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red corduroy overalls but would be good humored about the exigencies
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of laundry. He wasn t very efficient about going downstairs yet so, after
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unlatching the gate at the top, Jeremy would carry him, three flights to the
front door lit by a stained-glass panel, the flat number worked into a design
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of coiled blue morning glory, 2170, and Toby would repeat the address as his
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father opened the door, twenty-one seventy Sutter, my name is Toby Kent
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and I live at twenty-one seventy Sutter. He even remembered the ZIP code,
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which was better than Jeremy could do some days, foggy with sleep, open-
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ing the door to the foggy street.
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Toby would ask to be let down, at four and more than a half too sure of
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his dignity to be happy seen in his father s arms more often than neces-
sary. Six stone steps to the sidewalk, the risers as high as his knees he let
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Jeremy hold his hand. Past the tub of scraggly geraniums and chrysanthe-
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mums. Mica flashed in the sidewalk despite there being no sun, the upper
stories of buildings bundled in a cottony fog that threatened either to rise
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or descend, in any case to leave prospects for the day uncertain. Toby and
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his father turned the corner on Fillmore, headed uphill past the laundro-
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mat, crossing Bush Street and Pine, to California. At the intersection, Toby
looked through the glass doors of the doughnut shop where a policeman
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might be drinking a cup of coffee, where a young woman in peaked paper
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cap slid a tray of twisted crullers with glinting sugar skins into the display
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case. Then he tugged his father to the curb, to wait for the light to change
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so they could cross safely. If he saw the bus on its way toward them down
the street he shouted,  Here it comes, Daddy, and bounced up and down,
intent on its not making the light and getting away without them although
if so another would be along in ten or fifteen minutes.
The day-care center opened at seven. Toby and Jeremy seldom arrived
that early since Jeremy wasn t tied to corporate working hours eight, eight-
thirty, nine: they got there when they got there, Jeremy pushed the gate, they
went in. This early, still damp and cool, no-one was playing outside. It had
been Ruth s idea to put Toby in day care.  Look at it this way, boyface, she
said,  he s going to school eventually this ll give you a chance to get used
to it. Anyway, I know you, you ll spend all your time with him and neither of
you will ever see anyone else. He s having a weird enough childhood as it is;
give him a couple of hours a day to be someone other than Jeremy s son.
Jeremy s reason for being, she might have said, Jeremy s sense of direc-
tion, but restrained herself. For her part, the notion of devoting all her at-
tention to any one person be it Jeremy, Candace, or the extraordinary
creature her son appalled her by its overwhelming attraction, an attrac-
tion she was determined no-one would ever discover. Jeremy had no such
defense: this was perhaps the first thing she understood about him, one
of the reasons she had married him as much as being one of the causes of
their divorce. She knew not to tell Jeremy he needed time to himself every
so often. He wouldn t believe it, nor was she certain she did. Knowing es-
sentially nothing about his childhood he didn t talk about it, was distant
to his family, discouraged her becoming close to them she thought it must
have been so claustrophobic he had not developed a proper sense of separ-
ateness; either that, or he had beat so hard against the multiple carapaces
of his parents, sister, brothers as to cripple his own, open it permanently to
influences he could not restrain. She pictured him as something like a sea
anemone in a deep tide pool, grasping after current and flow, whereas she
was more like a hard-shelled mussel that must close itself off against alien
air when the tide fell.
In fact Ruth s diagnosis was overly dramatic, as is Ruth herself. In fact
Jeremy had early, as early as memory, discovered himself to be a changeling,
a dark Celtic elf child in a family of fair Saxon skeptics too unimaginative to
understand he wasn t one of their own, too accepting not to care for him.
This is not to say he consciously thought he had been adopted, although
the possibility intrigued him during adolescence. There were sufficient
Mediterranean and Celtic strains in his parents ancestries to account for
Jeremy s being black haired, slender, tall, dizzy with romance, while the rest
of the Kents were blond and stocky, solid and stolid. It was more as if he were
a reversion to a type his family had evolved beyond, a genetic anachronism,
an atavistic throwback, dispossessed heir of wave-drowned Ys or Avalon,
Middle Earth or Narnia. Little brothers Jamie and Jonny read Tom Swift and
grew up to be a computer programmer and a perpetual PhD candidate in
particle physics; older sister Jenny, disdaining fiction, became a doctor, a
lawyer s wife. While Jeremy s most decisive action, so far as his family was
SAFE AS HOUSES
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concerned, appeared to be the repudiation of his childhood nickname, re-
claiming his birthright as if it were the crown jewel of Faerie, and becoming
someone the Kents didn t know.
Just inside the door of the day-care center stood a row of white-enam-
eled cubbyholes, each marked with the name of one of the children. Two
Tobys were enrolled in the center the other was a girl a year younger than
Toby Kent. Jeremy helped his son off with his jacket, hung it on the hook
in Toby K s cubby, checked the slot above for messages. There were none.
Then the two of them turned right, past the cabinet, to the four and five year
olds classroom. Opening the door released the high-pitched cacophony of
fifteen children cooped up inside with three adults considerably less alert
than they. Toby s friend Sacha rushed over.  Toby, come and look! Toby let
go of his father s hand, followed Sacha without looking back.
 Good morning, Jeremy, said one of the teachers.
 Hello, Paul. Across the room, Toby helped Sacha place another block of
oversized Lego, the red of Toby s overalls and as large as his hand, in the
correct position.  How s it going?
Paul shook his head.  It s too early in the morning and there s too many
kids in this room. He shook his head again, bent down to a desk scaled for
someone a quarter his size for the sign-in list.  That s not true. Just say I
had a really great weekend and it s Monday again. He handed the list to
Jeremy.
Holding the clipboard against his belly, Jeremy printed his name and the
time.  What makes a great weekend? he asked, handing the list back.
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 I got completely ripped and went dancing and, you know, like that. A
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small blond man whose clavicle showed at the neckline of his t-shirt like a
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wishbone sucked clean of flesh, Paul slapped the clipboard against his thigh
as though it were a tambourine. Small teeth bit into his lower lip, crowded
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