We sat in the dark as Trevor sobbed noiselessly. Eventually I told him, “It’s ok.” It was not an appropriate thing to say, but I was letting instinct guide me. The priority was, of course, to get him out. That was my instinct above all else — I had to get him out. But my instinct also told me to go slow. To act like this was nothing out of the ordinary. To be kind, solicitous even. To this day I shake my head at those instincts. I shake it right along with all the people I tell this story to — the people who demand to know why on earth I didn’t grab my phone the moment I spotted Trevor’s silhouette — or a heavy object, suitable for bludgeoning — as opposed to a bathrobe and a box of Kleenex. But then I feel guilty, as if I have betrayed someone. What right do I have, after all — a comfortable person seated at a desk in the secure present, spine lovingly supported by my ergonomic chair — what right have I to look askance at this other person, shifting squeakily around in her mother’s ancient rocker, flailing in the moment? I am at a distance now — she wasn’t. I am operating on pliable memory and cool reflection — she was operating on adrenalin in the dark.

Trevor lifted his face from the wad of Kleenex and blinked at the ceiling. He took a breath.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “Didn’t wanna wake up Beaner.”

“It’s fine,” I told him.

“It’s not fine,” he said. Then he struggled a few moments more before he could say the next thing. “I’m fucking this up and I know it. You think I don’t know it?” His face disappeared into the clot of tissue again.

“You’re not fucking anything up,” I whispered.

“I was a prick.”

“It’s ok.”

“It’s not ok.”

How long could we go back and forth like this?

“You got angry,” I told him. “And I got angry. It’s ok. People get angry.”

“I just care about you guys so much,” said Trevor.

“I know.”

“I don’t got anything,” he said, his face contorting. The extremity of his expression was amplified by the shadows cast by the streetlights and the LED outside and he looked abruptly like a gargoyle. “I don’t got anything,” he said again, and shuddered.

The strange, keening rhythms of this conversation, its sing-song, whispered repetition, gave me a feeling like Trevor and I were performing some kind of spontaneous poetry together, here in my mother’s darkened living room, or improvising a ritual, a magic incantation. It reminded me of the feeling I had the first time Trevor got angry at me, when we sat eating cookies and drinking tea and I felt as if, in my effort to win back his approval, I was following a script that he’d already memorized and I could only intuit.

I knew how he wanted me to reply, but I wasn’t going to follow that particular script this time. “You have Mike,” I told him. “You have your brother — your family.”