I was sure there was nothing to see inside the coffin. It made powerful sense now. It explained everything. My mother hadn’t dropped—or thrown—Baby B over the railing of the ferry. She’d given him away that night, left him in the care of some other family, and returned alone, and he was out there still. He might be Cole, or he might be some other man. But I had another brother, still alive, still in this world, which meant I wasn’t alone. We weren’t alone after all.

I realized I was crying. Covered with rain, and dirt, and now tears.

“Have you actually gone crazy?” Tuck said.

“Maybe,” I said.

Once, at the booth, Kelly Cardoza had handed me her baby to hold while she ran into Jack’s to make a phone call. I set it on my lap. It turned its head to look at me, curious, wary. I experienced a complex feeling. On the one hand, I felt comfortable, as if I were biologically programmed to know what to do, but it was like the programming was blinking in and out. One minute I found the baby beautiful. The next minute I was horrified by the drool and mouth empty of teeth. The baby rocked back and forth like an animal. But the baby also felt good to hold. Felt solid and right. Like the right-sized stone in my pocket. I held the baby for ten minutes. We looked around together. The baby put its hands in my hair and then on either side of my face. The baby touched my nose.

When we lifted the lid of the coffin, I knew we were looking at a baby right away. He was there, and not there, his bones skin flesh hair withered as a ghost. His clothing was only dark shreds now, like cobwebs, but he was a perfect shape there in his tiny coffin, the bones visible under the flesh. He was the shape of bones, even if the bones were covered.

“Holy fuck,” Tuck said. We sat on the edge of the hole in the earth, both of us, looking into the coffin. I was shaking I realized. Soaking wet. The rain had poured down the neck of the raincoat, drenching my sweater.

“I can’t touch him,” I said. I wanted to pick him up. I wanted to hold him in my arms like I’d held that other baby. But I knew he might break into a hundred pieces if I picked him up. I knew the flesh would come off, and the bones would scatter.

“No,” Tuck agreed. “Don’t touch him.”

His whole head was the size of my hand, smaller than my hand. He had eyes. He had lips. His nose, though, was mostly missing, two blank holes in a skull. I felt so sad about his nose.