Beside his hospital bed, Lindsey had fallen asleep while holding our father’s hand. My mother, still mussed, passed by Hal Heckler in the visitors’ area, and a moment later so did Len. Hal didn’t need more than this. He grabbed his helmet and went off down the hall.

After a brief visit to the ladies’ room, my mother was heading in the direction of my father’s room when Hal stopped her.

“Your daughter’s in there,” Hal called out. She turned.

“Hal Heckler,” he said, “Samuel’s brother. I was at the memorial service.”

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”

“Not your job,” he said.

There was an awkward pause.

“So, Lindsey called me and I brought her here an hour ago.”

“Oh.”

“Buckley’s with a neighbor,” he said.

“Oh.” She was staring at him. In her eyes she was climbing back to the surface. She used his face to climb back to.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m a little upset – that’s understandable, right?”

“Perfectly,” he said, speaking slowly. “I just wanted to let you know that your daughter is in there with your husband. I’ll be in the visitors’ area if you need me.”

“Thank you,” she said. She watched him turn away and paused for a moment to listen to the worn heels of his motorcycle boots reverberate down the linoleum hall.

She caught herself then, shook herself back to where she was, never guessing for a second that that had been Hal’s purpose in greeting her.

Inside the room it was dark now, the fluorescent light behind my father flickering so slightly it lit only the most obvious masses in the room. My sister was in a chair pulled up alongside the bed, her head resting on the side of it with her hand extended out to touch my father. My father, deep under, was lying on his back. My mother could not know that I was there with them, that here were the four of us so changed now from the days when she tucked Lindsey and me into bed and went to make love to her husband, our father. Now she saw the pieces. She saw that my sister and father, together, had become a piece. She was glad of it.

I had played a hide-and-seek game of love with my mother as I grew up, courting her attention and approval in a way that I had never had to with my father.

I didn’t have to play hide-and-seek anymore. As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of the things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.

Late at night the air above hospitals and senior citizen homes was often thick and fast with souls. Holly and I watched sometimes on the nights when sleep was lost to us. We came to realize how these deaths seemed choreographed from somewhere far away. Not our heaven. And so we began to suspect that there was a place more all-encompassing than where we were.

Franny came to watch with us in the beginning.

“It’s one of my secret pleasures,” she admitted. “After all these years I still love to watch the souls that float and spin in masses, all of them clamoring at once inside the air.”

“I don’t see anything,” I said that first time.

“Watch closely,” she said, “and hush.”

But I felt them before I saw them, small warm sparks along my arms. Then there they were, fireflies lighting up and expanding in howls and swirls as they abandoned human flesh.

“Like snowflakes,” Franny said, “none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before.”

Thirteen

When she returned to junior high in the fall of 1974, Lindsey was not only the sister of the murdered girl but the child of a “crackpot,” “nutcase,” “looney-tunes,” and the latter hurt her more because it wasn’t true.

The rumors Lindsey and Samuel heard in the first weeks of the school year wove in and out of the rows of student lockers like the most persistent of snakes. Now the swirl had grown to include Brian Nelson and Clarissa who, thankfully, had both entered the high school that year. At Fairfax Brian and Clarissa clung to each other, exploiting what had happened to them, using my father’s debasement as a varnish of cool they could coat themselves with by retelling throughout the school what had happened that night in the cornfield.

Ray and Ruth walked by on the inside of the glass wall that looked out on the outdoor lounge. On the false boulders where the supposed bad kids sat, they would see Brian holding court. His walk that year went from anxious scarecrow to masculine strut. Clarissa, giggly with both fear and lust, had unlocked her privates and slept with Brian. However haphazardly, everyone I’d known was growing up.

Buckley entered kindergarten that year and immediately arrived home with a crush on his teacher, Miss Koekle. She held his hand so gently whenever she had to lead him to the bathroom or help explain an assignment that her force was irresistible. In one way he profited – she would often sneak him an extra cookie or a softer sit-upon – but in another he was held aloft and apart from his fellow kindergartners. By my death he was made different among the one group – children – in which he might have been anonymous.

Samuel would walk Lindsey home and then go down the main road and thumb his way to Hal’s bike shop. He counted on buddies of his brother’s to recognize him, and he reached his destination in various pasted-together bikes and trucks that Hal would fine-tune for the driver when they pulled up.

He did not go inside our house for a while. No one but family did. By October my father was just beginning to get up and around. His doctors had told him that his right leg would always be stiff, but if he stretched and stayed limber it wouldn’t present too much of an obstacle. “No running bases, but everything else,” the surgeon said the morning after his surgery, when my father woke to find Lindsey beside him and my mother standing by the window staring out at the parking lot.

Buckley went right from basking in the shine of Miss Koekle home to burrow in the empty cave of my father’s heart. He asked ceaseless questions about the “fake knee,” and my father warmed to him.

“The knee came from outer space,” my father would say. “They brought pieces of the moon back and carved them up and now they use them for things like this.”

“Wow,” Buckley would say, grinning. “When can Nate see?”

“Soon, Buck, soon,” my father said. But his smile grew weak.

When Buckley took these conversations and brought them to our mother – “Daddy’s knee is made out of moonbone,” he would tell her, or “Miss Koekle said my colors were really good” – she would nod her head. She had become aware of what she did. She cut carrots and celery into edible lengths. She washed out thermoses and lunchboxes, and when Lindsey decided she was too old for a lunchbox, my mother caught herself actually happy when she found wax-lined bags that would keep her daughter’s lunch from seeping through and staining her clothes. Which she washed. Which she folded. Which she ironed when necessary and which she straightened on hangers. Which she picked up from the floor or retrieved from the car or untangled from the wet towel left on the bed that she made every morning, tucking the corners in, and fluffing the pillows, and propping up stuffed animals, and opening the blinds to let the light in.

In the moments when Buckley sought her out, she often made a barter of it. She would focus on him for a few minutes, and then she would allow herself to drift away from her house and home and think of Len.

By November, my father had mastered what he called an “adroit hobble,” and when Buckley egged him on he would do a contorted skip that, as long as it made his son laugh, didn’t make him think of how odd and desperate he might look to an outsider or to my mother. Everyone save Buckley knew what was coming: the first anniversary.