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Dedication

For Brady and Kate,
who showed me what to put in my heart

I

My life has faded to floating bits of black and white, but I remember the minutes with Jack in color, in a vivid haze of red and yellow and blue. Sensory things. The sound of his voice. The smell of him, like a forest in winter. I can see him lying beside me with the moonlight on his face. His hand holds mine, and I’m warm all over, despite the cold. I can feel his breath on my skin.

I don’t forget these things.

I told Jack to stay away. He’ll make you hurt, I said. He’ll take what matters most. He’ll do it with a smile and then he’ll smoke a cigarette.

Jack didn’t listen.

But I get ahead of myself. I go to the end when, to understand the truth, you have to start at the beginning.

When Jack opened the door, Mom wasn’t sitting in the rocking chair by the stove. Her rainbow blanket formed a barren heap on the rocker, except for a tattered corner that slunk down to the worn carpet. She wasn’t in the kitchen either, staring glass-eyed out the window above the sink, all bone and skin in her frayed pink nightgown. Cold clung to the house’s scant walls and crouched in dim corners where sun never hit. She’d let the fire go out. She never did that. Not even in one of her dazes.

In his mind, a steel clamp tightened.

He kicked snow from his boots and slung his backpack off his shoulders and hitched it over the peg of the kitchen chair. He took out his earbuds to see if he could hear her upstairs, but he couldn’t. She hardly ever left that rocker these days except to use the bathroom. Once she’d have greeted him at the door when he got home from school, but that was in another time.

“Mom?”

He stood there listening for an answer, and one didn’t come. Wind blew at the windows and rattled down the stove flue. He needed to get a fire going. If they had no fire, they’d be bad off. Matty would be home from school soon. Mrs. Browning let the second graders stay after and shoot hoops in the gym, but only for a while. He needed to get supper going for Matty. Night coming.

Still he just stood there and listened for her.