He seemed somehow smaller, more vulnerable than I remembered. A gooey little human like humans were wont to be.

Arthur knew the way, like he’d kept the hospital’s floor plan perfectly preserved in his memory for all this time since he’d decided to stop visiting.

Mark’s room looked as it always had, four different shades of blue like some modern interpretation of the ocean. Mark looked like he always had too.

Art and Dad and I lined up, down the length of his bed, and stared for a minute.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s us.”

Arthur’s shoulders hitched beside me. He closed his eyes, and without looking over, Dad draped an arm around him.

“I hope you come back to us, Mark,” I said. “But if you can’t, we’ll be okay. We won’t stop loving you, or each other. And someday we’ll find you. Someday we’ll find you, Mark, like you found us.”

I thought I felt him then. Not there, in the room, but somewhere.

Sometime. Three feet and five years away, maybe, or in a place that only looked dark and silent from the outside, but inside was brimming with light and sound. There were things we couldn’t understand. Places where the laws of physics broke down.

I thought about the still pool Molly had remembered diving into, all the rest of the light falling toward it, pulled by its gravity.

I thought about my brother sitting at a kitchen table, ruffling my hair with pizza-greased fingers, promising me there was nothing to fear in the universe’s mysteries: that if I were to fall in a black hole, I’d see whole histories of planets and moons and stars, all playing out at once, and might even get popped back out on the other end in some point of space-time before those things had even fallen in.

Nothing in this universe could ever be deleted, only hidden.

Maybe Mark could be here, in this bed, and inside Wayne Hastings, and somewhere else all at once. Maybe Molly could be here, buried in the cemetery where her father left fresh flowers in the middle of the night, and somewhere out there, diving into a pool where time flattens out and all the secrets of the universe are stored.

Existing in a way our gooey human brains couldn’t handle without turning to soup.

Streaking through darkness, lighting up a corner of the vast universe.

It was extraordinary, but no more extraordinary than the fact that I’d been lucky enough to have two brothers and parents and a Remy, a Sofía, a Levi, a Nick, and a border collie mix named Droog.

How many billions of things had to happen just right to give me this ordinary life.

THIRTY-SEVEN

THERE WERE SIX OF us, crammed into an ugly Geo Metro, cruising down Old Crow Station Lane. The eager gold beginnings of this year’s cornfields whipped past, and the cold clear headlights divided the velvety dark. The stars were all out, or rather we could see them.

Nick was driving, because he’d bought Remy’s car off him when Remy bought a gently used minivan, and Levi had scored shotgun because we needed him to curate the playlist. Droog was getting old, her joints didn’t work quite like they used to, but she still always rode in Nick’s lap, though now she preferred the comfort of curling up and sleeping over the rush of the wind snapping past her open window.

And that left Remy, Arthur, Sofía, and me crammed into the back, half my upper body hanging out of the car and the breeze ruffling my hair across my face.

“And I used to get shit for driving too slow,” Remy said, pushing my hair behind my ear.

“Don’t talk to Grandpa while he’s driving,” Sofía said. “He can already barely tell what he’s doing up there.”

“Hey now,” Nick said, rubbing the soft curve of his cheek. “I drive slow because of all the precious cargo.”

Remy scoffed. “You drive slowly because now you own the car.”

“Extremely true,” Levi said, and started a Cranberries song.

The headlights flashed over the green NOW LEAVING SPLENDOR sign, and Nick whooped and thumped the roof of the car. “Yeah, buddy!” he cried. “So long, assholes!”

“You say that now,” Arthur said, “but if you ever leave, you’ll miss this place.”

“Awhhhhh,” Nick cooed. “Do you miss us, Arty?”

Arthur shrugged. “There’s no Waffle House near my school.”

“Yeah, it’s the waffles,” Remy said. “Unparalleled waffles.”

We pulled onto the bridge over the train tracks, where we’d once watched sleek semitrucks skirt past, and followed the wooded road until it dead-ended into another, a couple of metal towers poking up from beyond the wall of corn.

We turned and slowed by Jenkins Road, decelerated to a crawl but didn’t stop.

We hadn’t heard from Wayne since that day. He’d been so sick then, it was hard to imagine he could survive whatever Agent Rothstadt had planned for him, but I held on to the hope that he was somewhere.

There were foreclosure signs stapled to his run-down fence and front door, an unnecessary formality. The tornado had left little of the house intact. These days it looked like the ruins of a medieval castle, with the way the door rose from the glass-dusted floor, cupped by the jagged arch of one of the remaining walls.

Our house hadn’t fared much better. It was lucky Dad had gone to the police station, looking for us. Lucky we hadn’t been at home.