It was so completely, so unmistakably him that for one moment he was alive again, thirteen years old and bossing a drowning stranger into living, and I could have reached out and touched him.

For one suspended moment, standing in a stranger’s workshop with an orange whistle in my fist, my middle son was so vividly present that the six years collapsed to nothing.

I could hear him — not the memory of his voice but the voice itself, fierce and cracking and thirteen, bossing a drowning boy into living with the exact words he used on his little sisters and their backpacks every school morning.

Both arms through the straps.