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air? I couldn’t tell, so I had to wait for another sign. I drove around Isla Vista, passing the apartment I’d lived in freshman year and the bar that Magda and I walked to the night her mother died, and then I rolled past the building where I’d met a guy named Jack and all those guys who turned out to be surfers from La Jolla. I parked and walked on the beach—sometimes at night you could see the waves lit up by microscopic sea animals that provided their own light, like magic. Nothing seemed to be a sign.
    It wasn’t until I pulled into a gas station to fill the tank that I saw my sign: Grant, pumping air into the tires of his bike. He came over to my car and leaned in, looking at all my stuff packed up on the roof.
    “You can’t save them, you know.” His voice was very quiet. “Don’t throw away your life just to save them. It’s not a fair trade, your life for theirs. And also, just so you know, that non-monogamous jerk you’re seeing is an idiot.” He gazed off in the distance, maybe over at the mountains, and then he leaned back into the car. “Look,” he said, and sighed. “If you want, you can stay at my place for the rest of the quarter. I’m mostly awake all the time anyway, working on my thesis, but I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
    I WENT home at the end of the quarter and immediately discovered that my father didn’t know the first thing about getting my mother back. He was hopeless. All you had to do was walk in the front door to see that. For one thing, the house smelled like raw onions, and I had to pick my way through dirty clothes to get to the kitchen, where the overflowing garbage can was stuffed with empty TV-dinner trays. And the curtains were closed. My father hadn’t even bothered to open them. How did he think he could get her back, if he wasn’t even going to do that much? Edie was a firm believer in such amenities as air fresheners and light. She was a minty-smelling dental receptionist, after all; her values involved brushing and flossing twice a day, keeping your room clean, eating fruit, doing homework, performing good deeds for other people. This was the woman whose singsongy “Good morning , Dr. Blan don’s office” was a deep comfort to dental patients all over the Valley. The truth was, my mother was a prize housewife, never once appearing bored with cooking and baking and cleaning and making little craft projects. She could do anything.
    For my whole childhood, my father went away every morning to work in a bank, and he came home tired and crabby. He had but one job around the house, and that was to clean the swimming pool and manage the required chemicals. He’d go outside in the afternoons after work, still wearing his suit pants and his undershirt, and first he’d put a sample of pool water into test tubes, glaring at the results. I loved watching him do that, although it scared me, too. He hated being watched. If he caught you, he’d say something like, “What are you staring at?” So I always had to pretend I was out there doing something else. Then, after he’d gotten the pH corrected and the disease-causing strains of whatever was in our pool eliminated, he’d stand there like somebody who was hypnotized, skimming the oleander leaves out of the deep end. I’d play hopscotch on the patio while he worked because I liked to keep an eye on him. You never knew when he was going to say something funny. He was mostly quiet and mad-looking, off in his own world, but sometimes he’d do something like make a mustache out of tree bark and do a whole Groucho Marx act, from out of nowhere. You had to watch him. Sometimes I could coax him into coming into the pool with me, but he didn’t really like to do things people asked him to do. He’d say he was too busy, but then when you weren’t asking, he’d suddenly fly out of the door in his swim trunks and jump in, flailing around like a crazy man, and spend the next hour letting you climb on his shoulders.
    My mother