Toward the end of her life, she talked more and more about his father, when it was just the two of them, things like: Do you remember that hill where your father and I took you sledding? Do you remember how your father had written phone exchanges right there on the kitchen wall in a pencil he sharpened with my paring knife? Do you remember how dark his eyes were, and that he had a little dark mole on his left cheek?

“I saved you,” his brother, Horace, liked to say to their mother as a child, and he continued on into adulthood, especially when he became a nephrologist. “Mom’s kidneys saved her life, and I was the reason for all that pressure on her bladder,” he said. Frank tired of the joke, but their mother never seemed to; she would smile, a hand pressed to her abdomen, as if it were all happening again, as if for just a second her husband was still sleeping comfortably in his darkened seat.

Horace was named for a young sweet-faced Eagle Scout who ran telegrams and helped Frank’s mother make contact in the days following the wreck. That’s how they got the news: a telegram.

His mother ran into that Horace—Frank called him the real Horace—a few times over the years; he grew up to become a lawyer, like his father before him, a well-loved pillar of the community, which Frank’s mother always said did not surprise her one bit. She said that night, December 16, had pulled all the communities together in a way that would warm your heart if it weren’t so badly broken. His mother always quoted his dad about sleep, work, kindness—such power to quote the dead! But if Preston was nearby, she never really talked about their private life, the days sledding and the things that had made them laugh; that was a part of herself she let only Frank see, and then just in brief glimpses, which usually led to her getting very quiet and turning away.

It is hard now, on this hot June day, to conjure that night, to pull the ghosts in around him. The tracks extend as far as Frank can see, the sun glaring. This has been a place of comfort; in those early years, he kept digging and finding things, never as good as the Captain Midnight badge, but things nonetheless, all in a jar and stashed in the old hiding place of that childhood home. And maybe it’s long gone, but maybe it’s not. Maybe it waits, like treasures in a tomb, and that’s why it’s important for him to go there and see. And Lil has encouraged that part of it all; she said she wanted to see everything that he stashed away.