Instead, we set up on the back porch, overlooking the woods. TJ brings Jim Beam, and he and I take turns sipping straight from the bottle, feet up on the railing, creaking back in the rocking chairs my dad built for my mother when I was a baby. My father’s mess has even spread to the porch: stacks of plywood, old air-conditioning screens, salvaged pipes, and electronics that haven’t worked in decades. The view has hardly changed since I was a kid, only gotten a little wilder, a little overgrown. I can see the hard glint of the sun off the reservoir—not the water itself, exactly, but little solar flares, as if something behind the trees is catching fire.

If I breathe deeply, I imagine I can smell the lingering smoke of a bonfire.

Only the present is solid. The past is smoke.

“You need any help sorting through your dad’s stuff, you let me know,” TJ says. He twists to grab the whiskey bottle with his “good” hand and we drink for a while in silence.

“What happened to your arm, TJ?” I ask him, when I’m drunk enough to think it’s a good idea. I’ve heard of phantom limb, of course, of people feeling a twinge in their missing fingers or getting an itch on an amputated kneecap. But I never heard of anyone with the opposite problem.

“IED,” he said. “Iraq, 2004. Blew up half our unit. I got lucky.” Then: “My friend Walt lost his head. He always made me swear I’d take his wedding ring back home to his wife, but I couldn’t get it. Too many bodies, and people blasting us from all sides. Eventually we had to pull out.”

I nod, even though his story doesn’t answer my question. Maybe the past doesn’t have to explain everything. Maybe it can’t.

—

It doesn’t take me long to pack up the rental. The hardest part is trying to move Kaycee’s paintings. I can’t just carry them openly. So I wrapped them and tied them all together, but now they have a gruesome kind of weight to them. I imagine I’ll have to cart them with me wherever I go, forever.

Hannah, Condor’s daughter, has returned from her grandparents’ house with a new toy: a plastic tablet she keeps about an inch from her nose. But she glances up from her perch on the front stoop when I wheel my suitcase out to my car.

“Are you leaving?” she asks me, very solemn, and when I nod she scrunches up her face. “Are you going back to Chicago?” She says Chicago like someone might say the moon.

“Nah.” I still have to dispose of my father’s things, get his house in order, sort through the accumulation of his junk. But my rental contract in Barrens is up and there’s already a new tenant scheduled to move in.

Maybe all along this is what my future held—what I tried so hard to escape, and what, ultimately, is inescapable. Time isn’t a line, but a corkscrew, and the harder I’ve pushed, the more I’ve drilled back into the past. “I’m going home.”