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donation. When she was little, Ashleigh used to ask whom they were lighting a candle for, and her mom always gave the same response: “My brother.”
    Ashleigh shut her eyes in the clearing. She heard the distanthum of a leaf blower, the rustle of the tall trees as the breeze picked up. But she kept her eyelids closed. She watched the weird starburst patterns that exploded on her retinas, shifting swirls of green and red. She mouthed one word:
    “God.”
    She felt nothing. She felt alone. She didn’t even feel connected to the trees and the grass. Did praying even matter? Did all the time she and her mom spent in church really amount to anything? It all seemed like a fantasy. And Ashleigh wondered if there had really been a man on the porch that night speaking to her mother. Had she dreamed it? A child’s dream? She’d never spoken to her mother about it, so how did she know it really happened?
    “God?”
    Nothing.
    She opened her eyes, and it took a moment for them to adjust to the bright sun. Impulsively, she raised her right hand to her mouth, kissed it, and then cast the “kiss” toward the ground where her uncle’s body was discovered, a gesture that felt a little childish and immature. She’d never done anything like it before, but something about the gesture just felt right, almost required.
    Ashleigh pushed herself to her feet. She knew she had to get home. She knew the reporter was coming by their house, and her mother had begged her to be there for the interview. “It sends the message that we’re all united in this,” she had said.
    But Ashleigh couldn’t convince herself to believe that either. It too felt like a fairy tale, a child’s myth. Her grandfather never spoke about his dead child or dead wife, and the man barely gave the time of day to Ashleigh or her mother. Ashleigh couldn’t say why, but she even felt a distance between herself and her mother. She thought about it often, searching for the source, andcould only conclude that it had to do with the sadness of her mother’s life, the black cloud that seemed to hang over everything the woman did. Ashleigh knew a better daughter would have reached out to her mother, talked to her about it, and tried to be the support system she so clearly lacked. But Ashleigh couldn’t bring herself to do that. She feared the wellspring of emotion that might pour out if the two of them even tried to talk about something real. Instead, Ashleigh decided to take the indirect approach. She’d find the man from the porch, and in the process, she’d find the truth about her uncle’s death. That would help her mother. That would put everything back on track.
    When she first heard the twig snap, she assumed she had made the noise. Ashleigh looked down and saw that she was standing on dirt with no twigs nearby.
    The noise came again, and when Ashleigh looked up, toward the same path to the clearing she had just come down, she saw the man looking at her, his body frozen in place next to the pond. A green scum was growing across the surface of the still water.
    She recognized him. Didn’t she?
    He was black. His eyes were large, the lids heavy and droopy. The man looked tired. Not like someone who hadn’t slept well, but rather like someone who had been knocked around, someone whose life had encountered a series of wrong turns and dead ends. The man’s eyes widened when he saw Ashleigh. He looked guilty, as though he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing. Ashleigh didn’t think—didn’t know if—the man would even recognize her.
    But she knew him. She had seen his picture in the paper that very morning.
    “Hey,” she said. Her voice sounded low, tentative. She felt as if she were in a dream, the kind in which she would try to cryout but her voice wouldn’t make a sound. To prove this wasn’t a dream, she spoke again, her voice finding itself and rising louder beneath the trees. “Hey.”
    The man started backing away. He held up one