

“Marino’s really good at fishing,” Lucy says. “He’s so good the fish have his picture up in the post office to warn everybody. Grab this man! Watch out! Reward offered!”

“Fish don’t have a post office!”

“How do you know that, huh? See you can’t unless you get some direct experience.” Marino picks up Desi and holds him high in the air as he shrieks in delight. “You want to know what kind of fish are in the water around here? You want to know what huge fish we could catch if we had poles right now?”