“I do not like to go to forgotten places,” my son tells me on the way to the pool party for Parker, the boy in his class who scares him.

          “I remember where he lives,” I tell him, but I’m taking my time.

          Morgan is my son’s name. He’s a twin, but he doesn’t know it yet. His sister died in my wife’s arms two days after she started living. Morgan is five now. We plan to tell him when he’s six.

          You might think that his life would weigh more than his sister’s death, but that’s not how it’s played out for his mom and me. I can’t figure out why—other than that we’re built this way. Maybe you’re built another way—although, it’s hard to say how you’re built until you have to carry a load like ours.

          “Will you stay the whole time?” Morgan asks.

          I regard him through the rearview mirror. “I’ll stick around. Just like we talked about.” I arch my eyebrows. I flash him a toothy smile for encouragement. “Remember the lions,” I say.

          “I don’t like that,” he reminds me. He’s in his booster seat with his eyes out the window.

          “I know, but just remember the idea.”

          “I’m not prey, Daddy,” he says in the mantra voice I taught him. He’s not convincing though.

          “Exactly,” I tell him. “You’re a lion.”

          He offers a meager roar, but I let it go. He’s probably right. The comparison isn’t helping, and it might actually be scarring him, but sometimes you run out of ideas.

          His mother doesn’t like all this talk. She worries it will encourage violence. I see her point, but I haven’t come up with a better way to keep this boy alive. I worry about him in the world.

          I find my way to Parker’s house and park across the street and down a bit just in case we need to make a quick exit without being noticed.

          “You ready, buddy?” He doesn't answer.

          I don’t mind the Morgan silences or the Morgan waiting. He’s a boy who needs to take his time. I have endless patience with him, seeing that I love him in ways I’ve never loved anyone. Maybe it’s because he’s two children to me.

          I tell myself we didn’t lose his sister because he absorbed her.

          I’m convinced he already knows about his sister whether or not he has language or memories with images and sounds.

          “He knew her better than anyone,” I told my wife once. My wife’s name is Amy, and she didn’t appreciate me saying that. She went right back to her desk. She works instead of feels.

          That’s what I tell her. She doesn’t dispute it.

          She’s also the one who insists we withhold telling Morgan. She’s worried that the news will do to him what it’s done to me. It’s a fair point.

          Parker’s house has a front lawn as big as a field, and the Fourth of July decorations crawl up the brick front and jut out of the flag holders like an invasive subspecies of ivy. A very patriotic kudzu.

          “I believe in you, buddy,” I tell him as I look at him in the mirror. “If Parker is mean, scratch your nose, and I will come over and throw him in the pool.”

          “We don’t hurt people,” he reminds me. “That’s the rule.”

          I nod at him and then open the door. I step out and then open the back door and start on the seat belt. “You’re right,” I say. “You’re a good boy.”

          Amy works the late shift from eleven at night to six in the morning at Mobile Crisis. She counsels the suicidals and shut-ins on the decaying streets of Cleveland. She devotes herself to them, and I devote myself to Morgan and the memory of his sister. No one as of late is devoting themselves to Amy and Roy—that’s me.

          “Count to five, Morgan,” I say because I notice that his face is puffing and his eyes are straining. You can tell he’s fighting the tears. I know that I’m the one who taught him to bite down on those big feelings so hard that your eyes leak.

          We’re a lost couple, no doubt. Amy has tried to go down into the well with me but she hesitates and asks questions like does grief honor the lost or ruin the saved like we’re in a philosophy class.

          After Morgan counts to five, I get him out of the booster seat and grab his backpack with his towel and the clothes he’ll change into later plus the present that I wrapped because Amy was still asleep. I wrap a present about as poorly as a person can, but Morgan doesn't seem to mind. He’s excited to give Parker the Lego set he asked for. I can tell that he hopes the gift will persuade Parker to let up on him at school.

          We walk around back where the party is well on its way with a clutch of five and six-year-old boys running around the pool screeching in their bathing trunks and shirts off.

          Morgan is next to me, leaning into my leg. He’s terrified but trying to be brave and not succeeding.

          “You got this, buddy.”

          He looks up at me and nods before stepping towards the fence that separates the yard from the pool. The boys are hooting on the other side of the fence.

          I watch him for a bit and then I step to the cluster of parents. I nod at Bella, Parker’s mom.

          That’s the plan in public. We smile and nod and inquire about each other’s kids and kitchen rehabs like the other parents do. It’s to keep up appearances.

          She loves me, she tells me. She bites my nipples when she orgasms and grabs my chin to make sure I’m watching. Amy never even makes eye contact when we do it.

          Four other moms and one other dad sip from plastic glasses covered in American flags.

          I can talk to Bella, but I can’t say I love her back. I feel too monstrous to even consider higher-order emotions like love. How do people love one person while they’re gutting another person at the same time?

          Bella doesn't like that I don't say it back, but she says she understands. I told her about our daughter, and she wept next to me. “Poor Amy,” she said, but that didn’t stop her, and it hasn’t stopped me.

          Maybe I’m not a good person, but I am alive still, and Bella at least lets me talk and listens when I go on about it all.

          Bella’s husband and Parker’s dad died in Afghanistan.

          “How’s the kitchen, Roy?” one of the other mothers asks me. Her name is Marsha, and her son is a bit of a terror—cruel and unruly. “Must be nice to be able to do some of the work yourself. I tell you what, accountants make lousy handymen.”

          I ignore the slight because what am I supposed to say? “The cabinets go in tomorrow,” I tell her, and that’s when we hear the scream. We’re always waiting for the scream, aren’t we?

          To be more precise, Bella’s husband died in a brothel outside of Kandahar. She understands but hasn’t forgiven him.

          I toss my drink on the lawn so I can have my hands free and run towards the gate to the pool. The concrete is dark with pool water except for the shock of a cherry-red puddle of blood.

          I try to quickly assess whose head is cracked open and if there’s a body floating or flailing in the water. Two boys are crying on the far end. I hear the horde of moms behind me calling “What happened? What happened?”

          I’m a plumber of all things. I service the expensive homes of these families and charge them double but they pay and pay and pay.

          “Who is it?” Bella calls, terrified. Her voice is a mass of tears.

          I know it’s Morgan. It’s all happening as fast as a bar fight, but I know it’s Morgan.

          I scan and find him on the far edge of the pool with his feet in the water. He’s not bleeding. As I step towards him, I pass Parker and see that he’s the one who’s bleeding. It’s spilling from his chin. I notice the rock in Morgan’s clenched hand, the same one that held his sister’s hand in Amy’s uterus. We still have the grainy ultrasound image on the fridge.

          Bella holds Parker who’s sobbing now and red with bloody sap.

          I bend down and try to get Morgan to look at me. “What’d you do, buddy?”

          Morgan isn’t crying. His expression is frozen and pink with fury.

          Maybe Parker knows about me and his mom. Maybe Parker said something to Morgan.

          Or maybe Parker said something about Morgan’s lost twin sister.

          I don’t know why, but I just sense that’s it.

          Parker could have overheard his mother telling someone about us losing her before we even met her. Bella might have retold the story to her sister Joan. They tell each other everything. Parker could have said something cruel. All these people telling stories that are not theirs to tell.

          Her name was McKenzie, I want to tell Morgan.

          “Roy!” Bella screams.

          I glare at her. She’s a lovely broken woman, strong and weak at the shattered places.

          “Hey!” I yell back.

          The others are watching.

          McKenzie was the size of a kitten and her skin was almost translucent and she never made a sound, not even a cry when she was born. The doctors tried. They always try. We’re all always trying.

          I take the rock from Morgan’s hand and pick him up like a bear cub and walk past the rest of them and leave.

          “Do you think he’ll still like the present?” Morgan asks on the way home. He’s calmer now and so am I.

          I look at him in the mirror. “I think he'll love it,” I say, and why not? Who am I to predict how a person responds to a rock to the chin? We’re all improvising, anyway.

          “Home?” I ask Morgan, and he smiles.