She had played with the toys in his apartment all year, only there, and he could not bring himself to give them back to her. Still, it made no sense to hold or keep them for her in some imaginary way, as if anything could change. She would never play in his apartment again. When he saw her next it would be at Big Sur, Santa Fe, New York, wherever they ended up, but not here in Wisconsin.

As soon as summer school was over, he would leave, too. It always had been that way with places where he had left someone, something behind; Lisbon, South Kent, a curve of lake, there. It would be the same with Wisconsin.

If he could not keep the toys, if he would not let her take them West, if the objects were only for them, then he would have to give them away or destroy them. But he would not be able to give them away, he knew that.

If they were not to be touched by Allegra or himself, then no one else would have them.

It would be impossible to dump the toys in a garbage can and let it go at that; especially her alphabet blocks, rubbed clean of paint, and her two-masted sail-boat, bleached with bathtub voyages. They were part of the reliquary. But they had to go; and it was after all, his sense of the toys that was at stake.

They would soon, at her age, pass out of mind, as easily as signposts she would see fading behind her as they drove, now, to the West. They were a dead weight in his mind, and if he could let her mother take her from him to live with someone else, then he would be strong enough to let go of them, knowing that his discipline in all of this was a preparation for the separate truth of their lives.

With these emotions and propositions set firmly in place, tied and secured, he waited for night, thinking, as he waited, of each toy wrapped and placed in a shoebox; the blocks, sail-boat, and driftwood angel he had dried and smoothed for her; of each object and the imprint of her hands on them, of her silent pressure and the force he would have to exert to be free.

As he walked to the back of the house, feet squeezing the first groundswell, he felt relieved by the still cool air. There were no streetlights in the alley behind the house except the spinning white blurs where the cars hummed by.

He dug inside the garbage cans until he found an empty one and filled it with newspapers, napkins, and paper cups. He mounded the papers carefully against the side of the can and built up the rest of the paper trash. He then poured out a can of lighter fluid evenly and carefully.

Without emotion or remorse, stone-like, he put the box in the can and struck a match. As he lowered and dropped the match, he had no feeling of his own weight, of the connection of his hand to his arm.

In a burst of flames – he could not be sure, for a moment, if he weren’t on fire, too – and in the midst of the flames, he saw a curve of beach and a small, red rubber touring car reflected in the water’s edge and his brother’s slight arm picking it up and running behind a dune and himself running after him through the beach grass and over pine roots, his ankles nicked, until he found himself in a hollow with only the sun overhead and the house somewhere and the sea somewhere and his brother was gone.

In the flame, he saw himself, her size and age, with Allegra in the hollow, both of them pawing at the sand.

He held his hands in the flames until they blistered and then plucked out the half burned box, with the charred hands of the driftwood angle sticking out, and brought it close to his body.

He wondered where they were: Indiana? Iowa?

He saw the plains stretching out between him and Allegra. He saw her sitting in the back of the station wagon, arms extended, waiting for him to follow.