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shout. He’d say it gently, but firmly. ‘Say, “Please may I have the milk.” That’s all you have to say, Luke.’
    And Luke, just three years old, would sit there and try and fail and keep trying and keep failing and he wouldn’t get the milk until he cried and then Eleanor would go and hug him and give it to him and Buck would yell at her, because how the hell was the boy supposed to learn if she did that every time, for Christsake?
    As Luke grew, so did his stutter. And the space between his words seemed linked in some organic process to the space that opened little by little in the midst of the family, he and his mother on the one side, everyone else on the other. More than ever, he became Eleanor’s son and soon he was to be her only one.
    On a snowy November day, when Luke was seven years old, two Henry Calders, his older brother and his grandfather, were killed in a car wreck.
    Young Henry, just fifteen years old, was learning to drive and it was he at the wheel, when a deer sprang out before them. The road was like greased marble and when he swerved, the wheels locked and the car slithered and launched itself into a ravine like a wingless bird. The rescue team reached it three hours later and with flashlights found the snow-sprinkled bodies in a tree, frozen and entwined, as if in some fabulous balletic leap.
    With seventy-six years on the clock, the older Henry’s death was the more easily absorbed. But the loss of a child is an abyss from which few families return. Some claw their way again toward the light, perhaps finding a narrow ledge where, in time, memory can shed its skin of pain. Others dwell in darkness forever.
    The Calders found a kind of nether twilight, though each by a different route. The boy’s death seemed to act on the family with a force that was centrifugal. They could find no comfort in collaborative mourning. Like shipwrecked strangers, they each struck out for shore alone as if fearful that in helping others they might be dragged beneath the waves of grief and drown.
    Lane and Kathy fared best, escaping as often and for as long as they could to the homes of their separate sets of friends. Their father meanwhile, like a brave pioneer, strode forward in manly denial. Unconsciously impelled, perhaps, to spread some compensating genes, Buck sought sexual solace wherever he could. His philandering, only ever briefly curtailed by his marriage, took on new zeal.
    Eleanor retreated to a distant inner land. She would sit glazed for days before the TV. Soon she knew every character in every soap and saw the same issues and faces come around again and again on the morning shows. She would watch wives yell at cheating husbands and daughters berate mothers for stealing their clothes or their boyfriends. She shocked herself sometimes by yelling along too.
    When she grew tired of that, she tried drink. But she could never quite get the hang of it. Every kind of liquor she tried tasted terrible, even if she drowned it in orange or tomato juice. It made her forget, but only the wrong things. She would drive all the way to Helena or Great Falls only to find she had no idea why she was there. She drank with such graceful discretion that no one ever suspected, even when they ran out of bread or milk or she served the same meal two nights running or, once, forgot to serve one at all. In the end she decided she wasn’t cut out to be alcoholic and simply stopped.
    It was Luke who felt her distance most keenly. He noticed how she often forgot to come and kiss him goodnight and how she rarely hugged him anymore. She still protected him from his father’s rage, but wearily and without passion, as if it were a duty whose purpose she had forgotten.
    And so the boy’s quiet harvesting of guilt went undetected.
    On the day of their death, his brother and grandfather had been on their way to fetch him from his speech therapist in Helena. And with the unsullied logic of a seven-year-old, this fact alone made the