JOEL

Joel sank into a padded chair in the funeral parlor’s lobby. He stared at a painting of an incandescent Jesus looming over a man sliding out from beneath a rusted truck.

He thought of the jersey that hung on his brother’s wall: #1 CHRIST.

At the thought of his brother, he craved pills.

Joel had given his statement twice at the station, once directly to the sheriff and the county attorney and again to Mayfield and Clark, a plate of untouched sandwiches resting between them on a sticky table. In each instance, Joel repeated exactly what he had told Mayfield on Saturday: he had last seen Dylan at the football field.

Joel did not tell the police about the painkillers he had discovered in Dylan’s room.

He had been asked, twice, if he could imagine a connection between his own return to Bentley and his brother’s death. Joel had thought Mayfield was joking the first time he asked. No, Joel had told the investigator, he couldn’t, and finally Mayfield had seemed satisfied with his answer, or had at least let it go.

Joel had not let it go.

Because there was a memory he couldn’t escape. Because that rainy night after the game, when he had texted Dylan, Don’t worry, I’m getting you out of this shit hole, his brother had begun to type a response he’d never finished. Joel remembered those three little dots on his screen filling and emptying, filling and emptying. Remembered the fear that had roiled his gut at the sight of them. That fear returned to him now, even though—he thought—the worst had already happened.

A door opened and Mr. Ortiz, the town’s mortician, stepped soundlessly into the little lobby, followed by Mayfield and Clark. The mortician gave Joel a well-practiced, sympathetic nod and ushered him toward another, more discreet door, half-hidden by a fern.

The back of the funeral home had a chill that settled fast into the bones. A line of humming fluorescent lights ran above a cavernous room lined with pumps and tubes. A dozen wigs in every shade of brown. A grinning Bison bobblehead perched atop a refrigerator.

A table draped by a white sheet.

A shape under the sheet about six feet long.

Mr. Ortiz asked Joel to attest to being Dylan’s brother, made him sign here and here and here.

They approached the body.

“In the city you would do this on a TV monitor in the other room,” said Mr. Ortiz, one hand poised over the sheet, sounding suddenly as if he’d lost his nerve. “We would understand if you’d rather wait until he might be moved.”

Joel shook his head, and the mortician folded down a portion of the sheet.

His brother had died afraid. Dylan’s mouth was locked open in a gasp. Dull brown bruises covered both sides of his face. One blow had ripped open the skin above the left eye. Another had turned his temple into a single wide scab. Joel noticed there was no blood on the face. Where it wasn’t bruised the skin was a marbled white.