The only information I have is that the boxes don’t seem to have been sent from anywhere — or at least haven’t passed through the post office — which may mean they have come from a neighbour close by who hands them directly to the postie. It is mail day, and another outlandish idea takes hold: I’ll go and catch the mailman on the road and ask him for any mail he has for me. If he has boxes with him, I’ll know the sender has to be someone from closer to town than where I meet up with the mailman. That is, of course, if there are more boxes coming. If he doesn’t have any boxes for me, I won’t know if he was never going to have them, or if he is yet to pick them up.

I know he leaves Stony Creek at around eleven. If I get going now, I’ll catch him not far out of town. If he has boxes today, I’ll catch him closer to Stony Creek on the next mail day. I run across the garden to the garage, and feel the pleasure of the urgency and my decisiveness. I drive fast, unjustifiably fast, but I’m on a mission to solve a mystery and make my son proud.

At the funeral, when they took the coffin away, I could hardly stand, even though the too-small box was on its way to our garden. That was when I first really believed in James’s death. Until then I had been fighting it with everything I could fight it with. Even when we entered the church for the service, I felt strong and positive because of that iron-clad denial. People must have thought I was strong, the way I smiled warmly and shook hands meaningfully. But the sight of the coffin going into the hearse, with all those weeping friends looking on, was simply too much for even the greatest barriers of delusion. Our only son, James, was dead. And I didn’t want to be me.