His grandmother had gone to bed soon after dinner, but she let him stay up to listen, and he lay there on the floor, hands clasped behind his head, his sock feet up on the footstool in front of his father’s chair, until the last sounds of Captain Midnight’s engine faded away with one final message about how to get your badge—Don’t miss out, boys and girls! Don’t miss your chance! Frank was wearing a sweater his grandmother had knit, in shades of brown and olive and tan, a sweater he dreaded outgrowing, the sleeves already too short. That was the before of his life—there he was on firm ground with so many things to look forward to—and then he was free-falling.

The radio switched to music, and he’d turned it off and walked upstairs, not noticing then what a nice home he lived in. He tiptoed past the room where his grandmother slept and stood in the cold bathroom to brush his teeth, noting with alarm, as he always did, the glass with his grandmother’s teeth floating there like some kind of exotic fish. Then he looped his finger in that bone ring in his bedroom and lifted the shade to see the icy street below: an occasional car, a light here and there in windows of other houses. His sheets were turned back, warmed by the hot water bottle his grandmother had placed there, a heap of blankets on top. And then he slept. Perhaps he imagined the view from Captain Midnight’s plane. Perhaps he imagined the warm sandy beaches his father had written about, or the palm trees. Maybe he just imagined himself there on the Tamiami Champion, seated with his parents while the dark night and all that lay beyond the tracks sped past the windows.

He had sometimes allowed himself to imagine the life that might have been if his father and mother had arrived that December morning. They would have gone to get his badge. And then they would have gone and gotten his canteen, and they would have chosen their tree at the lot where they always went—Wood Brothers, over on Bridge Street—and it would have stood there in the living room window so that he could see it as soon as he turned the corner coming home from school. He would have seen his mother laughing, hands clasped together in absolute joy when the lights were strung and the ornaments in place.