We made it to the yard, and it was like a battlefield, the grass dotted with white hailstones that seemed to glow in the dark, the barn roof pinging with every stone that fell. I saw funnel clouds whip and whirl in the sky, swirling like exits out of this world, gateways to the next. I didn’t know if they were real tornadoes or if I was having a vision. I realized I never really knew what was there and what wasn’t, actually, and maybe it didn’t matter at all. Maybe the old man at the gas station was right and time was just a dot, and everything happened all at once, in one great thunderclap. Maybe my visions were glimpses into other worlds where other possibilities happened, and any moment Murphy and I could slip through from one to the next and never even know it.

Reality was flimsy like that, I realized, just a series of open doors and long hallways, all of us passing from world to world and existence to existence and never once being the wiser. Somewhere out there was a universe where Mom had never died and Jeremiah had never died and Murphy and I had never been born, and it seemed like a good world, possibly a better one, all the congregants of the Farm still here, laboring together happy and beautiful with no need for Murphy and me at all. It was strange to imagine a better world without yourself in it.

Lightning struck the barn, sparks flying like a flicked cigarette from a car window, the embers scattering across the black pavement of the sky. I covered my head and sprinted through the mud, two steps behind Murphy, toward Grandma’s house. It loomed blackly at the far end of the field, a many-eyed monster in the dark.

We made it to the back door and scrambled inside, muddy and wet and hail-pelted and terrified.

“I’ll grab the keys to the Trans Am,” she said, “and we’ll get the hell out of here.”

“What about Grandma?” I said.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said. “Grandma will be fine. We’ll write her a letter. Let’s just grab the keys and go.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving without Grandma. You get the keys, and I’ll wake her up. You don’t even have to talk to her, okay?”

“Whatever,” she said. “Let’s just hurry.”

I sprinted to Grandma’s room, and Murphy ran past me to ours. Grandma lay sleeping in her bed, her face calm and still and peaceful, like it was the best sleep she’d ever had in her life, like it was nothing but good dreams playing on repeat in her brain. I almost hated to wake her. “Grandma, get up. Horace’s here.”

She rolled over and blinked her eyes at me.

“Jeremiah?”