Relentless

miles from our burning house, Penny repeatedly frowned at the rearview mirror.
    “Someone following us?” I asked.
    “No.”
    The lead-gray sky of the previous afternoon, which had looked as flat and uniform as a freshly painted surface, was deteriorating. Curls of clouds peeled back, revealing darker masses, and beards of mist hung like tattered cobwebs from a crumbling ceiling.
    She glanced at the mirror again.
    “Someone?” I asked.
    “No.”
    “It makes me nervous, the way you keep checking the mirror.”
    In my lap, Milo said, “It makes
me
nervous the way you keep asking Mom is someone behind us.”
    When she frowned at the mirror again, I could not help asking: “Anything?”
    “If I see something,” she said, “I’ll tell you.”
    “Even if you think it’s nothing, it might be something,” I said, “so if it’s nothing or something, tell me either way.”
    “Good grief,” said Milo.
    “Okay,” I admitted, “that didn’t make any sense.”
    Barely escaping our house before it blew up had left us in a state of shock. But as writers and readers, Penny and I were drunk on words, and we needed conversation as much as we needed air and water. Not much short of death could shut us up. Even Milo, when he wasn’t lost in an electromagnetic-field-theory reverie, could be garrulous. The shock of our loss did not reduce us to a brooding silence; in fact, the opposite was true.
    In the Greenwich-Boom family, conversation was not just talk but also a way we helped one another heal from the abrasions and contusions of the day. We started with practicalities and progressed swiftly to absurdities, which was not surprising, considering our conversations expressed our philosophies and experiences.
    Penny thought we would be staying at a hotel, but I nixed that. “They’ll want a credit card, at least for ID. We don’t want to be using our credit cards right now.”
    As she braked to a stop at a red traffic light, she said, “We don’t? Why wouldn’t we?”
    “John Clitherow called while you were packing. He gave me some advice. Credit cards were part of it.”
    “Clitherow—the writer?”
    “Yeah. He read the review. He has some experience of this … of Waxx.”
    “What experience?”
    Because I didn’t want to talk about the murder of Clitherow’s family in front of Milo, I said, “John wants me to tell you his three favoritechildren’s stories are
Dumbo
, Kate DiCamillo’s
The Tale of Despereaux
, and your first Purple Bunny book.”
    “That’s nice. But you said ‘experience.’ What’s he know about Waxx?”
    “John especially likes the funny physiology in those books.”
    In my usually savvy wife’s defense: Having been Tasered, having seen her house blown up minutes earlier, she urgently wanted to hear anything that I might have learned about the critic, and she was not in a state of mind that allowed her to pick up on kid-evading code.
    Holding Milo with one arm, I grimaced at Penny, tugged on my left ear, and pointed at the boy.
    She looked at me as if I were suffering delayed spasms from the Tasering.
    I said, “Dumbo, Despereaux, Pistachio,” because the last was the name of her bunny character.
    The driver behind us tapped his horn to encourage us to notice that the traffic light had turned green.
    As she drove through the intersection, Penny said, “I guess I misunderstood. I thought he called about Waxx.”
    In my lap, Milo said, “The little elephant, the little mouse, and the little bunny all had really big ears.”
    “Did they?” I asked. “Hey, yes, they did. How about that?”
    “Mom,” the boy said, “Dad’s trying to tell you that I’m little but I’ve got big ears, and there’s something Mr. Clitherow told him that I guess I’m too young to hear.”
    “So what did he tell you?” Penny asked me.
    I sighed in exasperation.
    “Probably something really bloody, strange, and scary,” Milo said. “Or a sex thing, ’cause from what I know about it, that’s totally weird.”
    “How do you know anything about sex?” Penny asked.
    “Collateral information. While I’m reading about other things.”
    “How much collateral information?”
    “Not much,” Milo said. “Relax. I’m not interested in it.”
    “You better not be interested in it.”
    “It’s boring,” Milo said.
    “It’s even more boring than it is weird,” Penny assured him.
    “It’s not all
that
boring,” I said.
    Milo said, “I guess someday it finally won’t bore