Trying to figure these things out is too hard. If he thinks or listens too much, his head hurts, and he falls asleep. He just wants to be outside, working in the garden, but when he looks out the window, summer is gone. John doesn’t know what month it is or what he’s supposed to do today. The people who make him do things—the women, the big man, his wife—come and go. Maybe they tell him what to do, but he’s not sure.

Other people come and go. A man with strange words that John can’t understand, but who hugs him and smiles. Another person he should know. A woman with long hair twisted into ropes. She is not here for him, he knows, but she comes anyway because she is . . . she is that way of being when a person is kind for no reason. Her voice makes him happy and sleepy. Like warm rain.

There is the man who was a boy but isn’t a boy anymore who comes, first to the place for sick people, then to the other place where his warm-rain friend was, and now to his grandfather’s house. Sometimes, he brings a baby. He is a father, this boy who is grown up now. They have dark hair, father and son, and the young man lets John hold the baby, who laughs.

Images flash through his head too fast to make sense—a girl with blond hair and freckles with that dark-haired boy, and colors, and John once held her hand as they crossed a street in a place with many lights. Once she cried because of that dark-haired boy who’s now a man.

Then, there’s nothing. Nothing but emptiness and gray and the horrible feeling of loss. Time passes, swirling past him, knocking him down, pulling him out into the sea of puzzling memories, and there’s nothing he can hold on to, so he falls asleep, and sleep is what he likes best.

— —

His wife comes in. Her name is sure in his mind. Barbara. His Barb. He’s not sure why they’re not in the little red house anymore. She says words, and he looks at her, smelling her good smell, loving her, wishing she wasn’t always leaving. But she is. She does.

— —

Then it’s later, or another day, and John can’t remember where he is. But the boy is here again with his little one, and a toolbox—toolbox jumps right into his head, and he knows it’s the right word. John reaches out and the man puts the baby into his arms and sits there a minute, his hand on the baby’s head, making sure John knows how to hold him.

He does.

The baby looks up at him with dark eyes, then smiles. John feels his mouth move, and he looks at . . .

. . . the name is coming . . .

 . . . Ned. Neil. Nick . . .

Noah!