“Tell me what you want to say. What’s this about your friend Keesha’s dad?”

“Put the clothes down.”

My father laid them gently on the ground.

“It isn’t about Keesha’s dad.”

“Tell me what it is about.” My father was now all immediacy. He went back to the place he had been after his knee surgery, coming up out of the druggie sleep of painkillers to see his then-five-year-old son sitting near him, waiting for his eyes to flicker open so he could say, “Peek-a-boo, Daddy.”

“She’s dead.”

It never ceased to hurt. “I know that.”

“But you don’t act that way. Keesha’s dad died when she was six. Keesha said she barely even thinks of him.”

“She will,” my father said.

“But what about us?”

“Who?”

“Us, Dad. Me and Lindsey. Mom left because she couldn’t take it.”

“Calm down, Buck,” my father said. He was being as generous as he could as the air from his lungs evaporated out into his chest. Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go. “What?” my father said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

Let go. Let go. Let go.

“I’m sorry,” my father said. “I’m not feeling very well.” His feet had grown unbelievably cold in the damp grass. His chest felt hollow, bugs flying around an excavated cavity. There was an echo in there, and it drummed up into his ears. Let go.

My father dropped down to his knees. His arm began to tingle on and off as if it had fallen asleep. Pins and needles up and down. My brother rushed to him.

“Dad?”

“Son.” There was a quaver in his voice and a grasping outward toward my brother.

“I’ll get Grandma.” And Buckley ran.

My father whispered faintly as he lay on his side with his face twisted in the direction of my old clothes: “You can never choose. I’ve loved all three of you.”

That night my father lay in a hospital bed, attached to monitors that beeped and hummed. Time to circle around my father’s feet and along his spine. Time to hush and usher him. But where?

Above his bed the clock ticked off the minutes and I thought of the game Lindsey and I had played in the yard together: “he loves me/he loves me not” picked out on a daisy’s petals. I could hear the clock casting my own two greatest wishes back to me in this same rhythm: “Die for me/don’t die for me, die for me/don’t die for me.” I could not help myself, it seemed, as I tore at his weakening heart. If he died, I would have him forever. Was this so wrong to want?

At home, Buckley lay in bed in the dark and pulled the sheet up to his chin. He had not been allowed past the emergency room where Lindsey had driven them, following the shrieking ambulance inside which lay our father. My brother had felt a huge burden of guilt descend in the silences from Lindsey. In her two repeated questions: “What were you talking about? Why was he so upset?”

My little brother’s greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gingerly monitoring father every morning and every evening as if, without such vigilance, he would lose him.

We stood – the dead child and the living – on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.

My father had only missed nighttimes twice in Buckley’s life. Once after he had gone into the cornfield at night looking for Mr. Harvey and now as he lay in the hospital and they monitored him in case of a second heart attack.

Buckley knew he should be too old for it to matter, but I sympathized with him. The good-night kiss was something at which my father excelled. As my father stood at the end of the bed after closing the Venetian blinds and running his hands down them to make sure they were all down at the same slant – no rebel Venetian stuck to let the sunlight in on his son before he came to wake him – my brother would often get goose bumps on his arms and legs. The anticipation was so sweet.

“Ready, Buck?” my father would say, and sometimes Buckley said “Roger,” or sometimes he said “Takeoff,” but when he was most frightened and giddy and waiting for peace he just said “Yes!” And my father would take the thin cotton top sheet and bunch it up in his hands while being careful to keep the two corners between his thumb and forefinger. Then he would snap it out so the pale blue (if they were using Buckley’s) or lavender (if they were using mine) sheet would spread out like a parachute above him and gently, what felt wonderfully slowly, it would waft down and touch along his exposed skin – his knees, his forearms, his cheeks and chin. Both air and cover somehow there in the same space at the same time – it felt like the ultimate freedom and protection. It was lovely, left him vulnerable and quivering on some edge and all he could hope was that if he begged him, my father would oblige and do it again. Air and cover, air and cover – sustaining the unspoken connection between them: little boy, wounded man.

That night his head lay on the pillow while his body was curled in the fetal position. He had not thought to close the blinds himself, and the lights from the nearby houses spotted the hill. He stared across his room at the louvered doors of his closet, out of which he had once imagined evil witches would escape to join the dragons beneath his bed. He no longer feared these things.

“Please don’t let Daddy die, Susie,” he whispered. “I need him.”

When I left my brother, I walked out past the gazebo and under the lights hanging down like berries, and I saw the brick paths branching out as I advanced.

I walked until the bricks turned to flat stones and then to small, sharp rocks and then to nothing but churned earth for miles and miles around me. I stood there. I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed. And as the light began to fade and the sky turn a dark, sweet blue as it had on the night of my death, I saw someone walking into view, so far away I could not at first make out if it was man or woman, child or adult. But as moonlight reached this figure I could make out a man and, frightened now, my breathing shallow, I raced just far enough to see. Was it my father? Was it what I had wanted all this time so desperately?

“Susie,” the man said as I approached and then stopped a few feet from where he stood. He raised his arms up toward me.

“Remember?” he said.

I found myself small again, age six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet.

“Grandaddy,” I said.

And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and he was fifty-six and my father had taken us to visit. We danced so slowly to a song that on Earth had always made my grandfather cry.

“Do you remember?” he asked.

“Barber!”

“Adagio for Strings,” he said.

But as we danced and spun – none of the herky-jerky awkwardness of Earth – what I remembered was how I’d found him crying to this music and asked him why.

“Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.” He had held me against him then, just briefly, and then I had run outside to play again with Lindsey in what seemed like my grandfather’s huge backyard.

We didn’t speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden movement that we’d read about in science class one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space. I pressed myself into my grandfather’s chest and smelled the old-man smell of him, the mothball version of my own father, the blood on Earth, the sky in heaven. The kumquat, skunk, grade-A tobacco.