That Old Cape Magic

in the air, and the kid wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Jason, no doubt hoping for one last hard spike at his brother, lunged a step to his right and leapt, his knee catching the boy under the chin and snapping his head back. The next instant the kid lay flat on his back, motionless, and before Griffin could prevent her from weighing in, his mother said,
Good
. Or possibly, face it, the sentiment so succinctly expressed was his own.
    Jane and June let out simultaneous, identical yelps, and everyone on the porch hurried down onto the lawn, where a circle formed around the fallen child, his mouth now open and working like a fish’s, though no sound came out. Griffin, alone on the porch and ashamed of himself (or his mother), caught a quick glimpse of the little shit’s bloody face. Finally able to catch his breath, he began to wail, and his mother, gathering him to her ample bosom, joinedin. “Oh, poor sweetie! Poor,
poor
sweetie! What happened? Did the big people play too rough?”
    Jason looked like he might object to this characterization, but being responsible for the kid’s injuries, he decided on a different tactic. “He’s all right, aren’t you, sport,” he said, tousling his hair. “He’s a tough guy.” Whereupon the brat broke free of his mother’s grasp and tried to punch Jason where he’d punched Andy. This time, though, he was trying to punch a marine, whose crack training allowed him to deftly parry assaults from even the most malicious seven-year-olds. But the kid’s intent couldn’t have been clearer, the groining strategy apparently his default mode.
    “Justin!” his mother barked, taking him by the shoulders and spinning him around to face her. “What did Mommy say about hitting people there? Didn’t she tell you it’s
not nice?”
Whereupon he punched her in the same place.
    It had been Griffin’s intention to say a quick goodbye to Joy and Laura, but they were now at the center of the commotion on the lawn, and he decided against it. The entrance to the wheelchair ramp was close at hand, and with everyone distracted he’d be able to slip away unnoticed, using the yew hedge for cover all the way to the parking lot. Even as he planned this, something tugged at his short-term memory like a continuity problem in a movie (hadn’t the main character’s shirt been unbuttoned in the previous frame?), though only when he started down the incline and saw the splintered railing right where the ramp made a ninety-degree turn did he realize what it was: that just a few moments ago an impatient Harve had been sitting here.
    When Griffin got close, he could hear him groaning. The railing was rotten—he could see that much—and had snapped on impact. Due to the severe slope of the lawn, the porch was at this point a good ten feet above it, the top of the hedge a couple feet below. The yew was still quivering when he peered over the side. “Harve?” Griffin said. “You okay?”
    The voice that answered sounded more like a child’s than a grown man’s. “Won’t…
go,”
it said.
    It wasn’t difficult to piece together what must have happened. His father-in-law, abandoned by his daughter when the brat got clobbered, and too impatient to wait for assistance, had tried to navigate the ramp on his own and lost control of his chair. He was now planted headfirst in the hedge, his chair on top of him, its wheels up and still spinning. Actually, no, that last part couldn’t be right. The wheels were turning, all right, but that was because Harve, invisible beneath the chair but apparently still in the saddle, was pushing on them like mad, trying to power himself out of this predicament, apparently unaware that he was capsized in the yew’s branches, suspended eight feet in the air.
    Griffin kneeled, leaned over and reached down as far as he could; the nearest spinning wheel was just beyond his fingertips. From somewhere behind and above there came a shriek, and he didn’t have to turn to know that Dot had returned, no doubt expecting to find her husband where she’d left him. For a woman her age, she had a hell of a set of pipes on her.
“Nooo!
” she wailed. “Is he
deaaad
?
”
    “Harve,” he told his father-in-law, “stop spinning the damn wheels.” Poised as precariously as he was—a large man, with the additional weight of the chair on top of him—he easily could snap one of the branches, Griffin feared, and impale himself on it.
    “
Won’t… go, goddammit,”
the