The gardens are overgrown. It’s the first thing I notice when we pull up the drive — ragwort choking lilies, roses climbing faded brick. It is late September, the year I turn twenty, and Dad has spent the entire ride from the Greyhound station talking business. He manages the regional branch of a freight company with national aspirations, the largest employer in the area, the only he has ever known.

“We could set you up in customer service,” he says when he hoists my duffel off the flatbed.

“Let me carry that,” I say.

“What do you have in here? A dead body?”

“Books,” I say. “Really, I can help.”

“Too late,” Dad says, hobbling towards the house. “You’re sleeping in Kyle’s room by the way.”

“Why?”

“Ask your brothers,” he shouts over his shoulder.

I find them in the basement huddled around the card table. Surrounding John, Abe, and Kyle are shelves of trophies from Little League and Pop Warner. Autographed posters hang from the wall alongside pennants and antlers, bigmouth bass. In the middle of the table, buttressed by poker chips, stands a small tower of beer cans, which is new.

“The yard is a mess,” I say.

“Ten dollar buy-in,” says John, second born, built like me but with fuller features and a sharper voice. I dig the cash out of my wallet before pulling up a chair. I weigh probabilities, place my bets, and soon I’m up on a string of straights.

“Quit bluffing,” John says, his cheeks ripe with alcohol. “Are you bluffing?”

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not.”

“Seriously, it’s not fair,” Abe says.

“Isn’t that the point,” says Kyle, who at thirteen has grown six inches in the last year.

“Yeah but he’s counting cards,” John says.

“You’re thinking of blackjack,” I say. “It wouldn’t hurt to learn the odds. I have a guide you can borrow.”

“Just deal,” Abe says.

For the next hour, I fold enough to keep things interesting. The money moves in predictable patterns as my brothers plow through a six-pack, one sip for every fuckup past or present.

“Remember when you flooded the kitchen,” John says to Abe.

“You sank the lawnmower,” Abe says to Kyle.

“At least I didn’t run away,” Kyle says to John.

It’s a story we’ve heard too many times, how he left with a Swiss army knife and a backpack full of Pop Tarts in a heroic effort to avoid middle school; how he lost his bearings in a clearing cut by utility towers; how starlings dropped from the sky when the hail opened up, jagged chunks the size of softballs; how a headshot forced him into the husk of a gnarled oak, where he sheltered for hours, shivering, bleeding, drifting in and out of consciousness while the whole town fanned out in the sedge, arms linked, hounds barking, bullhorns blaring, wondering what had become of him.

“There I was,” says John, laying his cards on the table. “Left for dead — ”

“Left by whom?” I ask.

“Left for dead or dead already,” John says. “When I look up through a crevice and there’s this white light blazing overhead. Like a meteor only it doesn’t burn up. Then, I realize it’s coming right for me. It’s speeding up and getting smaller, and I think I’m toast when suddenly it stops, little globamajigger the size of my fist.”

“Orb,” I say. “Orb is the word you are looking for.”

“He’s talking,” Abe says.

“Next thing I know,” says John. “Globamajigger explodes. Fills me with mad warmth. The nausea, the throbbing, the chills — all of the pain leaves my body. I feel sharper, too, like I remember where I came from and how to get back.”

My brothers observe a moment of silence, the kind of reverence normally reserved for religion or America or both.

“Question,” I say after John deals another hand. “How do we know the light was real?”

“He just told you,” says Abe. “That’s how.”

“Considering the concussion — ”

“Here we go again,” Abe says. “One year of college and now he’s the everything expert.”

“I never said that.”

“Yeah but you thought it,” Abe says.

“My point is there are other explanations.”

“False,” says Abe. “Falsest thing I ever heard.”

+

Abe is the most devout disciple. He claims dozens of encounters. He keeps a notebook between couch cushions, its pages filled with primitive sketches. In the early illustrations, the light is asymmetric, a silver oval surrounded by rays. His blue pencil period shows an interest in hexagons and crystals. The more recent interpretations offer simpler geometries surrounded by a kaleidoscope of purples and greens and yellows. Dad calls him creative. I call him a liar. Not long before I left for Hopewell, I caught him stashing Mom’s jewelry in a thermos beneath the couch.

“That’s not yours,” I said.

“Ain’t yours either.” Abe pulled a ring off his pinky finger, stuffed it into his pocket. “Someone gave it to me.”

“Who?”

“Mitch Murphy.”

“Mitch Murphy the wrestling captain?”

“Yeah so.”

“Don’t play dumb,” I said.

“You know just because you’re older doesn’t mean you can boss us around,” Abe said.

“I’m not stupid.”

“One more word,” Abe said. “I swear to God.”

+

The ring was a gift from her grandmother, twin rubies set in gold. Mom never took it off, not even in the garden. On weekend mornings, she used to spend hours out back pulling weeds or trimming hedges, oblivious to the sun’s slow work on her skin. I remember helping her plant dogwoods one summer near the edge of the property. She’d already potted the cuttings from a specimen she liked. Our job was to dig scalloped holes for the saplings. “Imagine if you could grow a whole new person from a fingernail clipping,” she said, her chin propped on her shovel.

“Then nobody would ever die,” I said.

“Wouldn’t that be terrible.” My mother removed a handkerchief from her smock and wiped her forehead. “Look,” she said, pointing out a pair of mushrooms peeking through the mulch. “Agaricus campestris.”

“What are they really called?” I asked.

“Well, there’s no common name. Not in English, at least.”

“Are they poisonous?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But they don’t taste very good. Did you know the biggest living organism on earth is a fungi?”

“Two square miles.”

“If you’re bored you’re welcome to play with your brothers.”

I could hear the sound of bottle-rockets exploding in the distance. “No, thanks. I’ll stay.”

“Good,” she said. “Now get back to work.”

“You’re the one who started talking.”

“Exactly. My whim is your command. Now mush.”

+

On the second night of my return, Dad tells his version at Pizza Hut. We are joined by Abe’s new girlfriend. She sits on his lap trading bites of Deep Dish Supreme, her finger laced through his belt loop. She’s thirteen, four years his junior, but Abe says age is just a number, we don’t choose who we love.

“Couple years back,” Dad says, wiping sauce off his beard. “I went to a conference in Albuquerque. Thought I could make the drive in one day, but black ice had me hours behind schedule heading out. Must have been close to midnight when, just shy of Hereford, something in the distance caught fire.”

“Like you see at a refinery,” he continues after the waiter refills our breadsticks. “Like flames leaping out of chimneys. But I knew that stretch of highway, knew there weren’t any industrial parks for another fifty miles. I thought maybe I was tired, maybe my mind was playing tricks. But then the temperature started to climb and the snow banks on the shoulder melted into slush. I pulled over, barely unbuckled my seatbelt before the windshield turned white. I ducked my head, thinking jetliner or maybe A-bomb, but then nothing happened. Whatever it was up there just vanished, like the whole thing was a bad dream.”

“Maybe it was,” I say.

Back home, Dad leads us outside with a flashlight and shows us the char on the trailer hitch.

“There’s your proof,” he says, no mention of the welding torch or what that instrument does to steel.

“Crazy,” says Abe’s new girlfriend.

“Were there other cars on the road,” I ask. “Other witnesses?”

“Middle of nowhere,” Dad says.

“You forgot about the sunburn,” says John.

“That’s right,” Dad says. “When I got to the hotel, my nose was beet red, redder than the time your mother dragged me down to the Everglades.”

“Wow,” says Abe’s new girlfriend.

“I didn’t know you went to Florida,” I say.

“There’s a lot of things you don’t know,” Abe says.

“What’s your problem?” I ask.

“You,” Abe says. “Nobody likes a nit picker.”

“Unless you have lice,” I say.

“He does not have lice,” said Abe’s new girlfriend, running her hands through his hair.

“I wasn’t talking about his scalp,” I say.

“Henry Lee,” Dad says. “We have company.”

+

Kyle says he might have caught a glimpse. He’s ninety-five percent certain. He says he was practicing punts at the park when the sun whipped leaves into a vortex. He shielded his face, but somehow the light penetrated his eyelids, filled his mind with floaters. From the bunk overhead, he tells me that aliens could be toying with us; that seismic activity pulls ghosts through ripples in space-time; that the souls of those who did not deserve to die can be reached through magnetic curtains. His theories derive from cable television, shows about imaginary animals and paranormal detectives. I see now why Abe migrated to my old room.

“What are they teaching you?” I ask.

“You don’t understand,” Kyle says.

“You’re right,” I say. “I don’t.”

“You’re not even trying.”

“You’ll be the first to know if I see any alien activity. Promise.”

“This is important,” Kyle says. “Mom might be communicating something.”

“Like what?”

“Well I don’t know what exactly. Something. Something important.”

But my mother rarely spoke in riddles. She wasn’t from here originally. She moved downstate after graduating with honors from Hopewell, good enough for a teaching fellowship at a target school, our school, Whispering Rock, the only school in the county. Before she met Dad, she rented a small apartment above the pharmacy. Friday nights, while the rest of town filled the football stadium, she graded physics exams in the diner before it became Pizza Hut. She said she liked feeling like she owned the place. Sometimes, if the workload was light, she would drive to the levee with her telescope. She watched for meteors in the fall and in the winter she scanned the sky for Mars or Venus, the rare eclipse. “There’s so much we don’t know about the universe,” she told me on her tenth anniversary. “Like what dark matter is or why black holes are so strong.”

“I bet somebody will figure it out,” I said.

“Maybe you,” my mother said.

She winked. I remember standing beside her vanity, nervously popping the top to one of her empty pill canisters while she applied her makeup. She dabbed her cheeks with blush before painting her puckered lips a thick shade of scarlet. In the dim mirror light, her wig made her look like a star.

“Don’t go,” I said.

“We won’t be long,” she said. “Just dinner and a movie.”

“Dad hates movies.”

“Well, he doesn’t hate dinner,” she said.

“Please,” I said.

“Only a couple hours,” she said. “Sometimes it’s good to do things you don’t like.”

“And sometimes it’s not,” I said.

“The babysitter should be here any minute. You can play board games with your brothers. Won’t that be fun?”

“No,” I said.

“Don’t think about it,” she said, kissing my forehead. “I’ll be home before you know it.”

+

On my fifth day back, we drive to Whispering Rock for the annual homecoming rally. Tradition holds that every player tosses a torch into the bonfire while the rest of the student body lives vicariously for an hour or two. I stand at the edge of the crowd between Dad and Abe’s new girlfriend. Along with one of his old jerseys, she wears a necklace I recognize. I’m about to say something when the band starts to play. A sea of silver pom-poms blurs the view of John and Abe marching up the hill in their shoulder pads, in camouflage and cleats, howling like men possessed. Kyle trails at some distance, sporting face paint and school colors and his orange ball boy vest. At the pinnacle, beside a teepee fashioned from two-by-fours, John leads the team in song before touching off a pool of gasoline. Flames engulf a Plainsville dummy hung from scaffolding. The crowd erupts when the helmet starts to melt. As the heat swells, I can feel the weight of stolen glances, of those nearby wondering what I’m doing here.

“Go Tigers,” Dad says.

“Hell yes,” says Abe’s new girlfriend.

“May I be excused?” I ask.

“Why,” my Dad says.

“I have to use the restroom,” I say.

“Just go in the woods like a normal person.”

“Shhh!” says Abe’s new girlfriend. “They’re making a speech.”

I take my time crossing the practice field. The turf is uneven from decades of abuse. As I pass the gymnasium, a stray light stings my eye. Overhead, construction paper blacks out all of the windows except one. The glass shines gold and smooth and alive. For a moment, the hairs on my arms stand at attention, but then I realize it’s just a reflection, the blaze at my back.

+

The next morning, an envelope arrives from Hopewell. Inside is a form I already submitted but somehow went missing. Now I need more signatures — from the dean, my advisor, from the director of an office I’ve never heard of.

For a NEW leave of absence, it says, please indicate the semester(s) for which you are requesting approval.

Approval is granted on a case-by-case basis. A leave of absence may jeopardize your financial aid status.

Check box for: Medical, Personal, Financial, Academic, Course Offerings, Special Program, Other.

If other, please state your reason(s) for requesting this leave. Be clear about the reason(s) and include appropriate documentation.

Underneath, there are two lines, half an inch to explain. I want to write about the way grief radiates in waves. How time only heals some wounds. I want to write about the day she died. My brothers were away at camp. I stayed to work my first job: digitizing files for the mayor’s office. I finished early, and I remember stopping by the grocery on the way home. I bought a soda and a pack of baseball cards. I didn’t really like baseball, but there’s something satisfying about gloss between your fingertips. I liked the numbers too, the idea that even such strong, stoic men were subject to statistics. I remember how the bubblegum, rock hard, pasted with chalk, had already lost its flavor by the time I saw the silent ambulance in our driveway. I remember the open door. The wet carpet soaking through my socks. Paramedics kneeling at the bathroom threshold, studying oversaturated prescription labels, paper turned to pulp between their blue-gloved fingers. The scent of lavender, stray bubbles floating out from behind the shower curtain. I remember how we used to bathe together. She wore her swimsuit, a shapeless one-piece long faded from purple to brown. The tub was small so I had to pull my knees into my chest as she slid into place behind me. She rubbed the dirt out from behind my ears and ran a washcloth under the faucet and wrung warm water over my head. “I hereby cleanse you of your sins,” she would say in a voice not her own. “We welcome you into a better-smelling world.” Once she finished shampooing my hair, I helped with hers, the suds still stinging my eyes. At the time, my mother had long black hair. When it was wet, it clung to her neck like kelp, drawing out the blue veins ringing her collarbone.

+

“If you keep biting your nails,” Dad says, muting a replay of the state championship. “You won’t have any left.”

“Gross,” says Abe’s new girlfriend.

“What are you even reading?” Abe asks.

“Organic chemistry,” I say.

“For fun,” Dad says.

“I don’t want to fall behind.”

“News flash.” Abe cracks open another beer, licks the foam off the side of the can.

“Can we please watch the game,” John says, squishing a stuffed football.

“You already know what happened,” Kyle says.

“Hey,” Abe says. “Did John ever tell you about the time he disappeared?”

“No way,” says Abe’s new girlfriend. “That’s crazy.”

p=. +

It’s the middle of the night. I sneak down to the kitchen and fix a bowl of cereal before sifting through the remnants once more — photographs, lesson plans, a grocery list penned in her immaculate cursive, everything but the celery crossed off. My head starts to spin, so I walk to the back yard, to the grove of dogwoods we planted together, the trees now overrun with ivy. The vines, thick and stubborn, press filaments into my palms. On hands and knees, I work my way between the beds, where creepers blanket the flagstone path. I haven’t gotten very far when footsteps along the fence line hold my heartbeat. Soon a familiar silhouette emerges. Kyle. Hands jammed into the pockets of a letterman jacket he can’t fill out, spaceship pajamas stretching halfway down his calves.

“What are you doing,” he says.

“What does it look like I’m doing,” I say.

My brother squats, makes a show of pitching in. It may be the first time I’ve seen him attempt the task. Dry stalks snap in his hands, but he continues unfazed, oblivious to the young growth.

“That’ll come back in less than a week,” I say. “You have to pinch the root.”

“Like this?”

“Better,” I say. But before long he is flexing his fingers, kneading his knuckles, exhaling the boredom bound up inside. I tell him that I’m fine by myself.

“You sure about that,” he says. He bends over and pulls a flask out of his sock. “Here. This helps.”

I unscrew the top and take a whiff. The fumes tickle my nostrils. “Where are you getting whiskey?”

“I have my sources,” he says.

“You’re too young for this. Way too young.”

“So are you,” he says. “We all are.”

Leaves spiral to the ground as I squint through the darkness. The sky hangs low and black, freckled with stars. I take a sip. Then another. It burns going down.

+++