What I Loved

ordinary—popular music, action and horror movies—and yet he brought to these subjects the same agility of mind, the same fleet brain that had made itself felt in chess. What he lacked in content, he seemed to make up for in quickness.
    Mark resisted going to bed. Every night I was with him, he lingered in the doorway of Bill and Violet's bedroom, where I was reading, as if he was unwilling to tear himself away. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes would pass as he leaned in the doorway and chatted. All three nights, I had to tell him that I was turning in and that he should do the same.
    The single hitch in our weekend together was over doughnuts. On Saturday afternoon, I looked for a box of doughnuts I had bought the day before. I searched the pantry but couldn't find them. "Did you eat the doughnuts?" I called out to Mark, who was in the next room. He walked into the kitchen and looked at me. "Doughnuts? No."
    "I could have sworn I put them in this cupboard, and now they aren't here. It's strange."
    "Too bad," he said. "I like doughnuts. I guess it's one of those household mysteries. Violet always says that the house eats things when you're not looking." He shook his head, smiled at me, and disappeared into his room. An instant later, I heard him whistling a pop song—high, sweet, and melodic.
    At around three o'clock the following afternoon, I answered the telephone. A woman was screaming at me through the receiver in a piercing, angry voice. "Your son started a fire! I want you over here right now!" I forgot where I was, forgot everything. Too shocked to speak, I breathed into the receiver once and said, "I don't understand you. My son is dead."
    Silence.
    "Aren't you William Wechsler?"
    I explained. She explained. Mark and her son had started a fire on the roof.
    "That's not possible," I said. "He's in his room reading."
    "Wanna bet?" she said loudly. "He's standing here right in front of me."
    After confirming that Mark wasn't in his room, I walked downstairs and went to retrieve him from the building next door. When she let me into the apartment, the woman was still shaking. "Where did they get the matches?" she screeched at me when I walked through the door. "You're responsible for him, aren't you? Well, aren't you?" I mumbled yes, and then I said that boys could pick up matches almost anywhere. What kind of fire was it? I wanted to know. "A fire! A fire! What does it matter what kind?" When I turned to Mark, his face was vacant. There was no belligerence in it—there was nothing. The other boy, who looked to be no more than ten years old, had wet, red eyes. Snot leaked from his nose as he repeatedly pushed away his bangs, which instantly fell back into his face. I apologized weakly and led Mark home in silence.
    We talked it over in Mark's room. He told me that he had met the kid, Dirk, on the roof, and that Dirk had already started the fire. "All I did was stand there and watch."
    I asked him what they had burned.
    "Just some paper and stuff. It was nothing."
    I warned him that fires could quickly get out of control. I told him that he should have let me know that he was leaving. He listened, his eyes calmly taking in my comments. Then he said in a voice that was surprisingly hostile. "That kid's mother was crazy!"
    Mark's eyes were illegible. They bore a striking resemblance to Bill's, but they had none of his father's energy. "I think she was scared, not crazy," I said. "She was really scared for her son."
    "I guess so," he said.
    "Mark, don't do anything like that again. It was your job to stop it. You're a lot older than that boy."
    "You're right, Uncle Leo," he said. I heard conviction in his voice, and it relieved me.
    In the morning, I made Mark French toast and sent him off to school. When we said good-bye, I gave him my hand, but he hugged me instead. When I put my arms around him, he felt small, and the way he pressed his cheek against me made me think of Matthew, not when my son was eleven but when he was four or five.
    After Mark left, I climbed the stairs to the roof to look for remnants of the fire. I had thought that I might have to cross over to the next building, where Dirk lived, but I discovered a heap of ash and litter on the roof of our building, and I squatted down to examine it. Feeling both underhanded and a little ridiculous, I stirred the charred debris with a wire hanger that lay nearby. This had not been a bonfire, just a small conflagration that couldn't have lasted very