25

BY THE TIME we reach the border of the Circle’s land I’ve re- appraised my opinion of Collindale. Without the pressure of the case hanging over us and tainting our interactions he turns out to be quite good company. He doesn’t talk too much, which always helps, and doesn’t make small talk about the capsule, which helps even more. He has an infectious enthusiasm for an obscure form of jazz that came from the part of New York he grew up in. After listening to it for an hour, I’m coming round to it too.

“I’ll send you some links, once you’re back online,” he says, and I smile and thank him as if nothing is wrong, as if he’s going to unlock the bracelet in a few hours and wave me off from the airport. For the briefest moment I’m tempted to tell him what’s happened and beg him for help, but either pride or fear or the sheer ridiculous need to see the Circle again and work out what the fuck is going on there stops me.

The final road ends at a gate, there for symbolism more than anything else. There’s no fence on either side of it, just posts at regular intervals that would jam a car engine and make a chip go haywire in someone’s head while notifying the Circle of trespass. They put it up the year I left, replacing the old, rusting barbed wire that had a habit of trapping tumbleweeds and made the place feel like a gulag for anyone who liked going for long walks.

I ready myself for some surge in emotion, some horrible memory or at least a stirring of something long buried. There’s nothing. I feel numb. Distanced. My pysch supervisor would probably bleat on about repression and how harmful it is. At least I won’t see that sanctimonious bastard ever again.

The land here is flat and dominated by agriculture. For the past hour I haven’t seen another soul. The only movement has been a few birds wheeling in the sky and a few farming drones spraying something onto fields lying fallow over the winter. The last time I was here, I was walking down this road in the opposite direction, leaving the Circle behind me with nothing more than the clothes on my back, a few days’ worth of food that I’d stolen from the kitchen and a rage that kept me walking long after many would have turned back.

I had slept rough for two weeks before finding civilization and was immediately picked up by local law enforcement, who were ultimately sympathetic but unable to help me. Cult escapees aren’t that common, but one of the officers had clearly had some relevant experience, because she stopped the other one from taking me back, pointing out that at my age I had the right to choose. They took me to a local church and some nice people there put me up in a simple room at the back of the church hall in return for light labor as I waited for my temporary visa to come through. When the daughter of the pastor came to my room in the middle of the night and made it clear there would be other responsibilities, I ran away.

Maybe if I’d stuck it out there, I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now. But, then again, maybe I’d have just ended up in another one.

“There she is,” Collindale says, snapping me out of the bitter memory. He points to a car on the other side of the gate, a modest, old-fashioned car powered by solar panels attached to its roof by fraying rope. Selina Klein is leaning against it, wearing a long black dress and coat. Collindale flashes the lights and she heads over to the gate, unlocking it by the time our car pulls up. I push down the disappointment—and the relief—that it’s not my father who has come out to meet me.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Collindale says, and she smiles at his quaint manners.

“Hello, Mark.” She turns to me as Collindale gets my bag. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I say back, seeing the sadness in her eyes. “I seem to be making a habit of seeing you under terrible circumstances.”

She smiles weakly and I wish I hadn’t said it. Collindale sets my bag down next to me and shakes my hand. “I did all the checks and the bracelet is active,” he tells her. To me he says, “I’ll see you later.”

“I’ll make sure he gets here in one piece,” Selina replies, and she heads to the old car.

I give Collindale a last wave, feeling the metal bracelet slapping my wrist as I do so, and then put my case in the car.

“It’s old but reliable,” Selina says when I get inside. “It’ll take us another hour to get to—” She stops, shaking her head at herself. “You know that already. Your dad said sorry for not picking you up, but he couldn’t get away.”

“I suppose there’s a lot to do.”

“Yes.”

“So, now you know I used to be in the Circle.”

She nods. “I mentioned your name and your dad told me. He’s so proud you made—”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” I cut in, unable to stomach even a secondhand report of my father’s pride. “I couldn’t risk altering your opinion of me during the investigation.”

“I understand,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind, but there won’t be time for you to see your room before the funeral.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’ll take you there after the wake. If there’s anything you need, just let me know.”

“Thanks.”

“It must be a relief. Closing the case, I mean.”

I look at her but her eyes are fixed on the road ahead. “Of a sort.” I look out over fields I once dug in, lying fallow. “I thought I’d be walking. There weren’t any cars the last time I was here.”

“We choose to live without personal tech,” she says. “We’re not the Amish.” After a pause, she adds, “The car is a tool, not a distraction.”

There’s an edge to her voice. Perhaps she thought I was judging them, comparing them to the Circle I left and finding them wanting.

The rest of the journey is in silence. It’s far from comfortable and companionable. I’ve seen her at her most vulnerable and I think that makes her feel awkward around me, like she wants to put on a show of being fine when she clearly isn’t and knows that I’ll see through it. Her makeup and styled hair make her look glamorous compared to when I last saw her, but she’s still far from her best.

There’s nothing to be said anyway. I barely know her. I want to know if Travis is going to be at the funeral. I don’t ask, lest I make it obvious that I’m here for him as well as Alejandro. I want to ask her about my father but no clear question crystallizes. So I sit there, looking out at the gray sky, wondering what the fuck I am going to say to people about the case and my part in it. Am I even still bound by that insane contract? I can’t imagine something as legally trivial as a change in ownership would make any difference to those lawyers.

The farther we go, the more dread and nervous anticipation fill the car, shared by both of us but for very different reasons. I find myself looking out for the silhouette of the huge house and converted barn that I spent eight years of my life hating, as if seeing it at a distance will somehow help prepare me and stop it from catching me emotionally unready.

Eventually I pick out blocky shapes on the horizon. But there are six instead of two.

“It’s changed quite a bit,” I comment as they grow larger with our approach.

“There are almost four hundred of us now.”

“JeeMuh! There were barely a hundred when I arrived and not many more when I left.”

“That was more than twenty years ago, Mr. Moreno. And . . . and could I ask you not to use that word? I don’t have a problem with it, but I think there are several here who wouldn’t like Christ and Muhammad’s names taken in vain.”

“Right. Sorry.” I try to remember whether she said it herself, back in England, but without Tia to remind me, I give up. America is not the place to police hypocrisy.

The four newer buildings are far from what I’d expect the Circle to build. For one thing, they’re all different from one another and the original two buildings, so different they could almost have been plucked out of different cities from around the world and just dropped here. The old farmhouse where I slept when we first arrived looks neglected, and the old barn, containing the dining hall and dormitories Dad and I moved into, doesn’t look that much better. I remember sanding those sills and repainting the window frames every two years. Did Alejandro just lose interest in them?

The new buildings have something of the experimental about them. Now that we’re getting closer I can see how each one seems to have incorporated basic elements—little more than a block with a high-pitch roof on it and then a steel structure weaving in and out of it to form what I assume is a fire escape—and added something new each time. They are a world away from the traditional wooden structures that stand near them.

“Are the new ones accommodation blocks, then?”

“The one on the right is a meeting hall as well as some rooms.”

“Will I be sleeping in my old dorm?”

“Oh, we don’t have dormitories now. Everyone has their own room in the new buildings. We don’t use the old ones anymore. They’re not energy efficient.”

“But Alejandro loved the old farmhouse.”

After a long pause, she says, “He loved the new buildings more.”

The new roofs look like they’re made of solar-sensitive material and one of the buildings looks like it’s completely covered in the stuff. I’ve never seen it shaped that way before. I think back to the list of patents, how several were classed under energy storage. Maybe this is where ideas are tested. Then it strikes me that this place looks more like a scientific research facility than anything homey. These buildings would look more at home on university campuses.

We’re less than a mile away now and I realize the fields around us have crops. It’s hard to tell which are maize and which are corn. In November? “Milder winters here too now,” I say, jerking a thumb toward one.

“Oh, those are some ultrahardy varieties we’re testing out. They’re doing better than we thought they would.”

I see a movement in the corn and wait for a child to come running out. But when we pass I catch a glimpse of a wheeled drone doing something with the soil. “You have farming drones here?”

“A few. I suppose you had to do everything by hand when you were here.”

“Well, yeah. I was told it was kind of the point.”

“Alejandro said he used to be pretty hard-core. This must be a bit of a shock for you.”

I remember him teaching me how to plant. I must have been nine and still intimidated by that huge sky and the silence at night. Bear was gone, I couldn’t connect with the man who was supposed to be my father and Alejandro was trying his best to draw me out of myself. He’d decided to take me out into the fields with a watering can, a couple of tools and a bag of seeds. When we reached the edge of a plowed field he laid his hand on the small of my back and propelled me between the freshly plowed furrows I’d thought were out-of-bounds.

“Do you know what this is?” He held out a seed on his palm.

“It’s one of the bits you have to spit out.” I hated them. I hated the food that needed to be chewed more thoroughly, that had alien textures and uneven coloration and bits that couldn’t be eaten. Some of the teenagers had laughed at me when I’d tried to eat an orange without peeling it and put all sorts of fruit in front of me, telling me I could eat every part. After I took two bites out of a lemon, peel and all, my father had come across us and yelled at the teens until their parents had come and taken them away. I didn’t stay for the offered lesson, unable to spend more than a minute in his presence without wanting to burn everything to the ground.

“It’s a seed,” Alejandro said. “And sometimes we do spit them out. Do you know what they are for?” At my sullen shrug he smiled and reached for my hand to drop it onto my palm. “You plant them in the soil and they grow into a whole new plant.”

I stared at the seed, trying to work out if he was trying to catch me out. “Why?”

“Because God made them that way.” He smiled at my unimpressed scowl. “And because the genes inside them are programmed to do that. When they are in the right kind of soil that has the right kind of nutrients, all they need is water and sunlight to start growing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Where do you think all the food comes from?”

“Real food comes from the printer. Your wrong food comes from the kitchen.”

He looked so sad then, just for a moment, before he smiled and crouched down. “I shall prove it to you. We will plant these seeds together. Then you’ll see them grow, and at the end of the summer you’ll eat the corn.”

I wrinkled my nose at the soil. “After it’s been in the dirt?”

“Everything we eat comes from the dirt. Even a lot of the things they put in those printers. It all comes from somewhere, chico. This way,” he said, and pressed the seed into the little hole he’d made while talking, “we feel a connection to what we eat.”

“But there are drones that do this,” I said, having seen them in a cartoon.

“If we use machines to plant and tend and harvest, we cut ourselves off from the source of life. We need to touch the soil, smell the rain, feel an ache in our back at the end of the day. It keeps us connected and grateful.”

I think back to that man so in love with creation, willing to spend hours trying to find something worth saving in a screwed-up child, and am filled with a sudden and terrible sense of loss. I simply can’t reconcile that memory with what I see now. Seeing the drone wheel out of the field feels like an erasure, an underlining of his death that marks not just the absence of him but the end of men like him. Nothing of him has endured.

Perhaps I’m sinking into a nostalgic grief. Did he simply think that was all bullshit back then and just got over himself? How did he get from a man who liked the drafts in the old farmhouse to one who preferred those ultramodern structures? Energy efficient? He didn’t give a fuck about that sort of thing—in fact, he probably would have felt cut off from the land and weather in one of those fake cocoons. Did science simply overtake the spiritual at some point?

“The funeral will be starting in about ten minutes,” Selina says, when we’re still half a mile away. “It’s in the new hall. I feel you should know that not everyone is very . . . comfortable with you being here.”

“Let me guess: my dad is one of them.”

“Oh no, he’s been one of the most enthusiastic. He’s been so excited the last couple of days.”

I try to imagine him excited. It’s like trying to visualize a green sky with purple polka dots: possible but far from a realistic mental image.

“I’ll stay close and make sure no one gives you a hard time,” she says when I don’t reply. “I’ve told everyone how kind you were to me and how sensitively you managed the case. It’s just that . . . Well, we’re not used to strangers here.”

“I should know quite a lot of people,” I say.

“Not as many as you might think,” she replies, and parks the car. “It was a long time ago, Mr. Moreno.”

But I’m the only one who left. At least, that’s what Gabor said, and he’d obviously had people look into the Circle. Then the most awful thought occurs to me. Perhaps I’m the only person who left alive.

—

BEHIND the buildings there’s a large carport with space for about ten cars, but only two others are there, both old and one of them battered as if it’s been through a crash and not been fully repaired. Selina asks if it’s all right for me to leave my bag in the car until after the funeral and I agree. I need privacy to open that package, anyway. I feel happier with my case locked away in a car rather than in a room anyone could go and poke about in. Then she simply tucks the keys into the pocket in the driver’s side door and leaves it unlocked. I guess they don’t worry about thieves out here.

While I’m worried about my case, at least one problem has been solved: how to get out to the rendezvous. All I need to do is either persuade Travis to go home or, more likely, hit him over the head and bundle him into the car boot in the small hours. Either way, I see a way out now.

There is an alternative, one that is feeling better every moment. I could just steal the car and make a run for it. I’d never be able to take the bracelet off—and as a result I’d never be able to use my chip again—but it would be worth it to get away from Gabor. What I would do after getting out of the States—and how I’d do that—remains unanswered. Everything may have changed here in the Circle, but in this country, the treatment of nonperson-status men with my heritage is still just as bad as it ever was.

Now isn’t the time to consider this, anyway. I have to face my father. And my grief.

“It’s quite safe in there—don’t worry,” Selina says, thinking I’m still concerned about my bag.

“I’ve lived in London too long,” I say, and I fall into step alongside her as she heads for the right building.

Now that I’m up close, I see the buildings are made from some unrecognizable material rather than stone, as they looked from a distance. The pieces are uniform in size and shape and it seems like the building construction has been subdivided into modular sections that can be fitted together easily. I’ve seen similar ideas in printed buildings in London, built quickly to replace homes destroyed in riots years before; temporary solutions that poverty made permanent. These are far more impressive and more solid, but the principle seems the same.

Surely Alejandro would have preferred timber to be shipped in and to get everyone to build them together. Some sort of cheesy teamwork lesson or bollocks like that. Perhaps printed modules are cheaper. But it isn’t like the Circle is short of money, and the printed pieces would still have to be transported there. I can’t imagine Alejandro allowing a printer on-site. Then I remember the farm drone. Perhaps a large-scale industrial printer would be seen as a tool too. It still doesn’t feel right though.

I can hear the low murmur of gathered people before Selina opens the doors into the hall, and I steel myself to see my father. There are at least a couple hundred people sitting in rows of interlocking seats arranged in church-like pews. At the far end of the room there is a huge cross made of oak mounted on the wall. It’s a plain, functional room with large windows that look over the fields and doesn’t feel particularly chapel-like.

The murmur dies away as everyone turns to stare at me. I scan the faces, struggling to recognize anyone other than those whose bios I read on the way over, only to discover my father isn’t among them.

“This is Gabriel’s son,” Selina says. “Carlos.”

No one says anything. Neither do I. I’m struck by how young so many of them are, most in their twenties, some in their thirties and only a handful over forty. They all look so . . . healthy. All are slim and look incredibly fit, and it feels like I’ve walked into a personal-trainer convention. Very few of them are wearing black; most are wearing a kind of dark blue coverall that looks more like a uniform than anything else. I’ve heard of cults where everyone wears the same thing but I would imagine robes or something looser and more comfortable, not this. Not even when I was a kid did Alejandro insist everyone wear the same clothes. I feel like I’ve been brought back to the wrong place.

A man in his late forties stands up. “Welcome back to the Circle, Carlos. You might not remember me. I’m Ethan. I was older than you by a few years when you were here as a child. I look a bit different now.”

I struggle to place him and wish I had Tia to help. He might have been one of the teenagers who laughed at me for eating fruit wrong. It doesn’t matter. I force a smile, appreciative of the fact he’s trying to break the tension and make it clear to me that at least one person is happy with my being here.

“Welcome, Carlos,” says a woman in her twenties, brown skinned and smiling, and then others join in, some more convincing than others.

“Thanks,” I say, feeling eight again, an outsider disbelieving the smiles.

Many of the people waiting have reddened eyes; some are openly weeping. The attention shifts away from me as they gradually turn back to face the front of the hall, waiting for the ceremony to start.

Selina sets off down the aisle, but I slip into the back row, needing to feel a wall behind me instead of eyes. When she realizes I haven’t followed her, she turns back and comes to sit next to me.

“You can sit at the front if you like,” I whisper. She shakes her head. “I’ll be fine.”

“No, it’s okay,” she replies.

More people start filing in. Some are in more traditional funeral clothing but the majority are wearing the coveralls. I look for familiar faces, even hoping to see some of the people I used to actively dislike—just to feel like I’m really in the same place I was before—but there’s only a handful of older people who I barely recall. I was too busy staring at my own miserable navel to have formed any proper relationships here, and even though twenty years or so have gone by, it’s still disconcerting that I can’t remember their names.

Then Travis walks in. He’s wearing a black suit without the ostentatious styling I saw before and his hair has been cut too. He doesn’t notice me as he heads down the aisle to sit next to the young woman who greeted me earlier. He seems relaxed and much more comfortable here than I am.

“Your father is one of the pallbearers,” Selina whispers to me as I continually tense up every time someone comes into the room. “I doubt he’ll have a chance to say hello before the start.”

That eases some of the tension. I study the faces of another group walking in and one of them, a woman in her late thirties, is someone I recognize instantly. Not because I’ve met her before; I’ve seen her photo in the MoJ archive. Her name is Aliette Sorel, a brilliant physicist who went missing about five years ago. Her face stood out from the missing-persons file because of the scar running from her left earlobe to her chin, something she refused to have removed with cosmetic surgery. She won a Nobel Prize for physics at the age of twenty and was seen as a wunderkind in her field, so her disappearance made headlines all over Europe and Norope too. She was last sighted in London, hence the MoJ entry. Did she defect from her high-profile position in Europe because she’d had enough of the modern obsession with connectivity, drawn here by Alejandro? Or was there the opportunity to conduct research here that she didn’t have elsewhere?

Moments after she sits down a man enters with a friend, whom I also recognize from an MoJ file; he was one of several scientists who supposedly died in a terrorist attack at an artificial-intelligence conference in Los Angeles almost ten years ago. I remember him only because his daughter was under investigation in relation to the attack and the case spilled over into Norope as members of the terrorist cell were tracked down. She was cleared but committed suicide soon afterward. Does he even know about that?

Those two, plus the scientists Gabor sent the file on, plus the drones in the fields and the experimental architecture, all contribute to the feeling of this being a research facility now rather than the cult I left. It’s a clever way to avoid industrial espionage: remove the chips, lock down the perimeter and use the US gov-corp’s hard-core religious protection rules to keep prying eyes out. But what could possibly draw so many to this place? Money? Dedication? A particular project?

My thoughts turn to Selina. I had the impression that Alejandro tempted her here with charm and a way to put her failed marriage behind her. The baggage she had regarding personal chips could be left at the gates; no one at the Circle would ever be able to fall in love with anything unreal, so she could be safe to form close relationships again without the risk of being hurt like that twice. But is that the whole story? She was a UX designer and information architect before she left New York—valuable skills in the coordination of multiple scientific projects and the pooling of knowledge gained from them. And Travis too; I assumed he was here to escape his husband—and understandably so—but he also has a tech background and he may have kept his hand in more than I thought. My father, a former scientist put back together again by Alejandro. The patents in engineering and energy storage—it’s all pointing to the Circle being so much more than the outside world believes.

The doors to the hall shut and then someone at the front stands and everyone else follows suit. In moments the doors open again and four men and two women enter with the coffin on their shoulders. The man at the front left is my father. He’s almost bald, his thick black hair lost in the years since I last saw him, and that which remains is a pale gray. He looks like an old man now, shaking the very core of me, as if some childish part of me thought he would be young for the whole of my life.

But he looks like he’s in better shape than I ever saw him in. He walks with ease, no more hampered by the weight of the coffin than the younger man behind him. His eyes, wet with tears, are fixed on the cross ahead of him and then he’s walked past me.

They set the coffin down reverentially on a couple of trestles at the front and everyone except my father goes and sits down, along with everyone else. I realize he’s one of the oldest people in the room.

He turns and stands at the front to address us all, scanning the rows of seats as everyone settles back into place. His eyes finally meet mine and they brighten as a broad smile lifts his brow and ten years off his face.

“My friends,” he says. “Forgive me, but I’ve just seen my son for the first time in twenty-three years and I need to embrace him.”

He walks up the aisle and Selina makes room for me to go to the end of the row. There are tears on his cheeks by the time he reaches me and throws his arms about me. I return the bear hug, feeling tears prick my own eyes, a thousand things on my lips and none of them worth saying. Something that has always hurt, all these years, feels soothed, and for the first time I appreciate how heavily I’ve carried our separation.

He pulls away enough to cup my face in his hands and kiss me on the forehead. “I’ll speak to you soon, hijo,” he whispers, and then lets me go.

I return to my seat with a lump in my throat and shaking knees as he returns to the front. Travis is twisted round in his seat, staring at me with blushing cheeks, until I look directly at him and he faces front again.

“My friends, you know I’m not a man who speaks well, so I hope you will forgive me if I struggle. I never thought I would see this day. I never thought I’d have to face what’s ahead of us without Alejandro. Every single one of us was drawn here by him. We were inspired by his vision, guided by his gentle wisdom and given strength when we needed it most. God worked wonders through him. I would not be standing here today were it not for this man we loved so deeply, and I know there are several of you who can say the same. I . . .” He pauses as his voice breaks, looking up at the high ceiling to compose himself. “I cannot pretend to understand what happened and, I’m ashamed to say, I haven’t found it in myself to forgive. I will try, but not yet. Alejandro was taken from us too soon. There is so much left to do and we all need to lean on each other as we come to terms with the fact that we will go on without him. When we despair, we have to remember that we will see things for him, discover for him, learn for him, just as much as we learned from him. His vision will live on through us.” After another long pause, he clears his throat. “Alejandro told me once, years ago, when Breanna died, that he too wanted to be buried rather than cremated. He said he liked the idea of his body nourishing the Earth as the Earth once nourished him. Perhaps that can offer some small comfort now. If you feel you want to, take a moment to come up to the front and touch the coffin, say good-bye in your own way. Then we’ll take him outside and say good-bye to him one last time.”

I stay seated and watch as dozens of people shuffle forward from their seats to weep over the coffin, my father gently moving them aside one by one to allow the next to have their moment. I can tell Selina wants to go up there but she keeps hesitating.

“Go up,” I whisper to her. “You’ll only regret it if you don’t.”

“I keep imagining him inside the coffin,” she says, tears breaking free. “Like he was in that room.”

I reach across and take her hand. “He isn’t like that now. They’ll have cleaned him up and . . . He’ll be intact. The pathologist and the undertakers would have made sure of that, okay?”

She nods and squeezes my hand. When the mourners thin out she goes up there too and breaks down as she touches the plain, unvarnished wood. My father lets her have a minute or two and gently pulls her away. She sobs on his shoulder for a few seconds and then pulls herself together enough to walk back to her seat. She blows her nose and covers her face with her hands, and I realize that if I’m going to go say good-bye, the time is now.

I stay seated. I think I’ll go up, say good-bye, but the moment passes and I am still seated, watching the last people get up and weep over that box. Like Selina, I too think of him inside, of the stitches holding the pieces of his body together that Theo split apart with his devotion and grief. All I can do is fight the urge to go and shout at that damn box. Why? I want to scream through the wood. Why did you kill yourself? How can a man who gathered up the lost from all over the world and brought them together and gave them peace be so unable to do that for himself?

He gathered me up, but he didn’t give me peace.

I stay in my seat, fearing I’ll do more than ask that question. I fear I’ll curse him, spit this hatred and hurt at him that still burns beneath the memories of love. Of course my father did what he did the day I left. I expected—and still expect—nothing less than parental incompetence from him. I expected more from Alejandro though. When I looked into his eyes that last time, silently begging him for help, for some kindness to help me find a way back into the world he stole us from, he simply looked back as if I were nothing. He had failed to make me love him more than anything else in the world and he preferred to see that failure leave than help him find another path safely.

And then I am in that field again, a child again, watching him twist off the cob of corn and press it into my hands. “Here. You grew this. This is only here because of you. You gave it time and water and kept the pests and weeds at bay, and now it gives this to you. Now I’ll show you how to cook it and we’ll eat it with fresh butter.”

“Just us?”

“Just us.”

I cover my face with a hand, twisting away from the aisle as people pass me, pressed into the seat by the storm front of bitter, loving grief. I feel a hand on my shoulder and I ignore it, wanting nothing of these people, wanting to stay in my private space, where I can wrestle with this alone. The hand slips away after a few moments and in the instant of relief I realize it was always thus. I was always turned inward when the people here tried to reach out. Perhaps Alejandro knew there was no way to help me and thought it was better to let me go and damn myself than waste any more time on me.

I watch them carry the box out, suppressing the brief regret that I didn’t have my moment with him. Selina is waiting at the end of the aisle and I stand to give her the signal that I’m leaving, in the hope she’ll follow the coffin out and get on with her grief.

They bury him on the other side of the farmhouse in the center of a lawn that wasn’t there the last time I was here. It used to be a vegetable patch, but in the intervening years the space was made into a more traditional garden. At my frown, Selina mentions how Alejandro used to sit on the porch and look out over it in the evenings, and I feel like she’s talking about someone else. But Alejandro got older, changed, much more than I have. Maybe he wanted a space that was just beautiful and nothing more.

I stand back as prayers are said and people throw in their own handfuls of earth. My father invites me to do the same, eliciting some frowns from a few of the mourners. I almost refuse but a combination of social pressure and the fear that I’ll regret it if I don’t moves me forward. I try to think of something nice about him when I stand over the hole with my fistful of dirt, but nothing comes to me except the image of him standing on that chair, putting his head in the noose. I throw the soil in and it clatters on the lid of the coffin. My father seems satisfied and I go back to my place, aware of Travis watching me carefully.

Several people grab shovels once the personal good-byes are finished and begin to fill in the grave. Some are almost screaming with grief, making me step even farther back. I have an acute awareness of not being one of them and I’m possessed by the desire to go and steal that car right now. Selina is comforting one of the mourners while weeping herself and no one’s eyes are on me. I take a few more steps back and then turn to head to the carport, desperate to remove myself from this wrong place, these wrong people, this wrong time.

“Carlos!” she calls, and I stop. “The wake is back in the hall we were just in.”

I turn and nod. “My mistake,” I say, and head toward it.

“I’ll see you there, son,” my father says, and I nod and wave an acknowledgment as I walk, hoping he doesn’t see the disappointment in my eyes.