“Buckley,” Grandma Lynn said, “go get some towels.”

“Did you manage the bike in this?” Hal asked, incredulous.

“No, we ran,” Samuel said.

“You what?”

“Get into the family room,” my father said. “We’ll set a fire going.”

While the two of them sat with their backs to the fire, shivering at first and drinking the brandy shots Grandma Lynn had Buckley serve them on a silver tray, everyone heard the story of the bike and the house and the octagonal room with windows that had made Samuel euphoric.

“And the bike’s okay?” Hal asked.

“We did the best we could,” Samuel said, “but we’ll need a tow.”

“I’m just happy that the two of you are safe,” my father said.

“We ran home for you, Mr. Salmon.”

My grandmother and brother had taken seats at the far end of the room, away from the fire.

“We didn’t want anyone to worry,” Lindsey said.

“Lindsey didn’t want you to worry, specifically.”

The room was silent for a moment. What Samuel had said was true, of course, but it also pointed too clearly to a certain fact – that Lindsey and Buckley had come to live their lives in direct proportion to what effect it would have on a fragile father.

Grandma Lynn caught my sister’s eye and winked. “Hal and Buckley and I made brownies,” she said. “And I have some frozen lasagna I can break out if you’d like.” She stood and so did my brother – ready to help.

“I’d love some brownies, Lynn,” Samuel said.

“Lynn? I like that,” she said. “Are you going to start calling Jack ‘Jack’?”

“Maybe.”

Once Buckley and Grandma Lynn had left the room, Hal felt a new nervousness in the air. “I think I’ll pitch in,” he said.

Lindsey, Samuel, and my father listened to the busy noises of the kitchen. They could all hear the clock ticking in the corner, the one my mother had called our “rustic colonial clock.”

“I know I worry too much,” my father said.

“That’s not what Samuel meant,” Lindsey said.

Samuel was quiet and I was watching him.

“Mr. Salmon,” he finally said – he was not quite ready to try “Jack.” “I’ve asked Lindsey to marry me.”

Lindsey’s heart was in her throat, but she wasn’t looking at Samuel. She was looking at my father.

Buckley came in with a plate of brownies, and Hal followed him with champagne glasses hanging from his fingers and a bottle of 1978 Dom Perignon. “From your grandmother, on your graduation day,” Hal said.

Grandma Lynn came through next, empty-handed except for her highball. It caught the light and glittered like a jar of icy diamonds.

For Lindsey, it was as if no one but herself and my father were there. “What do you say, Dad?” she asked.

“I’d say,” he managed, standing up to shake Samuel’s hand, “that I couldn’t wish for a better son-in-law.”

Grandma Lynn exploded on the final word. “My God, oh, honey! Congratulations!”

Even Buckley let loose, slipping out of the knot that usually held him and into a rare joy. But I saw the fine, wavering line that still tied my sister to my father. The invisible cord that can kill.

The champagne cork popped.

“Like a master!” my grandmother said to Hal, who was pouring.

It was Buckley, as my father and sister joined the group and listened to Grandma Lynn’s countless toasts, who saw me. He saw me standing under the rustic colonial clock and stared. He was drinking champagne. There were strings coming out from all around me, reaching out, waving in the air. Someone passed him a brownie. He held it in his hands but did not eat. He saw my shape and face, which had not changed – the hair still parted down the middle, the chest still flat and hips undeveloped – and wanted to call out my name. It was only a moment, and then I was gone.

Over the years, when I grew tired of watching, I often sat in the back of the trains that went in and out of Suburban Station in Philadelphia. Passengers would get on and off as I listened to their conversations mix with the sounds of the train doors opening and closing, the conductors yelling their stops, and the shuffle and staccato of shoe soles and high heels going from pavement to metal to the soft thump thump on the carpeted train aisles. It was what Lindsey, in her workouts, called an active rest; my muscles were still engaged but my focus relaxed. I listened to the sounds and felt the train’s movement and sometimes, by doing this, I could hear the voices of those who no longer lived on Earth. Voices of others like me, the watchers.

Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn’t watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I’m afraid. A one-sided cajoling and coaching of the young, a one-way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never be signed.

The train would be still or stop-starting from 30th Street to near Overbrook, and I could hear them say names and sentences: “Now be careful with that glass.” “Mind your father.” “Oh, look how big she looks in that dress.” “I’m with you, Mother,” “… Esmeralda, Sally, Lupe, Keesha, Frank…” So many names. And then the train would gain speed, and as it did the volume of all these unheard phrases coming from heaven would grow louder and louder; at its height between stations, the noise of our longing became so deafening that I had to open my eyes.

I saw women hanging or collecting wash as I peered from the windows of the suddenly silent trains. They stooped over baskets and then spread white or yellow or pink sheets along the line. I counted men’s underwear and boys’ underwear and the familiar lollipop cotton of little girls’ drawers. And the sound of it that I craved and missed – the sound of life – replaced the endless calling of names.

Wet laundry: the snap, the yank, the wet heaviness of double-and queen-sized sheets. The real sounds bringing back the remembered sounds of the past when I had lain under the dripping clothes to catch water on my tongue or run in between them as if they were traffic cones through which I chased Lindsey or was chased by Lindsey back and forth. And this would be joined by the memory of our mother attempting to lecture us about the peanut butter from our hands getting on the good sheets, or the sticky lemon-candy patches she had found on our father’s shirts. In this way the sight and smell of the real, of the imagined, and of the remembered all came together for me.

After I turned away from Earth that day, I rode the trains until I could think of only one thing:

“Hold still,” my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he’d raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.