‘Seriously?’ Again he sucks the vowels out, making it more like ‘srsly’. His head is down, focus on the screen in his lap, all the way to the Alyeska Resort carpark.

As soon as the engine is off, he flings the door open and runs. The wind pushes in, cold and hard, whistling around the edge of the door.

There are two Pokémon gyms here, one at the bear statue around the back and one at the mountain-man statue. He’s heading for the bear. There are also other gyms up on the slopes. I have promised Cedar we’ll find them once my knee is ready.

Across the carpark, two men with white paint are re-marking parking bays. No-one I know. I will my knee to work like a regular one, pull my hood up against the wind and set off after Cedar.

He’s standing on a rock near the bear when I get to him, his back to the nearby window. The window is tinted, but I can just make out an older couple inside the hotel watching him, maybe wondering if this hunched boy, still as a statue from behind, is anything to do with the bear.

‘I got a Carbone,’ he shouts, without looking up from the screen. ‘It’s got a mask that’s a skull.’

In the distance, beyond the lake and the trees, rain shifts over the lower ski slopes.

Who out there knows? Who knows about the baby that was, but isn’t? What is the right way to think about it, to talk about it? To hold onto it, and to let it go?

‘We’ve got two minutes before we start getting wet,’ I tell him. I can smell it on the wind too, the damp coming in.

He charges ahead when we get home as well. He runs up the steps and then waits at the front door, hand up to keep the drizzle from his eyes as he checks my progress. He watches me swing my legs out of the van and then pounds on the door so that his mother will let him in.

There’s a sheen of dampness on the grass and gravel, and the soil in the pots lined up at the base of the steps is dark and wet. The remnants of plants are still in them, the dead brown stalks of the heirloom tomato seedlings Lacy planted in late April. Manitoba and Glacier varieties, since they can fruit outside, even in Alaska. Lacy had done her research.

The planting took me back to the time in my childhood subsequently known as the Vegan Panic, when my family changed after my father’s first heart attack. Smoking, out. Lentils, in. Meditation, pots of cherry tomatoes and herbs. But it was a phase. The twentieth century and all its grand vices punched their way back in.

April had none of that edge to it, no pacing with jaw muscles working hard on Nicorettes, no rummaging in drawers for the last Panadeine for caffeine withdrawal headaches, swearing, swearing.