But witnessing his death is exactly what happens, because just as I’m about to avert my eyes, Caleb smiles. Not a wide smile, hardly even a little one. Almost imperceptible. A gentle pull of the mouth, a look of satisfaction, as if he just realized everything in the world is going to be okay. That look is followed seconds later by his death, which I realize only because there is a sudden, indescribable absence of energy in the room. He doesn’t change, his gaze still fixed in my direction, but there is no more life in those eyes. I don’t know how I can tell this. I just know.

I turn my head and look at the wall on the staircase behind, to the exact spot where Caleb had his final view of anything in his ephemeral world.

There’s a painting wrapped in an ornate golden frame. The painting depicts a cornfield, and the sunlight from behind lights up the stalks in transcendent shades of green and yellow. In the distance, the sky is black, the color of a deep and painful bruise. A thunderstorm that’s just passed by, leaving the field wet and fresh, alive. And in the middle of the painting, a rainbow. It looks close but just out of reach. A thing to touch, if one could ever manage such a thing. It looks solid enough to be real. I picture it soft, spongy, like a long piece of taffy stretched out for miles.

The rainbow is the last thing Caleb Benner saw.

I like to think it made him smile.

“Cora,” my father says, breaking the silence. “Go to the garage and get a tarp.”

Fifty-Three

November 16

Present Day, 7:43 p.m.

I wake in a jolt, slick with sweat. Disoriented, with a sickening pit in my stomach, like I’m coming down with the flu. I blink. Two, three times. Push myself up.

My world comes back after a moment, and I regret it does. Early evening. I’m on the couch in the living room, where I’d lain down to rest my eyes after getting home from Alec’s house. I must’ve fallen asleep. What once was a threat of night is now a reality. One lamp shines on a side table, but everything else is dark.

I get up, stumbling in the hangover of a too-long late-afternoon nap. Head to the window. The gleaming, sublime view of the white morning snow is replaced by the sight of swirls of flakes streaming in the orange haze of the streetlamp, like a swarm of locusts delivering plague.

I shake my head, as if that will dispatch the sticky remnants of the dream. This time, it took me all the way to the end. The horrible, suffocating end.

And that picture. The cornfield and the rainbow. That part was new, and as far as I can recall, the only bit of the dream I’ve ever had that wasn’t true to life. We never had a picture like that growing up. It was just inserted there by my subconscious, a safety valve to relieve the pressure on my brain. To convince me that maybe Caleb really was happy at the very end.