He pulls back and looks me in the eye. “I’ll let you go see Ray. But by God, you’re going armed.” He picks up the Beretta. “And if he gets squirrelly, you shoot first and ask questions after. Okay?”

“Okay.”

My mother is curled up in bed beside the smaller lump of Annie in my old room. My old baseball trophies gleam in the dark on the shelves above them, like little watchmen. I creep in and touch Mom on the shoulder, and she stirs in the shadows.

“Tom?”

“It’s Penn, Mom. Go on to bed. I’ll sleep with her.”

She rubs her eyes. “All right, honey.”

I reach out and stroke Annie’s hair. Mom is already asleep again. I gently push her leg with my knee. “Mom?”

She opens her eyes again and smiles blankly, then gets up and sleepwalks toward the hall.

I quickly brush my teeth, strip to my shorts, and climb into bed beside Annie, who is already stirring. In seconds her hand finds my shoulder, reestablishing her early-warning system.

As I lie in the dark, her shallow breathing troubles rather than soothes my heart. Sleeping with Annie always brings memories of Sarah. After the funeral I had to move Annie’s bed into my room because she couldn’t fall asleep alone, and still she wound up in my bed most nights. The pulse of her life so near always stirs my dreams. I dream of Sarah before the diagnosis, before fear entered our lives and took away the most precious gift, which is not hope but youth. Immortality. The sense of unlimited possibility. It’s an illusion, of course, the most precious illusion of life.