Something about the description had made me feel vaguely sick. “Stars can collapse?”

I’d looked out across the water, the sand, the whole wild world I loved.

What would happen to all of it, to us, if the sun collapsed? It’d turn into a black hole. It’d suck us into itself and end the world.

“Listen, Franny.” Mark turned the shell like it was a Ferris wheel. “All those stars, hundreds or maybe millions, had to collapse to make our galaxy what it is.”

He lifted the shell to my eye. “It’s like this giant manual, telling everything in our universe and beyond how it should work, down to the smallest thing. Isn’t that cool? Doesn’t that make you feel like you’re part of some huge design?”

“Like a huge, boring quilt!” Arthur said.

Mom had sighed; Dad had laughed; Mark had said, “You little butthole!” and thrown a handful of sand at him; and my anxiety about the Inevitable End of All Things had frittered off.

I’d felt, right then, like the universe was in perfect order. Like I was a small part of a huge and meaningful design.

I stepped through the blood-red front door to the Jenkins House, emerging from the memory.

It had been so long since I’d thought about all that. Since I’d thought about Mark, period. Dad still visited him in the hospital every two weeks, and I went along every three visits like clockwork (Art had long since quit), but even when I was there, or when I clutched the necklace for good luck, I didn’t think about it.

The accident.

The months after it.

Standing on the balcony outside the master bedroom with Arthur, next to the telescope Mom had once loved, watching her pull away in the Voyager—just for a few weeks, to clear her head. Me waving until Arthur snatched my hand and threw it down to my side, snapping, Don’t do that. She’s not going to look back, and you’ll feel stupid. Don’t let her make you feel stupid.

The pounding that rose from the wall of my brothers’ bedroom whenever Dad was out, Arthur’s hands barreling into drywall until his knuckles busted open, Mark’s old Mucha print hung back up over the holes afterward so no one would ever know he’d put them there.

Sure, I used to feel like I was part of some huge design. That the world, and everything else that existed, was part of one seamless machine.

It was what Mom and Dad had taught us. Dad called the machine’s engineer Holy God and Mom called it Good and Miraculous Science, and as for us kids, we were allowed to call it whatever we wanted as long as our butts were in the folding chairs at Old Crow Christian Fellowship on Sunday mornings, supporting Dad.

Before the accident, Dad having married a “nonbeliever” might’ve been the biggest scandal Splendor had ever seen. A pastor and a wannabe-astronaut agnostic/atheist.

Most of the church didn’t approve, but they liked Dad enough to ignore Mom’s absence from prayer meetings and potlucks.

To my brothers and me, there was nothing weird about Mom and Dad’s different beliefs, and if it was ever an issue between them before the accident, I didn’t know.

Mom could be impulsive and restless like Arthur, insatiably curious like Mark. If you asked her about something she was excited about, she’d trip over the words, trying to get them out fast enough. She told stories out of order, always jumping backward to add bits of information she’d left out, and she was always gasping: when she saw her first lightning bug of the year, when she crossed paths with a rare bird, when she was reading articles in scientific journals, like surprising information had sneaked up on her and jumped out, screaming.

Like both my brothers, she was easily distracted; like Arthur, she was messy, impatient.

When Dad made dinner, the table was set and the serving dishes were loaded by the time the turkey was cooked and the noodles finished boiling, but when Mom cooked, pans caught on fire while she was busy reading about penguin mating habits on her phone.

Together, Mom and Mark formed a kind of feedback loop. She’d tell him about a new purpose just discovered for a specific organ in the human body. He’d tell her about a new artist using fingernail clippings in an interesting way. Tangents abounded.

The only way I knew to break her out of it was to put on Carole King. Then she’d grab my hands and spin me barefoot through the kitchen, singing, “Way over yonder . . . is a place that I know . . .”

She was still distracted from the task at hand, but in those moments, Mom was mine.

In the rest, she lived in a bubble I couldn’t quite permeate, and I sat outside, watching Mark move freely through it from the other side.

“They could shoot off into space and it’d be hours of them waxing poetic about the change in atmosphere before they even realized the ground was gone,” Dad used to say.

He was milder, calmer, the type to take a few seconds to think over his words before speaking them, sometimes so long you’d doubt he planned to answer.

Once I’d asked him the question the church busybodies so badly wanted answered. One night on the balcony, while Mom was taking Droog out to pee one last time before bed.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” I said. “That she doesn’t believe?”

Dad leaned against the wooden railing to stare down at Mom’s yellow hair whipping around in the night wind for so long I wasn’t sure he’d heard me.

“Everyone’s got to have faith in something, Franny,” he said finally. “No one knows all the answers to the universe’s questions, but I admire anyone who keeps looking up at the stars and asking them questions.”