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“But she said that it’s okay ’cause nobody never dies.”

3
    A HN SET up a cot in Eric’s room for Thomas—not for the sake of Branwyn’s son but for the doctor’s boy. Eric was desolate over the death of the woman who was the only mother he ever knew. He understood that she was sick, but he never thought about her dying. Thomas, on the other hand, thought about death all the time. The dead bugs and small animals that he’d find in the garden fascinated him. And his many months of isolation in the intensive care unit had often been the topic of conversation between him and his mother.
    “What would have happened if Dr. Nolan didn’t say for you to take me out of there?” he’d ask.
    “Then you would have stayed small and gotten smaller,” Branwyn told him. “And if you stayed long enough you would have probably died.”
    “And then would you come to the cemetery to visit me?”
    “Every day for my whole life.”
    At night Eric sobbed in his bed, and Thomas would come sit next to him and tell him stories about their mother.
    “She was always talking about having a small house near the desert where we could grow watermelons and strawberries,” Thomas said.
    “Just you and me and her?” Eric asked.
    “Uh-huh,” Thomas replied. “And Dr. Nolan too. And maybe Ahn if we were still little.”
    “How come you don’t call Daddy ‘Daddy,’ Tommy?”
    “Because I have a father, and he’d be sad if I called another man that.”
    “Are you gonna go live with your father now that Mama Branwyn’s dead?”
    Thomas had never thought of this before. Would they make him go live with the man that taught him the riddle? He didn’t want to go. And he couldn’t see why they’d make him if he just said that he wanted to stay with his brother and Dr. Nolan and Ahn.
    “I sure miss Mama Branwyn,” Eric said.
    Thomas put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
    “She’s not gone away . . . just in her body, she is. But she’s still in the world lookin’ at us and smilin’.”
    THE FUNERAL WAS three days later.
    By then Eric had recovered from his deep sadness. Thomas sat up with him every night telling him all the things about Branwyn he never knew, or at least never paid attention to.
    Eric was a strong boy filled with energy. He loved roughhouse games and running, and though he could be very sad for short periods, he always came back laughing and running hard. So when he woke up on the morning of the funeral, he was happy again, with Branwyn’s death behind him. He told Thomas that he didn’t need him to sleep in his room anymore. He helped his diminutive pretend sibling carry the cot back to the attic where Ahn had gotten it.
    When Thomas went back to his bedroom, he realized that something was different. It was as if there was a film over his eyes that made everything just the slightest bit darker, like a lightbulb dimming when lightning strikes outside or a cloud coming close to the sun but not enough to make real shadows.
    Thomas tried to look hard at things around him, to make them shine as they had done only a few days before, but the luster was gone. He sat down on the floor in the center of his room, looking around at the new world he inhabited. He tried to remember how things had looked before, but slowly the memories of the glitter he’d always taken for granted dissipated and all that was left was what he could see.
    After a while he forgot what he was looking for. When he tried to remember why it was that he sat there, he thought of what his mother had told him:
I will always be with you through rain and shine, thick and thin.
And he thought that he was waiting for his mother to tell him more.
    Sitting there on his knees on the floor, Thomas felt the world settling around him. It was completely still, but he knew that over time all things got heavier and sank into one another until they became one thing rather than many. He didn’t remember where he’d learned that—whether it was from Dr.