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“What?”

“How anybody supposed to deal with a pain like this?”

Without hesitation I said, “I’ll call Aja and then, a little while after that, she’ll call you with a reservation for a plane outta Philly to LA. You still in Philly, right?”

“Yeah. But ain’t you workin’?”

“You could be my helper, like Mercedes is for Dr. Klieg.”

“What about the funeral? That’s gonna be on me.”

“Give Aja the information. She’ll get in touch with you before making any decisions.”

Saying these words felt like calling down into a well. For a long time after there was silence, and then the single word, “Okay,” came up at me, a bubble of sound escaping a subterranean lake of crude oil.

“Death comes in many colors,” my father said to me when I was still a boy.

“What do the colors mean?” I asked him, a dutiful child attending to the most important teacher I was ever to have.

“The darkest color is black, midnight in the soul,” he said. “That’s where you get lost. That’s where you feel so bad that anything, anything would be better than that pain.”

“And is the lightest color white?” I asked.

He didn’t answer at first. He was staring up at a huge bank of clouds on the western horizon.

“Huh, Daddy?”

“No. The lightest color is like those clouds up there, the ones that’s so light that they almost white but they still gray. You see ’em?”

“Yeah.” And I did.

“Them light gray clouds are all the millions’a people that die in China and Mexico, back home in Arkansas, and two blocks over on some street that you might’a been on just once or twice…” A pained grimace invaded Chief Odin’s face as he gazed upward. “Those the people that die don’t mean no more than some ant you stepped on. They still dead and most’a them got peoples cry over them passin’. But when you hear about it, if you ever do, it doesn’t mean nuthin’—nuthin’ at all.”

For my father the lecture was over, but it left questions in my young mind.

“What about all the other colors?” I asked.

Chief Odin looked down at me and smiled.

“That’s the whole rainbow,” he said. “Blue if they sad but they were old and in pain. Red if it hurts you because you see their loss in you. And purple, like a purple bruise that’s ugly and hurtin’ and you feel good inside the pain too. ’Cause you know, sometimes you gonna want people dead. You gonna feel spiteful and vengeful and so mad that the only satisfaction you could imagine is them on the coolin’ board with they face all swole up and ugly.

“You gonna think that that death looks good on your enemy, that them sufferin’ is the best thing you could ever imagine. But then, if you lucky, that purple-black bruise start to heal. And when the pain goes away, so does the hatred. And then you realize that maybe the pain was just a stop on the way to what’s waitin’ for all’a us, that if you don’t forgive your enemy you will not be forgiven.”

“But what if the bruise don’t heal?” I asked.

After a long, thoughtful pause, my father said, “That’s everything that’s wrong with the world. People runnin’ around all bruised up and sour. They hurt so bad that they hate everybody, everyone includin’ those that ain’t never did nuthin’ to ’em. Everybody includin’ their brothers and even themselves.”

My father talked like that, in southern vernacular, when he was channeling my grandparents. In that way of talking, he granted me multigenerational wisdom.

I was thinking about Leaf’s pain and my father’s lecture on the colors of death while parking my car on the street near the hospital instead of in the parking lot, just in case someone a little smarter than the last spy might try to sabotage my ride.

There was a whole world of trouble on my mind, a complex cocktail concocted by some great master of mixology. Between Twyla’s pain, Arman’s losses, Mara’s love of men, and my father’s wisdom about death, I was beginning to place myself inside the actions I would soon have to undertake.

I had planned to go see my grandmother, to assure her that things were going to turn out fine. But on the way I decided to drop in on Arman.

Ilsa answered my knock. There was real anger stitched across her brows, but this vituperation was not leveled at me. Instead, it seemed as if some outside force threatened her and her charge.

The fury behind her eyes subsided once she recognized me.