And now, Frank does see. He understands how memories of what was good can be so painful you might choose not to look. He understands the desire to disappear, like an animal in hiding. When no one comes to the front door of the house, he walks to the far edge of the lot, through the brambles, blackberry thorns clinging to his clothes and scratching the backs of his hands. The tall, spindly pines tower over him, and there are all the sounds he loved as a boy: the squirrels and the birds. The small strip of trees buffers the highway noise, but when he was a boy there was no highway, just miles and miles of woods.

He had always kept the hatch open for light and air, and he could lie there and see the sky. It was a place to be alone—no baby screaming, nobody asking him to help with something. He kept his matchbook collection there, old marbles, flattened pennies, and in later years, right before he left to go to school, a can or two of Falstaff and a church key to open them. Frank’s mother had called it a grave, but it was more like a tomb, or what he imagined someone waking to the afterlife might find. When he told Lil all of this on one of their early meetings, she said it sounded like his whole career could be traced right back to that time—a hole in the earth in a small town in eastern North Carolina, “a blip along the tracks.” That’s what he had called it, and he liked how closely she had paid attention, parroting the words right back to him. He liked that she didn’t laugh.

The place is so overgrown it takes Frank a while to get his bearings; the sycamore tree at the back of the lot that had once stood over the cellar is no longer there. From here, he can see the screened porch has been closed in with cheap plywood, on which someone has written Keep out. A big dog is sprawled nearby in the sun.

What does Tomb Time mean? Lil had written that in a note. Is that a course title?