That was the thing about her father’s death, what she never told anyone, that she had thought it was a joke. It was not the sort of secret that explained everything, or even anything, though she knew that was what Jack believed: a key for a lock. Something architecturally essential that couldn’t be disturbed without the help of professionals. A spell of the Snow White variety that might awaken her to a different life. Better? Worse? Probably not worth the risk. Maybe the beast preferred being a beast, the swan brothers the power of flight, the boy kidnapped by the Snow Queen the ability not to care about the feelings of others and also the luminous cold.

A knot on a vital net. An undiscovered organ. A tumor left alone for fear of rupture.

None of these. It was merely a thing that belonged to her.

There was a certain emotion that she’d felt, when she was looking at her father, thinking it was a joke, then understanding it wasn’t, but not knowing yet the right response, what this meant for the rest of her life. Not shame: she’d hate for anyone to think that. Not sorrow, though sorrow was nearby. It was an emotion she’d never felt before and never would again, close to a religious conversion: deep certainty over a mystery. She couldn’t bear another’s interpretation. Couldn’t imagine converting any of it into words. The memory—not of the facts of her father’s death but of this one moment—was hers, only hers, like one of those morbid Victorian lockets with a dead beloved’s woven hair. How strange, to use the dead matter of a person’s head to stand in for all of a dead person. How right, too. Put it behind glass. String it on a chain. Wear it close to your heart. Don’t submit it to anyone else’s unraveling.

Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark

They had come to Galveston, the boy and his fathers, to look at the ocean and chaw on saltwater taffy, but Galveston was solid November fog. As they drove down Seawall Boulevard, the Pleasure Pier emerged from the mist like a ghost ship: first the multicolored lights of the roller coaster and Ferris wheel, then a billboard for a restaurant: BUBBA GUMP SHRIMP CO.

“Good God,” said Bruno, the older father, the old one. The sky was mild as a milk-glass rabbit. He would have said this aloud, but nobody else in the car would know what milk glass was. Instead he tried, “I hate the seaside. Where are we going?”

“You know where,” said Ernest, the younger father, who was driving.