“Eddie, wake up,” Laura said. “Wake up, Eddie.”

Her hand was on his chest, rousing him as if for work. She stood next to him, wearing a green T-shirt.

“Keep going,” she said. “You have to keep him with you. You can’t just leave him behind.”

She walked beside him for a long time in silence, and Eddie watched her. To her side, off the highway, the tree branches reached out into small leafless networks. There were buds on them. Even the air felt like spring. The woods were full of sound. Voices. There were people in the trees, and light streamed through them like water through a net. Ahead, the highway was obstructed by something Eddie couldn’t see. He looked at the woods again, but the trees were just dead poles in the darkness.

As they got closer, he saw the obstacle more clearly. It was a wreck. Only one car remained, and its nose was crumpled in. Glass and plastic were spread out over the highway and over the path where he walked.

A warm familiarity spread through his body. The wrecked car was his car. He knelt down in the path and began to pick up shards of plastic. Most were small, but a few were long and pointed. He put them in his pockets.

“What are you doing?” Laura asked.

He turned and looked over his shoulder to where she was standing, but it was only her voice. Her body wasn’t there.

“I’m collecting it.”

“Don’t,” she said. “You have someplace to be.”

“I’ll need proof for the insurance.”

“What proof? You think that’s going to be proof?”

He crouched there and looked at the destroyed car.

“Anyway, it’s not yours,” Laura said. “You weren’t driving on this highway. This is the way to my parents’ house. You were coming home from work.”

Eddie looked out onto the wreck and saw that she was right. This car had been an SUV.

“Where’s the boy?” she asked.

“Dylan.”

“Where is he?”

Eddie looked behind, and then stood and strained his eyes ahead. The path was empty in both directions.

“I lost him,” he said.

He backtracked down the path taking careful steps. He was afraid that Dylan had curled up somewhere and that he’d step on him or kick him accidentally. But the path was an uninterrupted gray line in the darkness.

“Dylan,” he whispered. “Come on, pal.”

He backtracked for longer than Dylan could have walked. Then he held on to the rail and vomited on the asphalt of the highway. It was only a trickle of spit, but he gasped and clung to the metal and cursed himself.

When he opened his eyes, the gray of the horizon was a lighter gray. He looked for Laura, but then he tried to keep himself from looking—from fooling himself. The world without Laura was lead-heavy around him. She was gone, and he’d been weak to let himself imagine anything else. He had to be strong. The path was still empty and the highway was empty going forward. He could see ahead where the woods on either side came to a point at the end of his vision.

He rested there on his knees to build his strength. Once he was standing, he could use his legs again.

If Dylan wasn’t curled up on the highway, then maybe he was in the woods. Eddie looked back and forth as the day began to brighten. He tried to jog, but the wind in his ears was painful. If he spent time searching the woods, he’d never make it to the bridge, but the woods would be cooler and he could hide himself in the leaves in the daylight.

He walked as the highway sloped gradually upward. To his right, on the other side of the guardrail, the land dropped off, and he stopped to peer down into the depression between where he stood and where the woods started up again. Someone was sitting in a chair there. He could see the top of her head—the gray hair of an old woman. As she lifted her face to look at him, he thought he knew her, but didn’t know from where.

Her shirt billowed out around her waist, and something moved in her lap. Dylan was curled up there.

Then he recognized her. It was Ruth Blackmon. His neighbor. Mrs. Blackmon. Just across the street.

Eddie stepped over the guardrail and put his foot on the edge of the slope, but before he could step to test its firmness, he slid on his heels and fell on his back and rolled. As the world turned over, he squeezed the plastic bottle tightly in his hand.

“You all right?” Mrs. Blackmon said.

Eddie stood up. The hill was soft and hadn’t hurt him. He brushed the dirt off his face. Mrs. Blackmon was sitting in a folding chair, and Dylan’s head was nuzzled against her chest. Mrs. Blackmon was in her sixties. She was retired, and Eddie’s mother sometimes sent him over with a bowl to pick her grape tomatoes, or to help her net the blueberry bushes that the birds enjoyed assaulting.

But no.

That was when he was a child. When he looked again, he saw that it wasn’t Mrs. Blackmon. It was Mrs. Kasolos.

“Where’d you get him?” Eddie said.

“He came to me,” Mrs. Kasolos said. “You need to keep track of your son.”

“It was dark.” He examined her carefully. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You’re dead.”

“I’m waiting. My daughter went off to look for people. She’ll be back. We found this chair on the side of the road. Perfectly good.”

“Dylan,” Eddie said.

Dylan pulled his head from out of the folds of Mrs. Kasolos’s shirt like a bird from beneath a wing.

“Why’d you run off like that?”

He looked at Eddie with dreary eyes.

“Well, I’m glad he found me,” she said. “Because now you’re here. I don’t know when I’ve been this thirsty.”

“You and your daughter don’t have water?” Eddie looked at the bottle in his hand. There were, perhaps, three sips left.

“Not anymore.”

“This is all we have,” Eddie said. “We need it to get to the bridge. I’ve got family over there.”

“And I have nothing. So who’s ahead in the game?”

“Your daughter’s coming back for you.”

“This one’s nice,” Mrs. Kasolos said. She put her hand on top of Dylan’s head. “Not too whiny.”

“He needs to come with me,” Eddie said.

“Of course,” she said. “And I need a drink.”

“He’s my son,” Eddie said, hearing himself say it.

Dylan looked up the hill at the highway above their heads.

“Come on,” Eddie said. He took Dylan by the wrist and pulled him off Mrs. Kasolos’s lap.

“Give me your hand,” he ordered, and Dylan reached up.

“Let’s go. Keep up. We have to go.”

He began to run, and when Dylan turned his head to look back, Eddie jerked his arm like a leash.

It was slow going up the hill, and he struggled to keep his breath from blocking up his throat. When it leveled off at the path next to the highway, he stopped and squeezed Dylan’s hand in his own. It was rubbery and loose. Ahead, the horizon was blank, but it could have been an illusion from the pitch of the land. The bridge could have been just beyond his sight.

He started jogging again, but something caught him, flexing thinly across his shins. He pitched forward and fell headlong, his palms hitting the dirt again. Dust spun into his mouth. Dylan stood above him and Eddie could see the tight white rope that had toppled him.

A woman stepped out from behind a tree. She held a stick with both hands, and thrust the sharpened end at Eddie’s face. Eddie squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, the tip was an inch above his forehead. The tip had been blackened in a fire.

“That was my mom back there!” the woman shouted. Her face was red and dirt had caked along the tendons in her neck. A wound on her forehead had dried as dark and crusty as a caterpillar. “It was a test! You failed it!”

A man and a boy about thirteen emerged from the woods. Each had his own sharpened stick.

“Give us what you got,” the woman said. The man wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It was unbuttoned halfway down the front, exposing red flesh beneath a puff of black hair.

“Why didn’t you come for her before?” Eddie asked.

“Shut up,” the woman said. “Hand it over.”

Eddie turned to look at Dylan, but the woman touched his cheek with the side of the stick, straightening him out again.

“I need it for the boy,” he said.

He rolled over onto the bottle and put his hand into his pocket. He felt the shards of plastic there.

Dylan sat down on the guardrail. His face was a doll’s face with half-shut lids.

The woman planted her front foot next to Eddie’s chest. The muscles in her calf twitched in fierce debate. Those muscles would decide the fate of her pointed stick—if it was going to withdraw or proceed directly into his face—and Eddie pulled his fist from his pocket and slammed the longest plastic shard into the soft spot behind her knee.

It stuck there, deep, and she howled and fell to the ground as the other two ran to help her. He stood up, scooped Dylan to his chest, and ran, the boy’s legs overflowing from the basket of his arms. The road was flat as a runway, and when the weight of Dylan’s body began to burn his shoulders and neck, he kept on running. He held the bottle in the vise of his hands beneath him as the plastic twisted his fingers until he thought that they would snap.

The sun was overhead, and they were alone. The white stripes on the highway were ten feet long, at least. Too long. His vision wasn’t right. The green highway signs across the divide were huge and sparkling.

As he lowered Dylan to the ground, the boy began to scramble. It was an animal’s recognition of a proximity to freedom. Eddie let him fall. He hit the ground and then stood and organized his shoulders.

“You’re not what you said,” Dylan said.

Eddie sat down in the dirt.

The boy began to walk back in the direction that they’d come.

Eddie stood.

“Dylan,” he called. “Get back here!”

He walked quickly to him, and tried to grab his arm, but Dylan shook away. Eddie pressed down on his shoulders, and his little-boy body collapsed like a cardboard box. Eddie was on top of him, pinning him to the ground. Dylan squirmed, but Eddie leaned hard into his chest, and finally he was still.

“You have to come with me,” Eddie said. “Sometimes you have to do things you don’t like.” He planted his shredded palms in the dirt on either side of Dylan’s body and pushed himself up, but Dylan stayed flattened where he was.

“Come on,” Eddie said, but the boy didn’t move. “Take a sip of this,” he said. “Come on,” but Dylan lay frozen on the ground.

Eddie took a sip and then another, and when he looked up from the bottle, Dylan was sitting.

Something had resigned in him, and Eddie led him to the woods. The leaves were thick on the ground, and he piled them up again. When Dylan sat, Eddie stooped to cover him up, but the boy tossed and kicked himself free of the leaves and began to whimper. It was too hot to be buried.

Eddie sat on the ground. It was soft, and he leaned back against a tree.

“Imagine that it’s night,” he said.

The sky was bright and bled beyond the branches that cut across it. When he thought of Laura, he had to tell himself, These are her eyes, and picture her eyes. He had to say, This is her nose; this is the curve of her cheek.

Points of light began to strike the inside of his skull like static against a screen. His skin was alive with itch, and when he scraped his nails along his arm, he thought he’d rip it open.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I can’t sit here.”

Dylan was up, peeing against a tree.

“Don’t!” Eddie shouted. He stood and went to him but couldn’t judge the distance, bumping his knee hard into Dylan’s back.

“You peed,” Eddie said. “You let it out of you.”

Dylan stood back.

“That’s okay. You had to.”

At the path, the sun flamed at the top of its descent. It blinded Eddie to look ahead, and he hit the guardrail and stumbled against it.

Dylan sat and hung his head. The light had turned him into a few loose sticks of glare and shadow. His face was gone; the tips of his fingers bled out into the hot yellow air.

“Dylan,” Eddie called, and then he said the name softly, testing his voice. He couldn’t tell if he’d spoken out loud.

He went to him and lifted him to his chest again, entwining his fingers beneath the boy’s rear end to keep him up. Voices around him made W sounds and H sounds. Then they began to shriek, but Eddie told himself they weren’t there. Dylan shuffled in his arms as Eddie ran. Though the sun was in his eyes, he felt the closeness of the guardrail with his legs and he followed it as it turned.

“You track stars,” he heard Laura saying. “You never get out of shape.” He loved that she loved his body because it wasn’t her own—that he was able to seek the mystery in hers. He loved that no matter how long he loved her, she would always be a separate person—that love’s limit arrived before two people could press together into one.

Another voice was at his chest. Eddie ran harder when he heard it.

“It’s there,” the voice said.

He opened his eyes. The sun had dipped to the side of the woods, and up ahead was the great skeletal arch of the bridge.

“There.”

Eddie’s legs began to float, and though he couldn’t feel them, he knew that his arms and head, his whole body, all of it, had lifted off of him like a shirt. He didn’t care about his body—it was nothing to him—and so he ran.

There were tollbooths ahead, and the highway widened to accommodate the additional lanes. To the side of the booths, the sun was seeping through a stand of bulrushes, and beyond that the land broke off and there was sky. Eddie couldn’t see what lay beneath it. There were people there in front of the bulrushes. They milled about in the deepening light as though they were neighbors to one another.

Eddie’s mind, too, began to float above him, as if it longed to reunite with his floating body. It was different from the marathon he’d run his senior year—the year he hadn’t trained. At the end of that race—having run too far, too fast—he’d thought that he might die, but knew he probably wouldn’t. Now, with his mind high above him, he could only think of living.

Dylan was no longer a weight in his arms, but a buoyancy he clung to in the vast sea of air around him. The people stood, hands on hips, in T-shirts and in shorts, with hats or blown hair. As he approached, he saw a woman whose eyes caught his and were full of laughter, until they widened and her eyebrows peaked. The sun dipped and was gone and he let himself fall because there was no weight and he was floating.