Dad was crying on and off, sometimes silent tears rolling from his eyes that might have been from the dust anyway. Other times his whole body shook with sobs. Henry sat on the floor in the corner of the room, arms wrapped around himself as he stared off into space. I took a clean damp cloth and wiped the dust from Mother’s face and hands. I wet her lips and tried to trickle water into her mouth. Her breaths grew shallower as the night wore on, and the hint of gray and blue in her skin became more obvious, even in the dim light of the kerosene lamp.

“I’ll go anyway. I’ll walk all the way to Oakden if I have to—” Henry blurted, stumbling to his feet, but Dad shut that right down.

“It’s still windy outside and we have no idea if the whole storm has passed. I am not losing two of you in one night!”

Henry slumped again, and the next time I tried to get Mother to drink some water, it ran from her lips onto the pillow. She was limp and heavy against the bedding.

“Please wake up, Mother,” I choked out. There was still grit in my eyes and in my hair and even between my damned teeth. We were all still covered in the very thing that was taking her from us, and there was no way to fix that. We just had to sit in it. “Mother, I love you. Please wake up.”

Not long after that, she exhaled one last gentle breath and she never took another. By then, we were all too exhausted to cry. We sat around her body on the bed, me and Dad holding her hand, Henry slumped by her thighs. The horrible events of those past twelve hours started to feel warped, like I was caught in a surreal dream. Henry eventually climbed up onto the bed beside Mother’s body, as if he were too tired to hold himself up. I stretched out too, still holding her hand.

I didn’t mean to doze, but the highs and the lows of that day drained every bit of strength from my body and sleep simply overtook me. Sometime later I was startled awake by a loud sound. I sat up, confused and bleary-eyed, then cast my gaze around the room.

Mother’s body was on the bed beside me. Henry bolted upright too, his eyes as red-raw as the skin on his face.

But Dad was nowhere to be seen. I went to slip off the bed to look for him and to investigate the sound, but Henry put his hand out to stop me.

“No,” he whispered. “No.”

“But where is—”