Brian shoved the dream journal back into my lap. “Turn to the last pages.” I returned to the 11/22 entry. “No, snoop, the very end.”

Flip, flip, flip. These pages stuck together, and when I pried them apart I saw reddish brown stains. “Your Rorschach test?”

“No,” he said. “My blood.” Brian glanced at his watch and backed the car from the baseball field. “The past few weeks, ever since I’ve been figuring things out, I’ve been getting nosebleeds. Haven’t had them since I was a kid. Back then, the slightest pressure would burst capillaries.” He touched his nose.

“I kept remembering something Avalyn said,” he continued. “She talked about proof, about leaving remnants of yourself to prove something happened.” At a red traffic light, he looked at me, and I placed my hand on the notebook’s brittle pages. “My nose bled that night, the night of the missing five hours. Now that I know what happened, it’s bleeding again. Strange, hmm? It’s like my body’s remembering, too.” Brian’s hand left the steering wheel. His fingers met mine on the dried smears and dots of blood. “This is my proof,” he said.

I didn’t have to give Brian directions. After he parked in the driveway, he simply sat, letting the car settle, as darkness lowered its canopy over Hutchinson’s west side.

We stepped to the porch. In the McCormicks’ bay window, blue and green lights winked from a tree garlanded with popcorn strings and candy canes. Tinsel speared from its branches like miniature javelins. A tin ornament was shaped like a gingerbread man, its eyes, smile, bow tie, and buttons chiseled into the surface by an amateur’s hand, quite possibly Neil’s as a child. I wondered if he’d made the ornament before or after that summer.

When I’d visited Neil in the past, his mom’s excitement would overflow: the door would swing open, and she’d tug me inside as avidly as Hansel and Gretel’s witch. Tonight her movements had slowed. “Good to see you both again,” she said. “I apologize, though. Something happened. Neil’s not well. Perhaps that’s the best way to put it.” Her voice sounded biblical: tired, wounded, meaningful. “He’s had an accident. He’s asleep now.”

Mrs. McCormick pointed. On the kitchen table, two pies lounged beneath a divinity snowman, its raisin eyes and cinnamon stick arms guarding them. “But you can still stay. I’ve baked a peanut butter-peach, and a good old-fashioned apple.”

Brian seemed lost. He eased into a chair, I took another, and Mrs. McCormick searched a drawer for a knife. Her searching knocked a wine bottle cork to the floor, and it bounced into a corner. I hunted for something to say. My gaze was preoccupied with pie number one’s mosaic of peaches, peanut butter dollops, and crumbled graham crackers, and I didn’t notice when the shadowy figure shuffled into the room.

“You’re awake,” his mom said.

Neil stood in the kitchen’s doorway. His eyes looked drugged, slightly incongruous, and I saw that it wasn’t a shadow beneath his right eye, but the gray crescent of a developing bruise. Another bruise curled across his cheekbone. His mouth wore a raspberryish sore. His earring was missing, the lobe swollen, infected. Below it, a cut had been Mercurochromed so thickly it glowed orange.

“Stop staring, Preston,” Neil said. Then he stepped toward Brian. “So you’re the man.” On “you’re,” his mouth widened to display his newly chipped tooth.

“Little League teammates,” Mrs. McCormick said. She aimed the knife at a pie. “Neil never would have remembered a friend from that long ago. How neat that you managed to. How long since you two last saw each other?”

Neil touched the cut on his neck. “Not as long as it seems, I guess.”

“Ten years,” Brian said. “And five months, seven days.”

I assisted Neil’s mom by ordering the table with a quartet of forks and plates. “I’ll have peanut butter-peach,” she said. “How about you guys?” I chose the same, and Brian picked apple.

“One of both,” Neil said. The bruise made his eye appear locked in a perpetual wink. I still loved him.

We ate, barely speaking beyond the standard “Mmm”s and “this is really great”s. Mrs. McCormick was the first to ease the tension. “This isn’t the way Neil normally looks, Brian. He’s a tough one, all right, but he’s learning the hard way not to assert that toughness in just any old place. Hutchinson is one thing, New York is another.” I saw him roll his eyes, mouth a silent, Oh, Mom. “By chance you ever go there, god forbid, take warning. If toughs on the street want something of yours, by all means give it to them, or else expect a scuffle.” Brian nodded, but I didn’t believe that’s what had happened to Neil. I doubted Mrs. McCormick believed it, either.

After we finished, Neil gathered plates and forks, deposited them in the sink, and rubbed his mom’s shoulders. “We’re going to cruise around for a while,” he told her. “There’s something I need to show Brian.”

“I imagine so,” she said. “I guess you have some catching up to do.” She saw us to the door; as we stepped out she gave us each a pat on the back. Then she stood there, waving.

Brian drove. Neil stammered directions. I sat in the back, but by then I could have sat on another continent and it wouldn’t have mattered. They had crossed to another place. I floated away, inessential.

The Toyota turned onto Main. Ahead, beside the street, were the Kansas State Fairgrounds, the wreckage from the previous autumn’s twelve-day carnival still remaining. Briefly I thought Neil would steer Brian there, but he indicated the opposite way. Brian swerved to a narrow street. “This is it up here,” Neil said. “But you probably know that.” Brian parked alongside the curb, shut the ignition, and folded his arms.

They got out, neither speaking. Brian fished the baseball photograph from between the seats. He stepped around the car and leaned against the passenger side door. Neil took his place beside him, wincing as he pushed himself onto the hood, and both he and Brian stared at the boxy, completely mundane house where we’d parked. When I joined them, the glassiness in their eyes looked foreign to me. I understood this as the place their coach had lived. The house sat back from a row of knee-high shrubs, a gravel path leading toward it. A two-door garage linked to the house’s east side, its doors closed, a green garden hose snaking from its wall to the shrubs. Neighbors’ homes were lit up, flashing their greetings and noels to the night street, but here, in this home from their memories, there was only darkness. No Christmas lights braceleted its exterior, no tree blinked its varicolored eyes from the front window. The only beacons were the illuminated doorbell’s tiny rectangular beam and the porch light, the globe of which shone a curious blue instead of white.

“Blue,” Brian said, seeing it.

Down the block, a group of carolers trudged through the cold, pausing before each house to warble their songs to neighborhood families. I listened awhile, not knowing what to do or say. No matter what the carolers sang about-the infant Jesus, enchanted snowmen, nightfall over an ancient village-their words seemed the same. A security underlied their voices, a knowledge that they’d soon be home in bed, a log snapping sparks in the fireplace, mom and dad snoozing in the next room.

“Merry Christmas,” the carolers yelled at a doorstep.

“Merry Christmas,” I said to Neil and Brian. They still stared at the house, stared beyond its glass and wood and aluminum siding, stared at what had happened inside, years ago. Neil’s face was anxious, heartbreaking in its bruised and swollen state. Brian’s face had leached of color.

I wasn’t part of this. Where else did I have to go but away?

I could have said “I have to leave now,” could have explained “it’s better if you two are alone,” but I didn’t say a word. I raised my hand, fingers scratching the air in good-bye, and spun around. I stood there, my back to them, these two people I’d united at last. Then I began walking. The air made brittle stabs at my face, and I swallowed icy mouthfuls.