The smell from upstairs is unbearable, so overpowering that I can’t function. It’s not even the reek that bothers me so much as the reminder. I can’t go a single second without being utterly aware that my family is dead. I see photos of my brother pinned with magnets on the fridge, and I revel in his regional championship basketball team picture even as I smell him decomposing. I see Mom and Paul’s wedding album on the coffee table, remember the way they kissed after saying “I do”—like giddy, ridiculous teenagers—and then the reek flashes me back to their dying embrace.

My family deserves a decent burial. Some kind of marker, something as immortal as marble or granite that will forever point to these precious souls and the lives they had.

I’m not strong enough to drag the bodies outside. Even if I were, I’m not sure the bodies are . . . whole. And the radio message rings in my head: Do not bury the deceased. It’s the only voice of authority I’ve heard since I woke up. It feels good to obey it.

So I’ll let nature take its course. I’ll even help nature along. This would please Mom, I know. The staunch environmentalist who forced us to reduce, reuse, recycle. She’d like the idea of being part of the circle of life.

I grab a yellow bath towel from the linen closet and wrap it around my nose and mouth. Then I dash into my parents’ room—refusing to look at the bed—and I fling open all the windows in the bedroom. I pull on the tabs to yank the screens out of place, and toss them to the yard below. Then I run into the master bathroom and do the same to that window too.

I rush back into the hallway, slam the double doors shut, and bend over against them, heaving.

After getting my breath back, I seal off the doorframe from top to bottom with plastic wrap and duct tape. Then I do the same to Ryan’s door.

The crows can have them all, with my blessing.

But by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs, I’m sobbing so hard my back aches. Ryan. Mom. Paul. My family.

Mom never lost faith, no matter how bad things were with the Sperm Donor. And I guess she was right not to. Our lives got so much better.

As the sun sets, I light a candle and sing Mom’s favorite hymn into the twilight. My voice is too loud in a vast silence, and no one will hear it but me and Emmaline and the birds. But on the off chance that Mom was right about an afterlife, that she can look down on me now, I want her to know I’ll be okay. I sing with my whole breath:

When peace like a river attendeth my way