I put my hand out absently to my mailbox as I passed it in the hall; it was empty. My mind slipped, then, to the dream I’d had the night before the start of winter quarter, a peculiar dream in which I saw my father shoot himself on a bridge above a churning gray river. I also saw a hearse and cars creeping along Palm Drive, spooling out along the Oval, heading toward Memorial Church.

In the thin half-light of the next morning, I’d had a lingering sense of unease. It was just a dream, I told myself, although I’d seen that river before, I thought with a wry smile, I would recognize that bridge if it were coming down a dark alley with its collar turned up against the cold; it had featured in more of my previous dreams than I could count, though never, it was true, in conjunction with my father. What could it mean? I had not dreamt of my father since I was a child.

As I walked down the hallway toward the break room that morning I could not shake the feeling that even if the events in my dream did not conform precisely to real life, surely they did not mean nothing at all? Perhaps there had been some important change. It could, I thought— But there I stopped myself; dreams were dreams, and that was—

Consumed by my own train of thought, I had burst somewhat unceremoniously into the break room, where a group of graduate students, occupying all four chairs at the round plastic table, turned to me, startled, like children interrupted at a forbidden game. Now that I thought of it, I had the impression that they had been talking quite noisily just the moment before, and on my arrival had been struck dumb. One of them—Weber, I thought, was his name, a fey and bespectacled little Italian—turned to his neighbor and muttered, under his breath.

“Eccolo,” he said. “Il fratellastro.”

2

Needless to say, since my father’s death he had been very much in my thoughts. There is always some regret, I would imagine, when there is a sense that where there might have been connection between family members there was strain, with death’s finality precluding any rapprochement.

And it was not just thoughts of my father himself that were foremost in my mind; it was the circumstances surrounding his death that nagged at me. The more I considered them, the stranger they seemed. Not only that, but someone was trying to tell me something about these circumstances, or so I thought, because a copy of the local paper had appeared in my mailbox some weeks ago, its pages turned to the real estate section, the listing for my father’s house circled in red pen. Who had done that, and why?