In and out, I tell my lungs. In and out. I’ve got some scrapes, but I’m not seriously hurt. And Ruth … There are plenty of worse things she could be doing to herself. I sit there for a moment, just breathing, trying to remind myself of that. But Mom … Mom is going to feel hurt like she was the one getting jabbed with needles. It’s the deception and sneaking that’s really going to sting. Even from across the country I know how Mom’s face will look. Dad will have the iron jaw, but Mom will look at her hands like they’ve failed her, like they’ve been bitten. How can Ruth not understand that?

And I will know even less what to do except watch Ruth more closely and stay right by my mom, trying my best, as always, to keep the upbeat.

So I pick up my camera and hold it to my chest because that is something I know how to do. I’m right next to the cemetery gates and now that my legs are starting to work again, I stand and walk through into the wet, wet green, and the garden of aboveground vaults of white stone. Many of the graves come higher than my head and I start snapping pictures. Pictures of graves shaped like pyramids, and one covered over with stone-carved angel’s wings.

Behind the lens I lose my fear and all sense of time. I take a picture of the grave of someone named Ruth Pendergast, who’s got Sassy and classy to the end written across the front of her vault. I think my sister will like that one.

I keep walking deeper into the cemetery. The part of me wishing my mom and dad were here right now is still pulsing loudly over my whole body. Maybe I can text them. I could find the funniest name here and send it to Dad, and the oldest grave and text a picture to Mom.

Under one of the trees I find a sleek black crow’s feather. It’s long, all its bristles in perfect shape, and it glints in the sun, even more metallic than Ruth’s hair. With a blue tip it would pretty well match Ruth’s hair, actually. I scoop it up and set it carefully in my camera bag.

My meandering leads me toward a gigantic knobby oak with long, mossy, bony-looking limbs coming off in all directions. It’s seriously like something out of The Twilight Zone. There is sap oozing through cracks in the bark and I see a trail of ants crawling up through the tree like a maze. The ground has flattened out some, or at least it looks that way, since in this small corner of the cemetery, the graves are underground.