The Six Rules of Maybe

its shiny cover and new-book smell. I opened it to the center and stuck my nose in and took a long sniff. I looked at the words at random. It felt thick and complicated and maybe more like the sort of book you think you should like more than you actually do.
    I started the first chapter.
    In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams….
    I liked the idea of a technique, a process, a series of steps for figuring out things and people. I needed some answer to all of the loose puzzle pieces in my mind and heart. I would have to try to put more faith in the idea of a subconscious, though, that supposedly murky land that existed behind a secret door of the mind. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe that there were things I kept even from myself.
    I read for a while, and then I rested and watched the beach that I loved. A man was trying to surf on a white board; there was a family made up of two couples, an assortment of kids, and grandma with her jeans rolled up. There was a father on his knees in the sand too, with a large sand castle taking shape in front of him. His back was curved with effort, and his arms reached to pat and build as his little daughter in a frilly bottomed bathing suit ran to fetch more seawater. The grandma in jeans bent down to choose a rock; a few seagulls on a blank stretch of sand were having a seagull conference with poor attendance. In all of it I could only feel Hayden’s absence.
    That night, Mom tried to barbecue hamburgers for us all; she was terrible at barbecuing, she always had been. We always teased her about the time she had cremated a pack of hot dogs. I watched her humming and trying her best with the smoke swirling around her. I pictured Hayden there with us, doing the job Mom wasn’t so good at, wearing one of Mom’s old striped aprons over his favorite green shirt and cargo shorts. I pictured him as a father, his and Juliet’s baby, all of our baby, tucked in a front pack next to him, but never, ever near the smoke or the fire. I pictured him holding the baby in the crook of his arm, pictured him warning a small child away from the hot metal. He would cut the meat into tiny bits. He would make sure she did not sit too close to the tipping end of the lawn chair.
    That night I dreamed again, with the cool air coming through my screen. I was small, and I was at the beach. I held a bucket of water in sandy hands. I was running toward a sand castle and caught my toe on a hump of driftwood. I started to fling forward, but was caught by the strong hand of my father. He was wearing a soft green T-shirt.
    I woke up in shock. Even if you didn’t believe in the subconscious, maybe it still believed in you.
    I sat upright in my bed, and right then I felt like everyone all at once—me right now; me a long time ago; my mother years ago, losing the man she loved; Jitter, even, adrift and fatherless. Know what you desire but, more importantly, why you desire it. That why was where the trick lay, I realized. Why was a land of trapdoors and hidden places, trees and rocks that looked like one thing, but were actually another.
    I was taking out the garbage when I saw Ally Pete-Robbins’s Acura driving up our street with Clive Weaver in the passenger seat. She stopped in front of our house and rolled down the window.
    “I found him at the ferry terminal, sitting on the bench,” she said. “I thought he had a suitcase on his knees, but it was an old clarinet case.”
    “Mary played the clarinet in the high school band,” Clive Weaver told me from the next seat. “She was very good, too. She had a gift, you might say.”
    “I would have liked to hear her play,” I said. I still cared very much about Clive Weaver. That was one thing that did matter to me, and I remembered that then.
    “We’re going to get settled back in,” Ally Pete-Robbins said. The window slid back up and they drove home, but that evening,I collected credit card applications and catalog and discount oil change flyers from the recycling bin. I got serious about it. It would take him days and days to open all the mail. I changed the recipients’ addresses from ours to Clive Weaver’s. I wrote more letters on pieces of perfumed stationery that Mom had gotten from Quill.
    Dear Mr. Weaver—
    I hope this finds you well. My husband, Roger Woodruff, and I have returned from the South of France, where we lived for several months. The mail