Laurel told me that Janet moved out of her father’s apartment. She left her brothers there. She showed a judge her medical records; she became officially emancipated. Harriet told me she’d heard that she ended up going to Yale, but no one knew for sure. It might have been the University of Chicago. This was back when Harriet and I emailed once in a while, before she died in a car accident. It was the other driver’s fault, said Nisha, but I couldn’t help thinking of the burn on Harriet’s chin, the way she tumbled out of bed. I didn’t go to the funeral. I heard she was cremated. I heard her mother flew across the country to scatter her ashes at the Center. I never realized how much Harriet loved it there.

The word cremate comes to us quite directly from the Latin cremare, “to burn,” but I’ve always been a little swayed by the overlay of cream I hear in English. Cream-ated. A body creamed. A body reduced to that silky white-gray ash that slides sweetly between your fingers.

In recent years, companies have gotten fairly creative about cremation. Now, your survivors can shoot your ashes into space. They can make your ashes into jewelry. They can have your ashes pressed into a record, so anyone who spins you can hear—what? That’s the question, always. What is left? And can we make it mean more if we arrange it this way, treat it in this fashion, bury it, burn it, embalm it, smear it across our faces, work it into our hair, ingest it bit by bit by bone-flecked bit?

Luke was cremated too, of course. I have no idea who scattered his ashes, or where.

I still hear from Laurel sometimes. It seems like she’s doing better this year. She sent me a picture of her daughter. She’s beautiful.

It’s a miracle I didn’t overdose, she wrote in her last message. I confess that at first, I didn’t know what she meant. It took me some time to realize. But of course she had her own reasons for being out of bed at night, for being raccoon-eyed in the mornings. I learned the names just for her: oxy and Valium and E and fentanyl, which is a patch you can wear on your body, or the best lollipop you’ve ever had, developed for the battlefield and used on the front lines of our many wars, foreign and domestic.