But the return of the stars had made no real difference to her father. It was as if some internal process of decay had taken root within him and could not be halted in its advance. No one ever said anything meaningful about this. Sandra’s mother, when she was home, labored to create an impression of normalcy. And because neither Sandra nor Kyle dared to contradict her, the illusion was surprisingly easy to sustain. Her father was often ill. He spent a lot of time upstairs, resting. That wasn’t difficult to understand, was it? Of course not. It was sad; it was inconvenient; but life went on. It did, at least, until the day Sandra came home from school and found her father and her brother in the garage.

Sandra was three weeks away from her eleventh birthday when it happened. She had been surprised to find the house empty. Kyle, home from school with a cold, had left his computer unfolded on the kitchen table. It was playing a movie, something noisy with airplanes and explosions, the sort of thing he liked. She switched it off. And that was when she heard the car motor growling. Not the car her mother drove to work but the family’s second car, the one parked in the garage, the one her father used to drive before he hid himself in the upstairs dimness.

She understood suicide, or at any rate the idea of it. She even knew that some people committed suicide by locking themselves in a closed space with an idling engine. Carbon monoxide poisoning. She supposed—it was a thought she harbored mainly in the bitter months that followed—that she even understood her father’s wish to die. People could get that way. It was like a sickness. No one should be blamed for it. But why had her father taken Kyle into the garage with him, and why had Kyle agreed to go?

She opened the door that connected the garage to the kitchen. The exhaust fumes made her dizzy, so she turned back and went outside and lifted up the big garage door to allow clean air to flow in to flush out the poison. The door slid open easily even though her father had stuffed rags into the gaps to keep the fumes from leaking away. It wasn’t even locked. Then she opened the car door on the driver’s side and managed to lean across her father’s lap and turn the engine off. Her father’s head had lolled onto his shoulders and his skin had turned a delicate, uncanny shade of blue. There was a crust of dried spittle on his lips. She tried unsuccessfully to wake him. Kyle was up front beside his father, wearing a seat belt. Had he been expecting to go somewhere? Neither of them stirred when she shook them, when she shouted.