This is where the details get harder to remember. I don’t remember what happened between my saying “Hey, hey, hey, wake up” and when I pissed myself. I don’t remember how long I stood in the bright woods, feet in the hard mud, holding the boy. I don’t remember making it back to our empty house, don’t remember how I knew where I lived. I could not see. I don’t remember doing it, but when he died—for he did die, a detail that can’t change or be altered—I must have stared too long at the ball of burning life in the sky, searing my cornea and lens and making the world a black blur.

In the grassy ditch that Frick never mowed I waited, and I felt the wet in my pants growing cold, felt the boy’s dead body in my arms. There is a real memory here—as if for a brief moment I could see again—where I watched Mom park her car behind Frick’s truck, as if to seal him in, to never let him leave again. I couldn’t see—I know that—yet the visual memory exists in my brain: Frick gets out of his truck, the three medicine pouches made of deer hide he wore only for ceremony swinging across his neck as he shuts the door. He grabs all three with one hand to stop them, and then he takes one off. He hands it to Paige, whose hair is messy, part of it dried stiff, part of it stuck to her face—I would never ask Mom how they found her or how all that happened—and she puts the medicine bag over her head and then hides it under her shirt. Mom goes to the end of the driveway and checks the gray mailbox.

Frick is on the steps, head down, keys jingling, looking for the right one. Paige is behind him, waiting, but then she returns to the truck, reaches in the bed, and pulls out Bedogi’s ash basket. She carries it over her shoulder like she’s carrying a sleeping bag, like she’s erected her tent to mark the ground her own, like she has finally arrived at the place where she plans to stay.

She sees me. Paige sees me. By the woods, her earth and ground upturned in my arms. She sets the basket on the hood of Frick’s truck and comes to me, comes to Bedogi. She stares at him until she turns blue, and all I can say is that I cannot see, I cannot see, yet I can see me see her.