MacKenzie Bezos lives in Seattle, Washington. This is her first novel.

The Testing of Luther Albright

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

The Research Topic

The year I lost my wife and son, my son performed nine separate tests of my character. One night during Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the sofa tipped beneath us, and this is how it began.

"Whoa," he said.

His palms were flat on the sofa cushions. Liz was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and before I could think to stand, she had taken him by the wrist and led him to the shelter of the door frame. She reached to place a hand on his shoulder, and although he was fifteen, this was all it took to get him to follow her into a crouch. In a second, I had joined them there, and as I kneeled, I had to grasp the door casing for balance. Now I noted objects in the room by weight; our distance from windows. I became aware of sounds -- a quick pop that could have been wood or glass; three dull thuds from different corners of the house -- all of it muffled by the persistent rattling of our things: of flatware in drawers and knickknacks on shelves and pills in their bottles.

When the room stopped shaking, we uncovered our heads, and Liz's eyes, which normally ignored the television, turned immediately to it. Jim Fowler was rappelling down a cliff face toward a nest on a narrow ledge.

Elliot stood.

"We should wait here a minute," Liz said.

He crouched again. "It didn't feel very big."

"All the same . . ."

When the condor saw Jim Fowler, it spread its wings, a span the length of a man. Jim wrapped his arms around it from behind, folding them in. His boots dangled in the air. He tagged the condor's ankle, and then opened his arms wide to release it, a burst of feather against the blue sky. As he was hoisted away by the helicopter, the head and shoulders of a local newscaster replaced him.

"We interrupt your regular programming with a special report. An earthquake was just felt in the greater Sacramento area." Her eyes flitted offscreen and back. "We do not yet have any data on the magnitude or the epicenter of the disturbance, but, here in our studio, objects dropped from high shelves." She touched her ear and paused. "The sensation was reportedly felt as far away as Redding, as this caller describes. . . ." From an invisible speaker in the studio came the voice of a Citrus Heights woman explaining that she had been talking to her sister in Redding on the telephone when it happened; her sister had been carrying a mug of hot coffee at the time, and at the exact same moment that the caller heard the tinkling of wind chimes on her own porch, her sister screamed because her coffee had soaked the front of her blouse.

Liz stood and crossed the living room. She had a beauty so striking even I could not recall it fully from morning until nightfall. She was over forty by then, and still people spent the first moments of any encounter with her as they would in a hospital room or a cathedral, their eyes locked first on one feature and then another, trying to decode their composite power. She bent at the waist and picked up a set of proof Kennedy half-dollars that had fallen from the shelf and fingered a crack in the clear plastic case. She and I had met twenty-two years earlier at the Wells Fargo Bank on J Street; she monitored access to the safe-deposit boxes, where I appeared weekly to deposit coins of dubious value. She had thought me an inheritor or a man in the midst of a legal battle until one day she stepped into the vault while I was pulling a small tin of wheat pennies from my coat pocket.

Now she set the cracked case back on the shelf and looked at us, two men she had left in the safety of a door frame. "Come on," she said. "Let's go make sure nothing else is broken."

Elliot led the way. He had grown so much in the last month that from behind he was like a stranger: a thicker trunk, and also a change, from loping to shambling, in his gait. We followed him into the kitchen, and we all three surveyed the room with a sensitivity to disorder we had not felt when we cleared the dinner dishes an hour before. Elliot stooped to pick up a ballpoint pen that may well have been dropped that afternoon. Liz righted things on the counter: a cookbook, an orange that had strayed from an overfull basket of fruit. We had heard no noise that could have come from the direction of the kitchen except that pop, and now I opened cupboards trying to find it. The dishes sat stacked behind smooth oak doors I had purchased twenty-two years ago and waxed with a T-shirt. Little felt pads I had glued to their inner corners let them close without sound.

When Elliot's patience with the normalcy of things ran out, he passed back into the hallway, and again we followed. In the hall above us was a small antique table that I had bought for Liz last fall when Elliot began high school. On it, she kept a potted jade plant, a framed photograph of the three of us in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, and a souvenir core of bedrock, which had rolled from the table to the carpeted floor. We found the other thuds without trouble: a thick book on gardening Liz kept on her small nightstand, and a five-pound hand weight she had set on an ottoman in our walk-in closet. This left only the pop.

When I built the house, I'd left the attic unfinished, and over the summer, Elliot and I had made a project of its completion.