And now, Harvey’s teacher says he wants to meet with her again to continue the conversation, and she isn’t sure if he is asking her out or feeling sorry for her and thinking Harvey’s situation needs some really serious one-on-one face-to-face time. But she has been afraid to go, because what if he has something else on his mind, and she knows that she can’t reject him even if she decides she wants to.

That time with the giant Hefty trash bags, she found abandoned nests of all kinds on their porch with the appliances—squirrel and mouse and bird. And she found empty toilet-paper rolls and hot-water bottles and loads of nail clippers and old rolls of duct tape, which together made a horrible story if that’s all you had to go on. She was afraid to reach her hand in drawers without shining a flashlight to make sure there wasn’t a snake or a rat or a black widow or a brown recluse spider, something that would multiply and you would never get rid of, like in that movie Gremlins that Jason loved to watch, and they looked so cute, like those Furbies that everybody had to have that one Christmas, but they weren’t cute at all. They were really, really scary! And destructive.

Jason sent a text last week that was indecipherable. Butt-dialed. An accident. Rushing to class. She wrote back: I love you. Come see us soon.

OK, Mom. Soon.

Any nice girls?

He didn’t answer, and she knows she shouldn’t have done that; he needs his space. He had told her he didn’t have a lot of spare time, that he has a heavy schedule, all kinds of projects and research going on.

“So, are you alone now?” She gets asked that question a lot these days, a question she was asked back when no one knew where her brother had gone. Just recently in the grocery store, Harvey was spinning a rack and she was thinking about how a head of cauliflower looks like a brain, like those growths you sometimes see on a tree; there was a tree in her hometown, not far from here, that looked like that, a giant cyst or tumor on its trunk, its limbs reaching upward to get away from it. And why did she even move back this close to where she started, anyway, except thinking her brother might be there, that she might suddenly find him. “It was an accident,” he’d told her. “I swear it was.”

“What do you remember?” people asked, and all she could come up with was a number and the words do not remove.