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A strange calm came over me. It was all going to be OK.
Nothing had happened, and nothing would happen. The Coast Guard or the port police or whoever was in the powerboat below us would intercept the
Tiny Dancer.
They'd capture the terrorists, my dad would be fine, and nobody would get hurt. If I ended up in jail, that would be OK. Just as long as nothing terrible happened.

The copter pilot nudged the man next to me and then looked north. I followed his eyes and saw the
Norwegian Sky,
a huge luxury liner that carries at least a thousand passengers, and the calm that had filled me dissolved. The
Norwegian Sky
was less than half a mile from the
Tiny Dancer,
and the two vessels were on a collision course.

"What's your dad doing?" the man next to me shouted.

I looked back to the
Tiny Dancer.
My dad had left the wheel and he was taking in all the sail. Two men were on the deck pointing guns at him. I could tell they were screaming at him and that he was ignoring them.

Suddenly, I understood. My dad had seen the
Norwegian Sky.
He wasn't going to let terrorists use the
Tiny Dancer
to blow it up. He'd die first.

The rest happened fast. The patrol boat pulled up about one hundred yards from the
Tiny Dancer.
I could see someone shouting into a bullhorn while two other men pointed rifles. A gunshot was fired from the
Tiny Dancer
toward the patrol boat. Right then my dad jumped one of the men. As the two of them scuffled on the deck, the other man clambered below. My father grabbed the man he was fighting, spun him around, and hit him hard in the stomach and then again in the face. The man reeled backward and fell off the boat into
the Sound. My dad picked up the man's gun from the deck. He waved it over his head in the direction of the helicopter. I'd put the binoculars down, but I could still see his face clearly, and I think he could see me. He smiled, and he looked happier than I'd ever seen him. Then he turned and started down into the cabin after the other guy.

That's when the
Tiny Dancer
exploded.

The helicopter had turned and was flying back toward Lake Union. The blades were whirring; the pilot and the man next to me were shouting at each other; the walkie-talkie radio was alive. I heard it all, and I heard none of it. A numbness came over me, a numbness of mind and body. The
Tiny Dancer
was a ball of flame. My father was dead.

After the helicopter landed, two tall men wearing sunglasses led me to a beige Chrysler. Melissa's father forced himself into the back seat of the car with me. "I'm his attorney," he said to the men. "Wherever you're taking him, I'm going."

As we drove off, I saw Melissa standing by her Jetta. She waved to her father, and he rolled down the window. "Go home," he said as the car drove quickly away. "I'll be there later."

Twenty minutes later I was sitting alone in a room on the thirty-eighth floor of an office building in downtown Seattle.
Mr. Watts was in a separate room; I could see him through a glass window talking to a balding man in a gray suit. The two talked for ten or fifteen minutes. They could have kept talking forever, for all I cared.

When Mr. Watts finally came out, he sat down next to me. "Chance, did you know you were working for terrorists?" he asked, his voice low.

"No," I said.

"You're sure."

"I'm sure."

"All right, then. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to answer every question you're asked, fully and completely. You understand what I'm saying?"

I nodded.

Mr. Watts motioned to the man in the gray suit. He came over, showing me his badge as he spoke. "My name is Don Benjamin. I work for the FBI. I'm very sorry about what happened to your father. Very sorry. We all are. I know you must be in a state of shock and I wish I could give you some time. But there are questions you have to answer, and you have to answer them right now. You understand that, don't you?"

"I understand," I said. "Ask whatever you want. I'll tell you everything I know."

Hours later, Don Benjamin turned off the tape recorder and tapped his pencil on the desk. "That's it for today, Chance. We'll need to speak with you again, though. OK?"

I nodded. "OK."

Mr. Watts led me out of the room and we took the elevator
down. "Are you hungry?" he asked as the elevator went down and down and down.

"Not really," I answered.

"We're going to eat anyway."

There was a Starbucks in the lobby. He ordered a coffee and a sandwich for himself, and he bought me an apple juice and a muffin. We sat at a table away from everyone else. I was able to drink the apple juice, but looking at the muffin made me want to throw up.

Neither of us spoke for a long time, but finally I couldn't keep the words in. "I killed him," I said, looking down at the table. "I killed him."

Mr. Watts shook his head. "Don't do this to yourself, Chance. You didn't know what was going to happen. How could you? Nobody did."

"I killed him," I repeated.

For a while he didn't say anything. Then he took a deep breath and sighed. "Listen to me, Chance. I knew your dad. We both knew him. He didn't want to be a janitor mopping floors at night. He wanted more than that from his life. He expected more than that from his life. Today, he got it. He's a hero—you know that, don't you? He stopped a terrorist attack. He saved people's lives. Lots of people. Your father died the way he wanted to die. It's a rare person who manages that. A rare person."

I picked up the fork and turned it back and forth. I knew what Mr. Watts was trying to do—he was trying to take some of the guilt away. Most of what he said was true, and I knew that too. My dad was no janitor. The look on his face that last
time I saw him—I'd never seen him look like that. But it was what Mr. Watts didn't say that ate at me, and that eats at me still. My dad died a hero on the
Tiny Dancer,
and I'll always be proud of him. Always. But that I put him there—that's my shame. And that shame will be with me my whole life.

I put the fork down. "Can we go now?" I said.

Mr. Watts stood up. "I'll get us a taxi."

One week has passed since the explosion. Since then, I've spent every day answering questions. Sometimes it's the asking, sometimes it's Homeland Security, sometimes the port police or the Seattle police. Once it was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Mr. Watts is always with me, but there's nothing that anybody asks that I don't answer. I'm not hiding anything; I'll answer questions for as long as they want to ask.

The FBI found the black Mercedes in the Shilshole marina parking lot. Inside were a bunch of maps of Puget Sound and of Seattle. The Ballard Locks, the Aurora Bridge, the ferry routes—all of them were circled in red. But so were the Space Needle and Safeco Field and the University of Washington, so nobody is really sure what they were trying to blow up. Mr. Watts says they probably didn't care, that they just wanted to blow up something and kill a lot of people. But the only person they killed, beside themselves, was my dad.

There was a memorial service for my dad three nights ago. A huge crowd of people filled Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church. I sat in the front row with Melissa and her father and mother. As people filed in, I couldn't keep myself from looking around, hoping to see my own mother. She must have heard what had happened; it had been in the newspapers and on television. I had a small hope that she might actually be in the church, be close to me, but be afraid to talk to me. I wanted her to know that it was all right, that she could talk to me, that I didn't hate her. Once in a while, I'd catch a glimpse of a woman who looked something like my mother, and my heart would start to pound, and then I'd look closer and see it wasn't her.

I was glad when a female minister finally stepped to the podium and said a prayer. After she finished, men I didn't know spoke about how good a soldier my father had been in Kuwait, and how he had died a soldier and a hero. Melissa cried and her mother cried and even Mr. Watts cried. Around us complete strangers cried. But I didn't. Even after all the speeches at the memorial service, even after seeing the coffin with the American flag draped over it, I didn't cry. I don't know why I didn't, but I didn't.

I've been staying at Melissa's house all this time. When her father suggested I move in that first night, I told him no. "Where else can you stay?" he asked, and I didn't have an answer. I sleep in a guest bedroom that's bigger than the
Tiny Dancer.

Yesterday the FBI was done with me at three o'clock, which was earlier than they've ever been done with me before. The
questioning was finally coming to an end, though one agent told me they might be talking to me off and on for years to come.

"When are they going to arrest me?" I asked Melissa's dad once we were alone.

"What?" he said.

"When are they going to arrest me?" I repeated. "I know I broke the law; I know I helped terrorists; I know I'm going to jail."

He shook his head. "I've worked it out with Mr. Benjamin. As long as you cooperate, nobody is going to arrest you. You were a pawn in all this; the FBI knows that and so do the police. Your father died a hero. His picture was on the front page of all newspapers around the world. There's no way the government is going to put you in prison."

"But you don't understand, Mr. Watts," I said. "I have to go to jail. I have to make up for what I did."

He folded his hands in front of him and leaned forward. "You're right, Chance. You do have to make up for what you've done. But serving time is not the only way to do that. And it's not close to being the best way."

"Then what is the best way?"

He shook his head. "You'll have to find that out for yourself."

He drove me to his house and dropped me off. "I've got to get in to work," he said. "Someone will probably be home. If not, there's a key under the mat. Just let yourself in."

I walked up the long driveway and knocked on the door. Melissa answered. I'd been sleeping in her house for a week, but this was the first time I'd been alone with her. She hugged
me, and I held her close. Then she led me by the hand into her living room and had me sit down next to her on the sofa. For a while, neither of us said anything. It was almost as if we didn't know each other.

"What are you going to do now, Chance?"

"What do you mean?" I said.

"I mean when all this settles down. What are you going to do?"

"I guess I'll finish the school year somehow," I said. "After that, I really don't know."

"Listen. I've got it all figured out. I've already talked to my mom and dad about this, and they are one hundred percent behind it."

"Behind what, Melissa?"

"They want you to stay here, with us, indefinitely."

"Melissa—"

"Hear me out," she said. "My brothers are both away at college. They only come home for a week now and then, and you can see how big our house is. I'll be gone in the fall, so my mom and dad aren't worried that we're going to become secret lovers or anything like that. You could go to Shoreline Community College. My parents will pay the tuition. After a couple of years, you could transfer to the University of Washington or wherever you want to go."

I shook my head. "I can't do that, Melissa."

"Why not?"

"I just can't."

"At least think about it, OK? Do that much."

***

After dinner, her mother and father took me out into the living room and said basically the same things to me, only in a different way. "Your father and I were best friends once," Melissa's dad said. "He'd look after Melissa if anything happened to me. You know he would. So let me look after you."

I started to object, but Melissa's mother gently put her hand over my mouth. "Don't say anything now, Chance," she said softly. "Think about it. Think about it for as long as you want. Everything has been happening so fast. There's no hurry at all."

I spent most of last night wide awake, staring at the ceiling. Melissa's parents meant every word they said; I knew that. They wanted me to stay. And it made sense, in a fairy-tale sort of way. They would take me into their magic house and make me a part of their magic family. I could go to college, maybe become a lawyer, be like a third son to them. They would give me Thanksgivings and Christmases and birthdays, and they wouldn't even notice all that they were giving me. It was just the way they lived.

But that was what stopped me. It was the way
they
lived. It wasn't the way
I
lived. If I moved into Melissa's house, their life would become my life. The
Tiny Dancer,
my dad, my mom—all that had happened might become unreal—like a story a stranger tells you about something that happened to someone else. But it hadn't happened to someone else—it had happened to me. It was my life—both good and bad—and nothing was going to take it away from me.

I cried for my dad then. For the first time ever, I cried for him. Because rocking back and forth on a boat headed nowhere
wasn't the life he'd wanted. Now he was dead, and he'd never get to live that life. I don't know whether the drinking took it from him, or whether he drank because his life had gotten away from him. I'll never know, just like I'll never know why my mother hasn't come back to be with me, not even now, with my dad dead. But I do know my life isn't getting away from me.

It's just before seven in the morning. I'm sitting in Melissa's solarium looking out over Puget Sound. The sunlight is on the Olympic Mountains; some early sailors are out on the water. I can hear Melissa downstairs talking to her mother and father. They're probably talking about me.

In a few minutes I'll have to tell them. After that, I'll go to the bus stop and take the number 75 out to Northgate and enlist in the army.

Maybe enlisting is a big mistake, just like Melissa and her parents and Kim Lawton and everyone else thinks. Maybe it isn't. In a way it doesn't matter. Because if it is a mistake, when the time comes I'll do something else. One thing I'm sure of—I am going somewhere someday. I'm going for myself, and I'm going for my dad, too.