[She opened the door...

            She opened the door.

I lay in bed, holding to my chin the coverlet. She came to me softly, followed by a dark shape I did not recognize as Father till the moon fell across it, separating black from black. “Mom.” She set on the edge of the bed, and I felt her hand in my hair, settling its part. In her other hand she held a white ribbonbox with a lock of my brother’s brown hair inside. She thumbed the ribbon until it slipped undone. Setting for a long while, she watched the ribbon swing inaudibly. I waited, still. Father paced the floor, whispering secret regrets under his breath, crying. Grief had hollowed his cheeks and eyes. “Travis didn’t make it, hon,” my mother finally spoke, “I’m so sorry.” I looked past her. “Why?” “It was just too long he was out there like that.” She told me. God had showed to her in a vision my brother, broken and chairbound, and she had allowed him away into the light to stand and bejoy. They had washed his body with warm water, cut a piece of his drying hair, taken ink prints of his hands and feet. The doctors had been noble and kind. The hospital had been generous and understanding. “Come downstairs,” she took me. “Everyone is here.” Family gathered in the kitchen. I walked from one to the next, and each embraced me in a quiet word. The round done, I sank to the floor beside the icebox and cooled myself at its flank, one of my brother’s fingerpaintings beneath my head where it rest. There were recollections, and we gave them voice as we tried to conjure the boy between us. Felling the insincere cage of memory: his hard head softened to a saint, his unchecked contrariety to a wisdom. His reddish color became the color of the wind. I rose to look upon the thin outline of the oak tree from which he had hung. It was too much to see it again as I had, and that was the first I buried my brother. I filled his swaying body, abused by fight and death, with the color in the air. Then, there was nothing but sadness. By the midnight, family began taking their leave. They would return in the morning to help with the arrangements. Uncles solemnly shook Father’s hand to the bone, clutching his shoulders as they hardened. Father maintained a strong lip. My aunts drew my mother into a sisterly circle. They clucked their sympathies, even the featherless among them. Cousin Bill and I did as the young do in hard times, nothing and everything. We promised to let go a balloon in my brother’s honor. “I’ll bring one tomorrow,” he said. When they were gone, my mother and I retired together to one bed, my mother’s, and the largest in the house. Father brought my other brothers in from their room, heavy at hip, and we all lay together. The dark whispered, and the little ones, their eyes like quoits, put their faces to the bedcloth and fell asleep again without question. I watched them. Their slack, easy postures betrayed the upset of their dreams. Mother and I favored Father when he saw Travis shining above us, skirting the ceiling once before he was gone. “It was him to say he made it,” said Father. Slowly, “He’s fine.” “I saw him,” I said. “He did look fine.” Sometime in the night, I dreamt of a window shade on a waking breeze. Roomnoise mingled fitfully with the shade as I stirred, and I became aware of the table clock, faraway. The shade, moving like a marionette in the service of an untrained child, fanned lees of smoke and a voice called my name. When I awoke later, I told all it had been the voice of my Travis. They believed.