Willa missed Justin’s homecoming. She had been in school, floating through her day from class to class, without the knowledge that her brother was back. Her mother hadn’t told her it was happening. Later, Grace said of course she’d told her, why wouldn’t she?

After school, she walked in the front door and Justin was sitting in the living room. He used a cane in each hand to help him stay upright. His body looked skeletal and wild, like a boy raised by wolves. She wasn’t prepared. She hadn’t gone to see him during the months he was in the hospital because her mother thought it would be too hard for her to see him. Willa didn’t try to imagine what he’d look like. She thought he’d look the same. But he didn’t.

Their mother sat on the couch with her arms around him, his bristly head resting on her shoulder. His head had been closed with staples; where the staples had been removed, there was a large crescent scar. Ugly pink.

Justin’s eyes fixed on the carpet. Grace cried. Willa put herself in the wingback chair, carefully, to watch her mother cry. Love cracked and gushed inside her to see her mother’s tears. She didn’t know if it was seeing her mother be weak and soft, or seeing her crying over Justin, hurt by what had happened to him, but Willa didn’t want it to stop.

• •

The police came to speak to Justin. Willa was used to them being around. The last time they came, Grace brewed coffee and they sat at the table talking.

“Your father was one of the best,” an overweight cop said to Justin, and Justin’s eyes examined the dark uniform.

Willa waited for him to respond. He didn’t. “Thanks,” she said for him. Just in case.

Her mother asked her to leave, as if Willa couldn’t handle the conversation. Had the officers not been there, she would have argued. Instead, she pretended she was going to her room, but she secreted herself in the linen closet in the hall, which shared a wall with the kitchen. Much of what she heard sounded melted. The spike of Nick’s name drove through her ear now and again.

Later, she drifted into Justin’s room. He kept the door closed all the time now. It made him feel safer, he said. Grace didn’t argue with him about it. He sat on the bed with a deck of cards spread in front of him on the blanket. There was a railing on the edge of the bed so that he wouldn’t fall out of it during the night.

“They said I wasn’t there when the kid died,” he whispered.

Did he not remember Matt’s name? It was possible. Some of his past had been erased. She almost said: Matt. The boy who died was named Matt. People said the name to her all the time. “Matt,” someone would say as they passed her in the hall or the cafeteria, as if it were an insult. They didn’t have to say anything else.

“Who said you weren’t there?”

“It was Nick,” Justin said. “They told them, the uh, police, I wasn’t there. They said I ran away. Nick did it.”

Most likely, he remembered none of it and was telling her a story. He looked at her and tried to smile, but it gave her the creeps. He looked like an android pretending to be reassuring. She smiled back at him so he would stop.

He hadn’t been there. Or the police couldn’t prove he had been there. She didn’t know. At school, the message reached her daily. It’s your brother’s fault. Matt had been popular, a baseball player.

“I was there. I didn’t run away. I was hiding.”

Willa came around to the foot of the bed and climbed onto it to be closer to him. “If they say you weren’t there, you weren’t there.”

“I said Nick took me and I didn’t want to go.”

“He kidnapped you,” Willa said.

He started crying. His tears copious. Drool leaked out of his mouth. He laughed occasionally for no reason, too. It would ring out in the middle of the house. She couldn’t allow him to be this laughing and crying person. The cry was like something he was chasing, something that he’d tried to hold on to. Out of control. She slid away from him.

Grace appeared in the doorway, hurried through it, and grabbed her arm. “You’re upsetting him.”

Willa slipped off the end of the bed and let Grace take her out of the room. They both didn’t go back.

• •

Grace drove Justin over to Poughkeepsie to something called Neuro-Recovery. Willa didn’t go along, only imagined what went on there. He needed to go somewhere and learn things; he had to be rehabilitated.

“He’s different,” she told Jenny. They sat next to each other in their only class together. The first bell had not rung yet.

“Can I come over? I want to see him.”

“You don’t know him. You won’t be able to tell.”

“I just meant to visit. Not gawk at him.”

“No,” Willa said.

After school, they hitched a ride with Jenny’s father. At the farm, she lay by the woodstove with the dog while Jenny read aloud from A Tale of Two Cities, until her father told her to stop. It was putting him to sleep. He turned on a movie, and they shared a bowl of greasy popcorn with nutritional yeast. Willa let the dog lick her hands until they were hot and soggy. When she called home, her mother answered.

Willa waited to be yelled at.

“Where are you?” her mother asked.

“Jenny’s. I want to stay here. I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier.”

“I knew you were fine,” her mother said.

• •

When Willa talked to him, it took time for her words to reach him. Something flicked on behind his eyes, and finally he answered her. Whatever she asked him annoyed him. They stood in the kitchen. She laid slices of cheese onto bread. “Do you want something to eat?”

He sat at the table with cards in front of him to help with his cognitive function. The card game was called Memory. It was the exact game they’d played as kids, with illustrations of different foods, household items, animals, or symbols on the cards. You put them down in a grid face up, flipped them over, and tried to remember where the matching cards were. He glanced at her and she watched it happen. That life appeared in his eyes as the information reached his brain.

“Yes,” he said.