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hands and failing. They were almost see through and I could push them to the sides with the palms of my hands and pull more chain from under the door by lifting my hands above my head. But when I tried to grasp them they dissipated like smoke then reformed.
    I sat back down on the closed toilet lid and folded my legs underneath me. With a fearful reluctance, I thought back to my last dream, trying to bring forth all the details.
    Jordan had held my wrists, had grabbed them, really. And hadn’t I thought something about that felt unusual? But what? And what had I promised? What exactly had I promised?
    My head snapped up at this because I knew exactly what Jordan had promised—my brother back. And here I was sitting the bathroom like a zombie when my brother was somehow back from the dead and waiting for me, hurt, in a hospital bed.
    I threw the door open and nearly plowed down the nurse waiting on the other side. “Sorry,” I said, politely shoving past her.
    “Just a second,” she replied, grabbing my wrist. I froze, staring at her hand. The smoke chain seemed to drip from the back of it. I held my breath as she slid an ID band below the bracelet and secured it with a little plastic snap.”For security reasons. He’s being admitted,” she said apologetically, making no mention of any gauzy smoke chains.
    I nodded mutely and made my way back to Lincoln’s bed.
    The head of his bed had been raised and he was sitting up drinking a plastic cup of apple juice. Grandma sat next to him, smiling so wide I could see almost all of her teeth. He set the juice down when he saw me looking in. “Bixby,” he asked,”are you okay?”
    I felt my eyes tear up and my chin tremble. “Yeah,” I said, sitting down at the foot of his bed. “I should be asking you that.”
    He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Yeah, I guess I’m fine. I mean, obviously I am, I’m okay now.” He bit his lip, a rare nervous gesture from him. Lincoln was never nervous—about anything. It just wasn’t his personality.
    I took a shallow breath then asked the question I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to. “Where were you?”
    “I was ... I was at a homeless shelter. I was with all these guys and I slept on a cot and drank this really awful coffee.”
    I closed my eyes in relief. It didn’t really explain anything that had happened, but it was better than him saying, dead, or heaven, or the afterlife, or just plain old nowhere.
    “Linc,” I said slowly, “do you know how you got to the homeless shelter?”
    He bit his lip again and shook his head.
    “Has anybody, um, explained anything to you?”
    “Explained what?”
    Grandma took Linc’s hand and looked at me expectantly. I took the other hand and a deep breath. “You and Ben were going to the swim meet in South Bay. You took his car and on the way there they think maybe a deer ran out in front of you guys.”
    Linc stared at me blankly and I continued. “He must have swerved, because the car went off the road and hit a tree. It … it caught on fire. They said something about a fuel pump, or poor maintenance or something.” I swallowed hard, not knowing how to say the next part. “It was pretty quick and there was nothing anyone could do to help, the fire was too hot—”
    “Is Ben dead?” Lincoln gasped, jerking up. Grandma just looked at me.
    “He is, but—”
    Lincoln just shook his head and started crying again. He and Ben had been close, always playing the same sports and riding to most of the games together. They usually took Ben’s crappy Honda because it got better gas mileage than Linc’s beefed up Isuzu.
    “Linc,” I said quietly. “There’s more.”
    “Why didn’t I get him out of the car?” he wailed.
    “Nobody got out of the car,” I told him. “I ... I don’t know what happened, but both of you ... we thought you both died.”
    Something registered on his face. “Was that were I was? Dead?” he asked wonderingly.
    “Of course