He picks up one of the pieces of the jar, draws a circle in the dirt as he did many times when shooting marbles, then slips it into his pocket. People often need closure; they need to see certain people or say words they have meant to say and, for whatever reason, didn’t. His mother had apologized for taking him from his home, and Preston had to tell Frank what he had heard that night over seventy years before. Last words. People needing closure.

But not Lil. She just went to sleep and didn’t wake. There were no hiccups, no hearing voices or seeing people off in a corner, no smelling or hearing another place, as Frank’s grandfather had done. “Good night, Frank,” she had said, as she did every night, with a pat on his chest, a kiss on the cheek, and then she turned on her left side and went to sleep.

Perhaps she had said all she needed to say—in her notes and scraps and reminders—and maybe if he sticks around and pays attention, he will hear their private word; maybe she will still have something more to say. Becca keeps asking about their word and probably will again tonight when she brings his dinner, as she has done for the past two months while they go through things, and now he is filled with panic that he left that note.

Lil would be furious with him, both that he left such a burdensome goodbye in Becca’s hands and, more so, that he wrote their word for someone else to know. I don’t care if she is our daughter, she would say. That’s our word, our business.

The only thing worse than Lil mad was Lil afraid, and she had been afraid in this last year—a fear of loss, a fear of forgetting. He wants to tell her that he and Jeff have talked on the phone several times without a single argument, and he wants to assure her that he’ll check the weather in Boston every day, just as she always did. He wants her to know that recent articles offer proof that the Neanderthals were communicating with others after all, and that he’s sorry they didn’t get back to Florence, he’s so sorry, and he will never tell anyone their word and he will not hasten things. “Not today,” he says. “Not today.”

He looks at his watch and breathes a deep sigh; there’s enough time to get home before Becca arrives, enough time to stand here a little longer, the wall cool against his back as he breathes in the familiar damp smell and waits for that faraway whistle, waits as the train comes closer and closer—vibrations coursing through the earth as it passes—and then fades into the distance of the late afternoon and disappears on that northbound track.

Acknowledgments