He pointed the beam of the projector through the glass walls of the box and watched the gases begin to swirl and thicken. He stood there that way for a long time. There was one thing Nate had learned from years of milking cows and studying constellations—patience.

At first, when he saw the one dim flicker shooting through the box, he thought it was a dream. It felt like he was an astronaut floating up in space somewhere. His dad was there, and they were off on some intergalactic adventure. What he was seeing were the trails left by spaceships or meteor showers or an aurora boreal is. Then he realized he was awake, and it was real, and he had managed to capture inside this box the sight he’d been waiting to see for so long. Here, in the middle-of-the-night darkness, was tangible evidence of a stellar explosion—the death of a star whose remnants had traveled millions of miles over millions of years to get to this implement shed in Montana, on the last night Nate would ever spend in the only home he’d ever known. And in all that time no living creature had ever seen what he was witnessing at this very moment. This particular spidery track of light, flashing for a nanosecond through the chamber, then moving on.

First it was only one, like at the science fair. Then another. Then suddenly the rays were shooting through the cloud chamber like atomic billiards, crashing and bouncing off one another, colliding and intersecting. It reminded Nate of that moment that Junie loved at the beginning of “Disney” every Sunday night, when Tinkerbell waved her wand and sprinkled fireworks across their television screen. Only this was much better.

He imagined how it would be if grief were something visible, like cosmic rays. He imagined what the airspace around their kitchen table would have looked like, these last months, if there had been a light to shine on it or some chemical compound to pour onto the linoleum that made it so they could see all the things they had been feeling.

Maybe, if they could have seen what was there, it would have resembled an animal—a monster—lurking in the corner. Not in the corner, even, but smack in the middle of the room. On the kitchen table, snoring loudly and giving off a terrible odor.

It came to Nate, standing in the darkness of the implement shed, that he and his sister had stared down two very different kinds of sorrow over this last, hard stretch of months. One was the sadness that came from having for your dad a man who didn’t want to be alive anymore. The sadness of a rifle and a bullet and blood.