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straight to the trash, news channels were quickly changed. That day, those days, were rarely spoken of again. The implications and the volatility of the matter within the often touchy, so-called blended family—it had just been too big a risk for any of them to take. The price in terms of their necessary relationships with one another was too high. But was it still ? Over the years, each of them had hunkered down into their personal pods of regret and sadness. And ignorance, and, she supposed, blame. Although life had changed forever and Stevie’s loss, the terrible way they’d lost him, gripped them all, they tried to put it aside. It was easiest. That much they all seemed to understand.
    No one had ever brought up the question of her part—her alleged part—in it. How much her mother and stepfather had known about what the police knew, or guessed, Mary Byrd had never known. She suspected that each of them had different pieces of information, or misinformation, about the murder, as if they all had the same disease but different symptoms, or were in different stages of it, and there was no cure.
    Mary Byrd began to feel an old creepiness, a poisonous smog of bad feeling, leaving her in a black, blank space that would easily fill up with all kinds of ugliness. She should talk to someone about the day’s news, to make it seem real, and navigable. Well, it wouldn’t be her mom, or Charles, who did not invite conversations about feelings.
    She was afraid of bringing on the old bad dreams again. They didn’t come to her often anymore, but when they did, they were paralyzing and heart-squeezing and sleep-sucking and day-ruining. She’d never said a word about them. Back then, after Stevie died, she’d slept in the basement of the new house they’d moved into to start fresh, to get away from the fearful neighborhood, their haunted house on Cherry Glen Lane with Stevie’s empty room, and the horrified neighbors who avoided them because they had no idea how to act or what to say. Who would? Her basement space in the new house with its own bathroom, which her mother said would give Mary Byrd more privacy from her brothers, only isolated and spooked her. Her mother had really been thinking, surely, of keeping her out of the way of her despondent stepfather, his crazy binge drinking, his rage and resentment. So for a long time Mary Byrd, the big sister, slept with her light on, a nine iron by her bed and a knitting needle and a barbecue skewer easily reachable, sticking slightly out between the box springs and mattress. She had been afraid of everything. Tuttle. Creepy detectives. Her stepfather and her mother. Herself. Her memories were like her nightmares, but she’d always been able to slam the door on them. Now that door swung wide, wide, wide as hell open.
     
    Rain had been falling down that evening, seemingly at the same rate and density as the cherry blossoms. The spent petals—it was early May—had fluttered down with the sparkly drops and been illuminated by the streetlight so that Mary Byrd, not wearing her glasses, had imagined that the dark woods across the street were a deep blue, almost black prom gown studded with luminescent pale pink pearls and rhinestones. From time to time her boyfriend’s head had obscured the view. They were making out, necking, it used to be called, struggling with heavy petting, reclined in the backseat of his little blue Chevy convertible, steaming up the back windows. They’d had to put up the top quickly because of the rain, which had surprised them; it had been such a gloriously bright Sunday, and they’d taken a drive once the Rhineharts’ afternoon dinner was over. It was Mother’s Day, but she’d been allowed to go riding with the boyfriend because he no longer had a mother, and maybe Mother’s Day was not such a good day for him. Eliot Nelson. What had ever happened to him? He’d been a senior, and she’d never seen him again after that spring. Quiet and