I ask for space as the crowd surges forward and blots out the sun, but I realise it’s Simone. She stands over me, her head bloated. The whites of her eyes the colour of fire and change. She runs her hand down the back of my neck and pulls me close to her.

‘He could be with us forever,’ she whispers and I feel her tongue on my neck. It is lizard rough and the sensation reminds me of a childhood diving accident. A piece of fire coral that cut straight through my diving suit and left my blood to hang in the water like a cloud.

I push her away and reach for Phineas but both he and the crowd have disappeared. When I stand it is late winter, the beach windswept and empty. Simone wades into the water and lies down, submerging herself beneath the waves. She calls out to me before she disappears completely.

‘Come,’ she says. ‘Lie with us.’

XXVI

Our grief is like a kaleidoscope through which we see our own history.

A lens that looks backwards through time.

I remember all of the newspaper headlines that have ever taken my breath away. So many of them involve children. They visit me in the night as glowing light. I see them forgotten in hot cars, lost and found too late in chest freezers, face down in bathtubs. I see them travelling along a desolate plain, a great restless mass. They walk forever lost between two great houses. I see Phineas now among them. His clothing ragged, his body filthy. A boy conceived of one mistake and dead as the result of another.

We, his parents, the complicit, are the sole survivors of his personal tragedy. In our silence we endlessly reconstruct the timeline of his final hours.

We ask ourselves what if, what if, what if?

We know that others will read our story and pass their judgement. We are marked by the official inquiry into his death. Condemned eternally in the court of public opinion. We imagine how friends and co-workers, even casual acquaintances, react to the news. How they gasp and shake their heads behind closed doors. How their voices soften and their bodies hunch as they discuss our personal tragedy.

Those poor people, they say.

Can you possibly imagine?

It’s awful. But if you were that tired why would you ever let yourself lie down?

I know, I know.

Would you take your eyes off—?

Of course not.

That poor woman.

But where was his father? I hear them whisper. Where was his father?

It was piousness, I told myself, a means of coping with the shock of the event. The quiet personal assurance that such a thing could never happen to them. But Simone carried the weight of their imagined judgements. She felt the accident had turned her into a cautionary tale. She felt the radiant glare of a thousand downcast eyes.

She had been a wonderful, attentive mother. She had raised a beautiful son. He was courteous, polite, personable. You could see it in the outpouring of grief after his death. In the masses that stood overflowing the church parking lot as we arrived with him in the hearse. In the ceremony they held at his school and the quotes from neighbours and teachers that appeared in local newspapers and on television.