My mother never seemed to fully recover, from losing a child, or from having them. Our existence exhausted her. We were never the von Trapp family, not Lucas and me. We didn’t sing, we cried. We howled. We were messy. We had bad dispositions. As we grew, we sometimes caught a look of disappointment on our mother’s face. Then we thought the same thing: the other baby would have been lovely, neat, affectionate. The other baby would not have disappointed her.

We were too young to know that what we were seeing on her face wasn’t disappointment, but lifelong sorrow, the kind that chisels its way into every movement, posture, and expression. It was all too easy to project any feeling of unworthiness onto Baby B. We saw so clearly what life would have been like if he had lived. My mother’s perpetual exhaustion would lift like fog burning off the water. My parents would stop looking at us with mystified, resentful expressions. They loved us, we knew, and they loved each other, but they were unhappy on some level that we never made sense of.

From the moment we could dream, we dreamed about Baby B. In Lucas’s dreams he was bright and alive, but nonsensical. He slid down banisters and snake holes, drove giant cars and reindeer, hid in cellars and knotholes. Lucas followed him through rooms that opened into other rooms. Chased him along strange beaches, where he disappeared into a series of underwater caves, his feet—or maybe fins—flashing behind him.

My dreams were logical, like me. In my dreams, we were in a classroom and a teacher was calling roll, and Colin was there along with the other children, raising his hand, saying here. My subconscious was forever trying to line us up, put everyone in order. Lucas’s subconscious was attempting to break the rules of reality, create a world in which Colin could return. Those were the ways we dealt with loss, even as children.

But it wasn’t just that we missed him. There’s a kind of peace in missing someone you’ll never see again. We didn’t have that peace. There was always a sense that we might see him again. Lucas believed with all his heart that Baby B would come back to us. And he wasn’t alone. My mother believed it, too. And maybe I did as well, some small unruly fraction of my psyche that rebelled against order and logic.

“He’s a spirit now,” my mother used to say. “He lives in the air all around us. He’s waiting to be born to us again.”

We’d thought she meant she was having another baby.

“No. I can’t have any more babies,” she said.

“That’s okay,” Lucas said. “He can wait for Lydia.”