Life Expectancy

o'clock, the six of us-and even Officer Paolini, who diligently set out on another patrol through the house-suspected that fate had accepted our offer. A tentative celebratory mood began to color our conversation.
        Huey called with news that seemed to give us closure, but it didn't inspire us to raise champagne toasts.
        As the firemen had been mopping up the scene and stowing their hoses, one of them noticed that the drop door on our roadside mailbox was hanging open. In the mailbox, he found a mason jar. In the mason jar, a folded slip of paper.
        The paper had a message for us in neat handwriting that police later matched to Konrad Beezo's penmanship on the admission forms he had filled out when he'd brought his wife, Natalie, to the hospital on the night of my birth. More than a message, it constituted a promise:
        
         IF YOU EVER HAVE A BABY BOY, I'LL BE BACK FOR HIM.
        

PART FOUR
        
    All I Ever Wanted Was Immortality

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         No one's life should be rooted in fear. We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are.
        Simply by existing, unseen and in some distant redoubt, Konrad Beezo made the world a darker place, but we lived in light, not in his shadow.
        No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make. There is always cake.
        Following the destruction of our house in January 1998, Lorrie and Annie and I moved in with my parents for several weeks.
        Huey Foster's estimation, the night of the fire, that nothing whatsoever could be salvaged from our house proved correct as to furniture, housewares, books, and clothes.
        Three items that qualified as mementoes, however, were raked from the ashes in acceptable condition. A cameo pendant that I had bought for Lorrie. A crystal Christmas-tree ornament that she had purchased at a gift shop in Carmel, California, on our honeymoon. And the free pass to the circus on the back of which my father had written five dates.
        The face of that card had been singed and water-spotted. The words admit two and the word free had vaporized entirely. Only a few fragments of the beautifully rendered lions and elephants survived as ghost images, glimpsed between mottling scorches, embedded soot, and water stains.
        Curiously, at the bottom of the free pass, the words prepare to be enchanted were almost as bright and clear as they had ever been. In this new context, that line struck me as vaguely ominous, as it had never done before, as though it were not a promise of delight but a subtle threat.
        More curiously still, the reverse of the circus pass appeared all but untouched by heat and water. On that side, the paper had been only slightly yellowed; the five dates in my father's printing were easy to read.
        The card smelled of smoke. I cannot say truthfully that it smelled also of brimstone.
        In early March, we began looking for a place in town, preferably in my parents' neighborhood. By the end of that month, the house next door to theirs came on the market.
        We know an omen when we see one. We made an offer the sellers couldn't refuse, and closed escrow on May 15.
        If we had been rich, we could have bought a compound of houses encircled by a wall, entered by a single gate, guarded around the clock. A house next door to my folks, however, was as close as we could get to living like the Corleone family.
        Our lives after Annie's arrival went on pretty much as before, except with greater focus on poop and pee. I chafe at the injustice of the Nobel Prize Committee awarding peace prizes to the likes of Yasir Arafat while failing year after year to honor the person who invented the Velcro-sealed disposable diaper.
        Annie didn't need to be weaned from breast-feeding. At five months, she turned adamantly away from an offered breast and insisted on culinary diversity.
        Something of a smartie, she spoke her first word shortly before Christmas that year. If you believe Lorrie and my mother, it happened on the twenty-second of December, and the word was mama. If instead you believe my father, it happened on the twenty-first, and she spoke not one word but two: chocolate zabaglione.
        On