She says nothing when she pulls him from my arms, the blanket dropping to the ground, and carries him past Frick standing at the bottom of the steps, and past Mom who takes me by the shoulder and picks up the fallen blanket and says, “This didn’t happen, this didn’t happen, not like this,” and she says it until it’s made true for the story. Inside, she sits me at the kitchen table and for a long while there is nothing but Mom’s crying and a toilet flushing, and when Frick returns he says he will call, but Mom stops him with such a loud scream. Mom is the one who picks up the phone, and she is the one who lies. “They’re not taking my baby,” she says, dialing 911.

The police and ambulance arrive. Paige sits on the couch with Bedogi in her arms, and she stares at him so intently that the police and EMTs standing around her asking questions do not exist. The house is quiet, even with all the EMTs and police talking and questioning. I stare at the kitchen table the entire time. I don’t change my wet pants. I sit there, head down. My eyes hurt and water (it feels like sand is back there), and when I begin to cry I wonder which pain is eliciting the tears.

Mom tells the officer taking the statement that we were all at camp having a ceremony and prayer for Paige. Mom says Bedogi was awake when we left camp, and when we got home we thought he was sleeping. When she finishes the story—the story she would believe, that Bedogi and I were with her the whole time, that he died in his sleep sometime on our way back—Paige speaks.

“He can’t see?” Paige says. “What does he mean he can’t see? He can see, right?” Whether or not somebody plans to ask for clarification, we are all interrupted by the phone ringing. Everyone stops—Paige, Mom, Frick, myself, the officers with pens and notepads, and the EMT crouching down, hand on Paige’s shoulder—and we listen to the phone ring on the kitchen table. We wait for it to end. But it rings and rings and rings, and regardless of how our own story’s details will work us for the rest of our lives, I cannot have been the only one to know who it was, why they were calling, and how much it stung and still stings to hear a phone go off.

. . .