In the night he watched the fire and he watched Matty and he listened for cars on the road, but there were none. He lay awake. Coughing into the blanket. Listening to the wind. This is not a safe place. You have to think about what to do. Someone will find you here. Someone will see the smoke.

Just sleep. Don’t think now.

Think in the morning. Go to sleep.

He lay there and watched the windows. Black sky. A few pale stars. He couldn’t remember much anymore how she looked when she was alive. If only he’d turned back for one last look.

XIII

Sometimes I visit the moments and watch them backward, from end to beginning. As if I might find meaning somewhere in all of it, lost in the flow of inverted time. Stop and start. Push a button and hit rewind: Lying in the snow with the warmth gathering back into me. Running backward through trees, white cupped along branches, white that floats up in flakes to the sky … My hand ungripping Jack’s, and behind me the devil following backward …

and

Heat of a fire and Jack lying on the ashen carpet, all the blood on his shirt unblotching. The cuts on his stubborn face unhealing, and his eye unbruising … the flames shrinking down by some miraculous force, until the lit match flares between my fingers …

and so on, and

Lockers and a crowded school and Luke Stoddard standing there, his white cheeks blooming to red. Here I can always hear Jack’s voice: “You need good hands in football, don’t you?” Math papers sweep together along the floor and gather into a book that rises from the polished concrete into my hands … a hot-air balloon on the cover …

And so on, and so on.

Stop and start. Rewind.

Some moments I speed up or slow down. And I ask myself how short it was, or how long, how wide and deep. I pull apart the minutes until there’s no beginning or middle or end, but a circle, and all the minutes untangle into many marvelous moments seen at once. Where everything makes sense, and nothing hurts.

But you want the story in order.

From A to Z.

One to ten.

            Beginning

                                  to

                                              end.

And I love you for that.

So. Here you go.

Doyle pulled onto Big Grassy Ridge alongside the deputy cruiser and parked and got out. Midge was already standing by the door of her truck, holding her black ledgerbook. Coat zipped to her chin and fur trapper hat over her ears. Faint shadows crossing the horizon. The sun coming up. Wind.

Doyle walked to the rear of the cruiser. “Damn.”

Midge sniffed. “Yup.”