After the crash, the waiting period to get news had been unbearable. When his mother was finally able to call, she said that she had waited until she knew for certain. “No one could have survived where he was,” his grandmother told him in quiet, clipped words. She was at the kitchen table, and she stared at the cut glass saltshaker, moved it in a small circle, as she spoke. “Your mother isn’t able to travel,” she told him. “I’ll go and take you to her when the time is right.”

It had all come back to him those first times he and Lil talked about it, and it was back now with full impact, given Lil’s obsession to document and remember. Perhaps that was part of his connection to Lil in the beginning; maybe he needed someone to make him think about it all. She was the only person he had told everything to, and she was solid and attentive, as strong-seeming as his grandmother had been, there at the kitchen table. He was grown before he was able to imagine what his grandmother had gone through. “Oh, that poor woman,” Lil had said, and shaken her head, both hands holding her cup of coffee. “How old was she?”

Sixty-four. Frank mouths the number now, way too young to have lost a husband and then a son. His grandmother, who seemed an ancient ruin at that point in his life, was more than twenty years younger than he is now.

“I’ll take you to her,” his grandmother had said, as if for a visit, something temporary, which is what it was, since school was still in session.

There were two other people recovering there in Preston’s house: an older woman from Connecticut, her pelvis crushed and her shoulder broken, who also lost her husband; and the woman’s niece, who, they whispered, would be lucky if she ever walked again. A nurse came and went daily, and so did Preston, bringing food and whatever they needed. He had given over his house and was staying down the road with his sister.

Frank and his grandmother stayed in a nearby town at the Lorraine Hotel, a big brick building that looked out onto the small bus station and large tobacco warehouses. The railroad tracks were right there, running alongside the river, and the sound of the passing trains was a constant reminder. The crash was the reason so many were there, and had been for months, first to identify and claim bodies, and then to attend to those like his mother, too badly hurt to travel. The small two-story hospital in town was filled to capacity with those injured, and remained so for months.