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calling everywhere they knew—even Aaron on the off chance that Hal had stopped in Toronto—but they couldn’t find him.
    Of course they couldn’t. Nobody knew about Friday night and Saturday all day and Sunday morning, not even Yo was supposed to know, not yet.
    And slowly, slowly he feels himself splitting. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the night gets in.
    But Dave said “Gone.” “Gone” is not … maybe not O merciful sweet Jesus—
    Dave’s green Dodge is at the curb, it is there, he was staring right there but he hadn’t seen it stop. How long canit possibly take for Yo’s brother to lunge out, slam the door, run around the car and up the walk and jump the two steps and across the porch and through the door he yanks open, he has more than enough endless time to know what he need never say aloud but Dave has wrapped him in his arms, clasps him fiercely heads over shoulders, is a machine gun of words set on automatic fire against his chest:
    “…  it was the blue cab of your pickup I saw it in the trees behind the shed at Aspen Creek, I come driving round the bend at the cabin Saturday morning and I saw Big Ed’s van there already so he’s working in the cabin and the sun glanced off something blue back behind the shed, in the trees there, everything was white, the trees hanging snow, it snowed Friday or maybe already Thursday night and the spruce still hanging—there were just Big Ed’s van tracks on the road coming in but no tracks to the shed and what was your blue pickup, that must be it, it was that blue, what’s it doing way back there in the trees, you never park there, you aren’t even home, I wouldn’t have seen it if the sun hadn’t glanced off, so sharp just once as I drove in so I parked and walked towards the shed to look and I remembered Yo calling Thursday about going out Saturday to the cabin to make more plans for Miriam’s wedding and I said I’d come too and she said Gabriel had borrowed your pickup Wednesday, but Thursday he wasn’t answering his phone and I got a stranger and stranger feeling walking past the shed and towards that truck, it was your Chev pickup all right, the light-blue cab and the white canopy, why was it there, backed in there like that, I was getting sort of scared and thinking only pickup, it’s backed so farinto the little birches and poplars on that trail we cut to dig the root cellar, the small trees are so heavy and I shove past the hood, it’s covered with snow and look inside the cab and it’s empty, nothing on the seat. And the door’s unlocked. I can open it, and then I see the key in the starter, it’s turned on, all the way.
    “So … I have to look in the back, into the canopy. Gabriel lying there, stretched out, face … staring up—”
    “Dave! Dave!” He has to get him stopped, they are knee to knee on the living room couch and he has to hear him say it, “He’s dead? Dead, in back of the pickup?”
    Dave stares over him at the wall. “I didn’t touch anything. Lying on his back. His eyes open. And that piece of hose from installing the dryer, it stuck into the canopy through the back window. I fell on my knees. It was taped … very neat, around the exhaust, duct tape … singed …”
    They sit on the couch, crying face to face.
    After a time Dave says, “I didn’t know what to do. What is there? On my knees in wet snow, those snowy little trees hiding me against the truck tire, just stay down, down … I’m praying it’s not true dearest God—and I remember Big Ed in the cabin and I get up and Gabriel’s naked face—I ran back like crazy, Big Ed would know, something, to do, he was up the stepladder sanding the balcony railing and I yelled at him come down, and I told him Gabriel is lying in the back of the pickup in the trees behind the shed. Big Ed went white, he couldn’t say a word and all I could say, ‘What do we do, what do we do?’ And then we hear the door, voices, Yo and Dennis