Deep painful blue of sky, the first stains of autumn in the elms and oaks.

Th e buses were long gone and there was nothing to see or hear at the front of the building but the snap hooks lashing at the high barren flagpole with that silvery hollow sound, and when he reached the street he turned south toward the railroad tracks. VFW stood for Veterans of Foreign Wars and the old vets would hail him and arm him with a pool stick and tell him stories of shitstorms in the jungle where men, boys really, not much older than he, best buddies, brothers, were there one second and gone the next. Headless. Cut in two. Th ey wouldn’t let him smoke or drink. Th ey called him the Young American. Th ey swore they would find the piece of shit who did that to his leg and make the cocksucker beg them to put a bullet in his cocksucking eye. Th e old vets knew nothing about Caitlin—there one second and gone the next.

Before he reached the tracks a truck pulled alongside him in the street, and the passenger’s window descended and behind the wheel was his father. Th e boy stopped, and the blue Chevy stopped too.

I was up at the school, his father said. Up and down those halls. Where were you?

Just walking. Th e boy felt dizzy. Th e sun appeared to yo-yo in the sky. What are you doing here?

Came to talk to you.

Th e boy waited.

It’s not about Caitlin, he said. Hop in, he said, and the boy breathed. He slipped the backpack from his shoulder and hauled himself up into the cab.

Where were you going?

Nowhere. Just walking.

Just walking, his father said. Th at knee must be feeling pretty good.

Th e boy shrugged. Th ough the windows were down, the cab held a humid personal odor like a bed just vacated. It was the smell of a man’s long drive alone. His uncounted cigarettes and coffees. His souring skin and all his human emanations, including his thoughts, all the miles and miles of them collected within the cab like a dew that would lift from the glass on the tip of a finger.

Th e Chevy joggled over the tracks and Grant turned left and drove past the old VFW lounge with its antiaircraft gun aimed at the sky. Th e faded flag lifting feebly from the pole and falling again.

You’ve got your aunt Grace pretty concerned with all this just walking.

Is that why you’re here?

No, I was coming anyway.

Why?

To talk to you, like I said.

You could’ve called.

Th at only works when the other party answers his phone. Did you lose your phone again?

Th e battery died. So you drove all the way here to talk?

Do I need a better reason?

Th ey drove south, out of town, on Old Airport Road. Grant had just come from seeing Angela, from sitting across from her at Grace’s kitchen table, a mug captured in her thin hands, her eyes dark and strange. As if watching a scene that had nothing to do with that kitchen, with him. Th ere was one morning she couldn’t forget, she said.

A twin-engine Piper raced the Chevy on a parallel course and rose from the runway and immediately banked and headed for them as if in attack. It droned overhead, darkened them in a blink of shadow and went wobbling off into the west. When Sean was small they would come here to watch the small planes take off and land, and Grant had told him the story of Sean’s great-grandfather who had been a navigator on raids over Germany and whose plane had been shot down. How one of the crewmen came home two years later to tell that he’d seen the boy’s great-grandfather parachute out just ahead of him but had lost him in the night sky, and when the crewman was captured he expected to see the navigator in the camp, and when the war was over he expected to see him at the army hospital, and then he expected to see him back in the States, but he never did. No one ever did.

Th e story had put into the boy’s mind the story of a man who dropped into a forest far from the war and the cities, a black forgotten forest where a man could walk for years and never come across another man nor the end of the forest. Back home his young wife and his son wept over his gravestone but the man was alive in the forest and he lived there for so long that he forgot that there were such things as wars and cities and families. He simply became, like the deer, the owl, the fox, a thing of the woods. And like them he one day died, not from war, or the violence of another man, but because he’d grown old and could no longer hunt and could no longer protect himself from the other things in the forest.

I think you should come back with me to Colorado, Grant said.

Why?

You don’t seem very happy here.

Am I supposed to be happy?

Grant looked at him.

Th e boy took hold of the brace he wore over his jeans, the steel bars to either side of his knee, and gave an abrupt, adjusting jerk. What about Mom?

What about her?

She needs me here, remember?

Grant nodded, absently. I think it would mean more to her right now if you came back with me, he said. To help look.

For a time the boy said nothing. Th en he said: She bought me something, out of the blue. Guess what.

What.

A model airplane.

Grant studied his son’s face—grown thin in the last year, like the rest of him. Th e soft blond mustache he ought to just shave. His son had lost interest in model planes years ago, he knew, though dusty fighters still patrolled the skies of his room.

Sean, he said. Did Mom ever tell you about her sister, Faith? Her twin?

Th e one who drowned.

Yes.

No. Caitlin did.

What did she tell you?

Th at mom had a twin sister named Faith who drowned when they were young.

Grant nodded. Th ey were sixteen, he said. Your age. Th eir folks, your grandparents, would rent a house on the lake for two weeks every summer—swimming, suntanning on the dock. One day they left the girls alone to go into town. Th ey left little Grace with them. Grace was walking by then and she walked right off the end of the dock. Do you mind if I smoke?

No.

He lit the cigarette and went on, describing the day as Angela had described it to him one night just before their own daughter was born (long wretched night of no sleep, of fears bursting all at once from his wife’s breast): the two teenage girls on the porch painting their toenails, talking to a boy on the house phone, accustomed to their mother watching the baby. Th e moment when something splashed and they looked at one another—each seeing in the other, in her twin, her own face of immediate comprehension. Immediate fear. Two girls running as one to the end of the dock and diving in. Angela could see little Grace down among the rocks like a sunken doll. Th e water wasn’t deep and she quickly had her in her hands and she came up kicking, reaching for the dock, calling out, I got her, I got her. But Faith hadn’t come up. Was still down there looking, she thought. She got Grace onto the dock and turned her on her stomach to push the water out and then turned her over again and as she blew into the tiny mouth, filling the tiny lungs, she was thinking about both sisters: the one she was trying to save with her breath and the one who wasn’t there, who wasn’t coming up. She had this feeling that, as a twin, her twin self ought to be able to dive in after Faith, her actual twin. She thought she ought to be able to be on that dock and in the water again, both places, at the same time.