But something had changed. Just a few days before, I would’ve held the phone away as she cried, and as the raindrops combined on the window and slid. Now I pressed the phone close, pressed hard until my ear was hot and red and her voice filled up my head.

4.

I arrived in Everett in the early afternoon and found the address. It was a modest, two-story home in a neighborhood fizzing with rain. A rusty bike was locked to a low chain-link fence around a front yard choked with dandelions. When I opened the gate, I heard a dog bark inside the house. It caught the attention of some men across the street who’d been fiddling under the hood of a pickup. They straightened and stared at me.

The front curtains wavered as I opened the screen door and knocked. A middle-aged woman came to greet me in a long denim button-up shirt over jeans, her reading glasses on a strap. She had bright-blond hair, shallow eyes of powder blue, and a face wrinkled like paper that’s been bunched up and flattened out. Between her legs, the barking German shepherd tried nosing through, and she kept pushing his head away.

“Yes?”

I introduced myself and, not knowing who she was, simply said, “I’m writing a story about Eva Kriss.”

“Really? Eva?”

“Are you—”

“Her mother, April. It’s okay, it’s okay,” she cooed to the dog, scratching beneath his collar.

She invited me into the wood-paneled living room. Beside the recliner, a king-size cigarette burned in a crystal ashtray, the smoke mingling with cherry air freshener. The 700 Club was playing on TV. April muted it.

She said, “Will you hold on a minute?”

“No problem.”

She hurried upstairs. The German shepherd sat and regarded me from the doorway.

I took out my notebook and glanced over the photos on the wooden mantle. I found Dr. Kriss’s graduation portrait from the University of Washington, a shining purple sash about her shoulders.

April came back downstairs. “Eva was the first Kriss to go to college,” she said when she saw where I was looking. She picked up the photo, frowning at how dusty it was. “We weren’t against it, but we wanted to keep her close.”

“So she grew up here?”

“Eva lived right in this house until the day she went to college.”

April indicated a display by the television, a kind of military shrine, glowing with electric candles. I saw a photo of Dr. Kriss in her navy uniform, standing against a desert background, along with portraits of several other soldiers, all men, from the Second World War to Vietnam. Two flags were folded in triangular cases of mahogany.

“My father and brothers all served,” April explained, “so I was very proud when Eva enlisted. This may be hard to understand, but she was both daughter and son to us.”