Roommates had come and gone by then, Ouss and Sachin and Charles the only ones who remained. Sachin was as volatile and Ouss as earnest as ever; he’d recently been promoted to assistant manager at the hardware store where he worked, and was convinced this would turn out to be his “big break.” The others had been replaced once, twice, three times over, the men different in their particulars, though these differences hardly mattered to Clive. Jean-Fran?ois kept a laminated picture of his father back in Dessalines in his jeans pocket. His father was ill, and Jean-Fran?ois would be stuck in New York until he died, paying his medical bills. After four months he was replaced by Dennis, a bachelor who had sent home enough money over a decade in New York for his sisters’ weddings and houses and schooling for his nieces and nephews. He went home once a year, for a week.

Clive had begun to wonder by then if Ouss hadn’t been correct on that first night—maybe this temporary existence was changing them in ways more permanent than they could fully comprehend. He thought of Hamid, another night-shift driver, who loved to brag about the accomplishments of his four children back in Pakistan, but whose plans to bring them over to join him always seemed to get pushed back to the next year, and the next. He thought of Neer, a baby-faced driver who had returned to Gujarat for the month of December for years. When December arrived that year and Neer was still at work, Clive asked if he would be going home at another time, and Neer told him he would not be going at all. Had something happened, Clive asked, was something wrong? Neer shrugged evasively, and Clive was frightened to find that Neer didn’t need to explain. He understood. The family Neer had longed for, eked out this lonely existence for … it had been too long. The noise and chaos of children early in the morning, a wife’s hopes and desires and disappointments—these things were too much now. He had grown too accustomed to a life he’d never wanted in the first place to give it up. That December, the sight of Neer—gazing impassively at the television in the break room, smoking a cigarette on the curb in front of the garage after his shift as the sun tried uselessly to break through the clouds—was enough to bring tears to Clive’s eyes. He missed Sara and his grandmother, missed being in the company of and under the care and brusque direction of women. He was determined not to let what had happened to Neer happen to him. He would not become one of those men for whom family became too difficult, a thing better surrendered than reclaimed. Yet he could feel it happening to him, bit by bit, as seawater erodes rock. He wired money to Sara monthly, but he called less frequently now. Sometimes he asked if he could speak to Bryan, but sometimes he didn’t try, even when he could hear cartoons in the background, punctuated by his son’s airy giggles.

Sometimes, he could never predict when it would happen, he would be plunged into Bryan’s life. He was stuck in traffic on the Major Deegan. He was trudging through the snow on an unshoveled stretch of Forty-seventh Street. Then he was in the yard at Horatio Byrd, invisible and watching, as a pack of boys (all much bigger than Bryan—in his imaginings his son was a small and delicate child) shoved him and called him bastard. He watched his son curl into himself and cry. Then Bryan turned and looked at him. He was not invisible anymore. His boy ran to him, and he gathered him in his arms, taking Bryan’s small, heaving body into his large one, absorbing the tears and the runny nose and the brave trembling lip into himself, and in that moment he understood, finally, what his too-big body was for. There had been a reason for it all along: to take into himself the suffering of his child.

Then he was back—the taxi inching along the asphalt, the snow soaking into his shoes. And he felt emptier than it had been possible to feel before he’d had a child to be absent from his life. He should never have left. He should have found a way to stay. If he had not been able to regain Sara’s trust he should simply have demanded it, so that he could remain on the island and in his son’s life. No, he had done the right thing. Sara needed space and time. Eventually she would soften. It might all work out in the end. He felt better, except sometimes he didn’t. Could you ever undo it when a father and son became nothing to one another but voices? He could never decide—he would wonder for the rest of his life—whether his departure was his single most courageous act or just one more example of his cowardice.

IN BED at night, he closed his eyes and sent himself home. His grandmother’s house, white curtains in the kitchen and the oleander tree in the yard. The potholed streets, Mayfair and Gould and Princess Margaret and Underhill. The three-legged goat in Daphne Nelsen’s yard. The secret, nameless cliffs from their nights joyriding with Keithley. Conch fritters and limeade at Perry’s Snackette. The gas station on George Street and the salt ponds with their pleasant stink and clotheslines on which school uniforms crisped in the sun. The spots where the buildings, the hillocks, the scrub parted to reveal flickering glimpses of the sea. The sea itself. He sat on the sand at Little Beach and looked out at the water. He was not alone. On the beach were all the people he had ever known, the old and the young, the living and the dead. They, like he, sat still and solemn with their eyes on the sea, waiting.

For what?

Then it began to snow.

IT WAS January of his third year in New York when Clive stopped for gas at the Shell on Hudson Street and the man at the next pump said, “Clive Richardson? Is that really you?”

He looked up and saw a man standing beside a Range Rover, and after a moment he realized it was Ron Rawlins, who had been in his form at school and who had gone on to attend university in the States. In school Ron had been a square, mercilessly teased for his eczema and acne. He looked good now. His skin had cleared and he wore a gray suit with a lavender tie.

“I heard you left for here, and here you are!” Ron said.

He could feel the weight of what Ron hadn’t said. Surely Ron had heard about everything that had happened to him in the years since they had last seen each other.

“What are you up to these days?” he asked Ron, who happily accepted this shift of focus to himself.

“Real estate. The market’s hot right now, my man.”

How he and Edwin and their friends would have laughed and mocked Ron if he had dared to call any of them “my man” back home.

“You know Berline’s up here, too,” Ron said.

“Bery?”

“I set her up working in the same optometry office as my girl. She’s saving for art school.”

Clive forced a smile.

“Hey, man, good on you for making an honest living here,” Ron said, gesturing at the taxi. “Keep it up, you hear?” He pulled out his wallet and flicked a business card at Clive. “You need anything, call me.”

Early the next morning, when Clive got back to the apartment and flipped on the light, Sachin leapt off the couch.

“The fuck, man? I’m sleeping here,” Sachin shouted, his eyes crazed. Drunk.

“Sorry. I didn’t know you were out here.”

Sachin spread his arms before him. “Well, here I am. Trev’s driving me mad. I can’t stand to sleep where I can hear that joker breathing.”

“Sorry,” Clive muttered again, and fled to his bedroom. He had to piss, but he didn’t want to go out and face Sachin again, so he relieved himself into a Big Gulp cup from the day before, his urine swirling with the inch of flat cola at the bottom. He lay down, but though he was tired he couldn’t sleep. He imagined Ron Rawlins and his girl and Bery sitting together in a diner. Ron had his arm around his girlfriend, who was small and pretty and American. “You’ll never believe who I ran into,” he would say to Bery, swiping a fry through ketchup and tossing it in his mouth. After he said Clive’s name, Ron and Bery would tell Ron’s girlfriend about him: an illegitimate child, drugs, jail, the girl. Then Bery would snort at a thought in her head. “You know, he punched me in the face once,” she’d say, without bothering to explain the circumstances.

IN FEBRUARY, his roommate Charles returned to Saint Thomas. Three days later their landlord came to the apartment with his replacement. Fazil was a diminutive man with mantis-like limbs and a tidy beard dyed with henna. He was much older than the rest of them, in his fifties at least, and he kept nearly silent. He prayed five times a day, and Clive liked this about his new roommate, though he had no interest in religion himself. It seemed to him that Fazil had released himself to the universe in a way that made him, not happy exactly, but reconciled to his life. He had a habit of picking his nose and flicking his excavations into the corners of their small bedroom, but other than this he was unobtrusive (in his sleep he was completely soundless, so that Clive sometimes worried he was dead) and fastidiously neat, and Clive accepted his one vice as the cost of a roommate who was much better than he might have been.