I tried telepathy one final time. I didn’t care about its foolishness. I zeroed my mind on theirs, hoping Neil and Brian would hear, just this once. I love you both.

A long-haired boy bent over the sidewalk at a neighboring house, his zebra-striped mittens sprinkling salt pebbles onto the cement in rhythm with the Christmas carol down the block. The boy seemed around my age. Neil’s age. Brian’s age. I wondered if he’d lived on this street ten years ago; if he’d known Coach. And then I wondered how many others there had been-where they lived now, the diversity of ways they’d chosen to remember. The boy stopped shaking the salt and hurried toward his house. I kept my head down, staring at the gravel lane, as if immersed in a book, a series of soothing and beautiful words spelled out across the roadside to lead me home.

The nervousness subsided, and my limbs grew numb. For the first time, Neil and I were alone, and we stood beside the house’s battered garage to watch Eric’s shadow trail farther away, each successive streetlight flashing him in and out of vision until his grandpa’s white sweater was nothing but a speck.

I turned and stared at the house. “Blue,” I said again.

There it was, the precise blue from countless nightmares, flooding the air around us as we moved toward the front door. The color came from the porch light, and it radiated a fuzzy semicircle over the yard. That same blue had shone through the windows on that long-ago evening, the rainy night Neil and I had been together inside this house.

Neil followed the gravel walkway toward the cement porch. He paused under the blue light, poised one knuckle against the door, and rapped gently. He waited, then moved his bruised eye to the door’s rectangular window to peer inside. Breath steamed the glass. “No one’s home.” He rattled the doorknob. Locked. “Let’s try the back,” he said, jumping from the porch.

We skulked around the garage, and Neil lifted the latch on a chain-link fence. The backyard was a jungle of tangled, skeletal weeds; their frozen vines and stems crackled beneath our shoes as we walked. Stabbed into the earth were plastic sunflowers, the kind that pinwheel in the wind. Neil kicked one, splintering three of its petals. A cardinal regarded him from a circle of dirt, a female, her feathers a rustic caramel color. Instead of flying south, she had chosen to remain here, in this overgrown garden where I imagined marigolds and morning glories and bachelor’s buttons would bloom in a warmer season.

Neil tried the back door; it was locked as well. He spied an overturned lawn chair, brushed away its layer of sand, and unfolded it under a window. He stepped onto it carefully, his body clutched by pain; still, there was a certain level of fused skill and grace in the way he moved. “You were a great baseball player, weren’t you,” I said. It was the first reference I’d made to the conversation I knew we’d imminently have. “I used to watch you from the bench.”

“I was the best,” Neil said. “He told me so.”

Neil cupped a hand over his brow and peered into the window. “It’s changed, but it’s the same place.” He stepped down, one foot on the ground, one on the chair. “What do you think? I say we go in.”

Down the block, closer now, the carolers segued from “The First Noel” to another song I didn’t recognize. Their voices wavered, as if each kid were shivering. The cardinal lifted into the air, flitting back and forth between two trees as deftly as a badminton birdie. Neil scanned the ground, and I followed his gaze. Beside a beehive-shaped snarl of weeds were glass shards, broken bricks, a rusting tin top from a cat food can, and children’s toys: rubber pony, plastic shovel, foot-size fire engine. Neil kicked a brick. “Should I do the honors, or should you?”

“You’d better,” I said. I bent to pick up a square brick chunk, then changed my mind. My hand closed around the fire engine. I relayed it to Neil, and he remounted the lawn chair.

He made a curious sound in his throat, a noise like a microphone’s static. “Bottom of the ninth inning, and the score is tied,” he said. “Bases loaded, two outs, the count full. McCormick rares back.” Neil swung the fire engine behind him. “And here’s the pitch.” I held my breath, and he hurled the toy at the window. The glass shattered, the crash surprisingly quiet. “Strike three,” Neil said.

Three more bashes of the fire engine’s front end knocked the rest of the glass away. Neil tossed the toy back to the ground, and it clattered against a brick. He positioned his hands on the window frame and squirmed into the gaping wound. I hurried forward, gripped his shoes, and nudged him farther. The house swallowed him.

My climb was more difficult. I rolled up the Little League photograph, wedged it into my pocket, and stretched myself from the lawn chair. I would have to chance accident by stepping onto the chair’s back and quickly thrusting my head and shoulders through the window. “Three, two, one, BLAST OFF,” Neil said. It worked. I leaned into the house, and Neil’s hands coupled with mine. I stared as our fingers intertwined; saw a triangular scar on Neil’s knuckle. Neil pulled me through, and I tumbled to the floor.

Neil and I scanned our surroundings. My eyes adjusted to the drapery of shadows, and the room asserted itself: lamp carved from driftwood, mirrored dresser scattered with paperback gothic romances and makeup, paintings of a stormy beach scene and a cabin in a forest clearing. It must have been the family’s master bedroom, considering the unmade double bed, the walk-in closet with sliding glass doors. “Not much for interior decoration, are they?” Neil asked.

I turned to him then, and for the first time that night I truly stared. Neil was my approximate height. His hair and eyes were pitch black, his eyebrows so thick they seemed mascaraed across his forehead. He had hardly changed from the boy in my pocket’s photograph, that Little Leaguer’s face a bud that had blossomed into the face before me. He was Neil McCormick, number ninety-nine. Seeing him after all these months, all these years, dried me up. I felt like a shell, with a mouthful of grist and an ice cube heart.

A pair of cats puttered forth from the hallway’s darkness, noses in the air. The first was stocky and gray, white fur like a bib beneath her chin. The second had long, almost silvery hair, which pieced onto the floor as she rubbed against Neil’s foot. “Awww,” Neil said, and the jaw he’d been clenching for the past half hour instantly relaxed. He bent to scratch her head, and the cat’s topaz eyes examined him. She begged for food, making a feeble and wee noise, more a wounded crackle than a meow, the sound of a dollhouse door, creaking open.

“Coach didn’t use this room much,” Neil said. “He kept baseball equipment here, other crap, odds and ends.” He moved into the hall, and the cats and I followed.

We gave ourselves a tour. The house oozed a baby odor, a sugary combination of perfumy talcums and lotions and diapers, a smell surprisingly like roasted sweet potatoes. But something else lurked beneath that, and when I inhaled I got a whiff of the house itself, the smell that had attended its rooms for years, a smell as familiar as the blue light.

“Here’s the hallway, the bathroom, the linen closet. And this”-Neil slapped a half-open door-“was his bedroom.”

Neil went in, but I stayed in the doorway. He flicked the light switch, and I squinted. “They’ve made it a nursery,” he said. On the wallpaper, elephants and clowns juggled polka-dotted balls. Figureheads decorated the bassinet’s posts. Cornflower blue jumpers, bibs, and socks had been layered across the floor, awaiting use. Neil switched off the light and stretched beside the baby’s clothes, the movement causing him obvious pain. He stared upward. “He’s here no longer, and the bed’s here no longer. But that’s the same ceiling.” I looked. “All the little ridges and whirls and speckly-sparkly things. I used to get lost in its pictures, after we’d finished.” He sat up. “You know what I mean by that, don’t you.”