“Dad, I can’t stop seeing—”

His voice broke, and I heard him sob.

“It gets better, Alex. Trust me. You come home, we’ll talk.”

After a few seconds he regained control of himself. “It’ll be at least three days before I get out of here. The infection has to clear up.”

“Whatever it takes. I’ll be home when you get back. Did you call your mother?”

“Julie did. To tell her I was in the hospital. I’ll call her now.”

“You and Julie?”

“We’re good—I think. And, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Dad, I couldn’t tell you about my flying over here.”

“Don’t worry about that, Alex. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Dad. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

After I dropped the phone in the cup holder, Glenna said, “Alex is okay?”

I nodded.

“Elaine asked me to remind you to be in touch when you heard.”

I nodded again. While Alex had been missing, I thought that if he turned up safe, I’d feel like popping a cork on a magnum of champagne, but my relief was matched by a glacial fury at my son for scaring me senseless. All the hours of waiting to learn whether he was dead or alive, all of the rage, sadness, guilt, and the remembered fragments of his childhood—teaching him to hit a baseball and shoot a basketball, carrying him to bed and reading him Goodnight Moon so often I could recite it by heart, and stumbling sleepily into his room in the middle of the night to pour him a spoon of cough syrup or comfort him after a nightmare—swept over me like a river breaching a levee, and to say that I began to cry would be to sugarcoat the experience.

One minute I was staring out the windshield to the southern shore of the creek, where birch trees, white and spidery, erupted in explosions of light against the wall of evergreens, and the next minute I was weeping uncontrollably. In my mind my car was transformed into a cage, and I rocked back and forth, hurling myself against the bars. The shoulder harness of my seat belt scratched my neck when my forehead hit the steering wheel, and I was vaguely conscious of Glenna’s hands on my shoulders, trying to hold me. All I saw as I wept was the watery outline of her face and that her lips were moving. I couldn’t decipher what she was saying because the one sound I heard was a horrific, guttural cry, like somebody dying in great pain, and not until Glenna unbuckled her seat belt and leaned across me to press the buttons that opened every window in the car, and a frigid blast of air lashed across my face, did I understand the hellish cry had been coming from me.

After a while, I started shivering and grew quiet. My overcoat was in the backseat, and I buttoned my corduroy sports jacket. Then it dawned on me that if I wanted to warm up, the wiser choice was to raise the windows.