Among the smaller disfigurements to his psyche, but one he contemplated often as a therapist himself, was that Halloween when he was eight and Katie was three. The Haunting of Emily Dickinson had just opened at the Beck, and there was a performance on the thirty-first: Halloween night. The show was an odd one for his father, Roman Stepanov, to produce: a ghost story that they all pretended had a literary pedigree. （It didn’t. No one really thought the poet was beleaguered by ghosts: not then, not now.） And the reviews had been, even when viewed charitably, mixed. Hence a redoubled effort with the social and gossip press. There was going to be a media reception before the performance and an appropriately themed cast party after the Halloween show, with yet more reporters and columnists invited. Their parents would be at the theater for both functions, and so the plan had been for the two children to go trick-or-treating throughout the apartment building with his friend David Hill and David’s mom. In theory, it shouldn’t have been a big deal. And yet it was. Or it became one. Glenda Stepanov decided on the thirtieth, the day before Halloween, that she herself should take Billy and Katie trick-or-treating that very moment. She made this decision after nine that night, when Roman was out and she was drunk. She had to wake Katie from a sound sleep. Billy recalled that he was in bed, too, though he hadn’t dozed off yet. Roman was having costumes made for the kids by one of his show’s costume designers: Katie was going to be a kitten and Billy was going to be a pirate. But the outfits weren’t quite finished and were still at the Beck. And so when his mother pulled him, a little dazed, from the bed, she dressed him in his costume from the year before: cowboy chaps that now were too short, a flannel shirt so tight he barely could button it, and a cowboy hat, all of which stunk of mothballs. She put Katie into the same cotton-and-wool-stuffed pumpkin she had worn when she was two, and it still reeked of the diaper she had worn underneath it the year before. Katie was howling because she had been dragged from a deep sleep, and he was crying because it was the wrong night and he wanted to trick-or-treat with David, but Glenda was brooking no dissent. They were going that moment, even though it was nine thirty at night and it was the day before Halloween.
It was, predictably, a disaster. Half the apartments didn’t have candy yet or hadn’t baked treats. The half that did had to find them. And everyone could see that the two kids had been crying （or were crying）。 They could also see, despite Glenda’s charm as she explained to the neighbors as they opened their doors that the children would be busy tomorrow night at the theater （a lie）， that she was a toxic mixture of mania and gin. She was a farce. The other adults were in their dressing gowns and bathrobes, but she was the mess. And when she brought the kids home around ten thirty, after knocking on perhaps fifteen doors, she was furious at what she viewed as their misbehavior and the way they had embarrassed her. She made Katie sleep that night back in her crib instead of her bed, and she placed the heavy wooden extender to the dining room table across the top so she couldn’t escape. She made Billy sleep on the floor of that terrifying coat closet. He was still awake when his father got home, but Roman knew not to rescue his children. Not when Glenda was in one of her moods.
The stewardess passed by Billy as they neared Nairobi, saw his eyes were open, and asked him if he would like anything. There was a slight whisper of French in her accent.
“All good,” he said, which meant, inevitably, that the plane chose that moment to pitch abruptly, and the drink on the passenger’s tray table across the aisle sloshed onto the white table linen. The other passengers who were awake craned their necks as one to stare out the windows. He was relieved that his glass was empty.
“Just a little turbulence,” the stewardess said to him, and she smiled in a way that was knowing and kind. She was no more than twenty-five years old, but she saw through him like glass. An idea came to him: the kind of person who became a stewardess would make one hell of a good therapist.
* * *
.?.?.
Margie had stopped shrieking now that they were in the Land Rover and Katie hadn’t said a word, at least not one that Billy had heard. David had said something about surrendering so no one got hurt, but Juma ignored him, ordering him into the vehicle. Now the guide was fumbling to get the car key into the slot, an uncharacteristic lack of competence, but the moment was brief. Billy looked around, unsure how they had wound up in the seats they were in because it had all happened so fast. But Katie was in the front seat, sharing it with the cooler and the toilet paper and the bags of nuts that Juma always stored there, David and Terrance were in the second row, and Billy and Margie were together in the third, Margie pressed against the right window. The engine started and they were fleeing. They were leaving behind, it seemed, Katie’s agent and her publicist, and Carmen Tedesco—Katie’s best friend in the world, the maid of honor at her wedding—and Carmen’s husband, Felix. They were leaving behind that hunter, Charlie Patton, and his mammoth staff: all those porters who boiled them water for the baths they savored in those canvas tubs, and barbecued the guinea fowl and Thomson’s gazelle that had been shot in some edge of the Serengeti where it was still legal to hunt, and brought to their tents their coffee and hot water first thing in the morning. They were running away like terrified zebras, racing like impalas that had spotted a lion.