When they were home, he raced to the medicine chest, and his mother treated her wounds quickly and with great efficiency, saying only, every few minutes, “That was an exciting one,” and then, “We can talk about you being frightened, if you want.”

“Do I look frightened?” His voice sounded as if it had been measured from a recipe: exactly one-half cup of concern.

“Look at me.” She was holding a chip of ice wrapped in cloth to her jaw. “Honestly, you’re a handsome boy,” she said. “I think you’re feeling anxious,” and then she had to rest.

Leland opened the back door as quietly as he could. He ran and then walked. On the sands of Timber Cove, he remembered his mother falling. At no time had his father come to save her. It hadn’t escaped his attention that in twelve years his father hadn’t yet managed to pay him a visit. There were awful fathers in town; his mother was never shy about pointing them out.

He had seen a few motion pictures by now, each of them a minute or two long. They had little effect on him at first, seeming to be aimed at someone stupider than himself. But then he’d noticed that the cowboy in one picture was a bricklayer in another. A strange frisson went down Leland’s spine as he watched, and, sure enough, the next week, the same person was now a jewel thief in a one-minute adventure in which he was hit with a frying pan. Perhaps his father could be all those things his mother had claimed.

“I will save you,” he said, with a stage actor’s projection, sweeping his hand before the ocean as if he owned it. “I will save you,” he cried, though he wasn’t referring to his mother, for he understood that being saved would only annoy her. Instead, he was saving a pretty girl who had a blank oval for a face. If he was good enough, and wanted it enough, his father would join him.

Above him, on bluffs dotted with clumps of ice plant that kept the dunes from collapsing, was a painful sunlit glint he did not see: the eye of a Bioscope camera. A crank was turning. The operator was muttering, “This is good, this is good, don’t turn around, this is good.” Then he stopped cranking, smiled, and congratulated himself on this bit of serendipity, a force he had encountered as far away as Java and as recently as an hour beforehand.

Five minutes later, the camera was packed up and ready to go to its next vista, and Lee was still stepping into the waves, throwing punches to pirates, and rescuing things that didn’t quite exist.