Wendy pushed past both of us into the room.

What I saw, in the four or five seconds before I did the only clever thing I did that entire year, was this: a bed that had been used, two glasses on the nightstand, a gray suit jacket on a chair — a second gray jacket, an identical one, which for some reason has stayed with me — and a young woman sitting on the far side of the bed with a sheet pulled up and both hands over her face.

Wendy was already going.

She had her back to the bed and she was pointing at her son with the whole hand, the way she pointed at burned pans, and she was saying things at a volume I didn’t know she had.