Mom loved him, and I guess it was for that reason she went to get him that day, but why she left me to tend to the boy I did not know. Once, about ten years back, I asked her why she left me there with the baby. I had brought her a Coffee Pot Sandwich and over soggy bread in her smoky elder apartment she told me she hadn’t, that she took Bedogi and me with her, that it was so long ago and I was a child, so I couldn’t remember. But I remember, and that’s not the story I know, not the story I tell or have told, and not the one I will continue to tell—although I tried out Mom’s story once on a therapist, the version where Mom brought us with her, and it ended where it was supposed to. I have to tell it how it went, and it went like this: she didn’t take us. But I can see how she’d believe her version, because she had to believe it.

While Mom was gone, I occasionally checked on Bedogi. He slept most of the morning, and so I kept quiet in the house, listening for him to wake, dreading the moment he would cry and I had to do something about it. But he didn’t cry. From the living room I heard him sneeze, and when I went to him he was kicking the air, his hands in fists as small as cotton balls. I sat on the bed, and it jostled him, maybe even scared him a bit.

“It’s me,” I told him. “Mom—well, Grammy, your Grammy, not my Grammy—went to find Frick. You’d think she’d go look for your mom, wouldn’t you?”

In my memory he kicked, a little Yes.

“She’ll come back,” I told him, meaning his mother. “And she’ll be better.”

While I spoke to Bedogi in that way, I kept my fears to myself, particularly that none of them would come back, ever, and that the sun would blow up.