“Worry can pull a person’s face into a mask of anxious lines, and he could tell she’d had some of that, but even worried folks could laugh.”

“Silas knew words could have power behind them. Usually it was just a sort of bad luck. He also knew, very early on, that you could never tell when that bad luck would jump up to claim its due, so it was best to be careful. Quiet was safer. He wished his parents had been quieter when they were together. Who knew what might happen when you said something awful to someone else? It was hard to take some words back. Some words stuck and you couldn’t shake them off. Silence was better than those kinds of words. Silas had learned that lesson the hard way.”

“The more he thought about his mother, the more he could see that while they were on different roads, they were each just plain lost. In their life together as a family, maybe for the last ten years, maybe longer, they’d all been living in a kind of perpetual twilight. Not light. Not dark. Not anything. And then when his dad disappeared, the lights went out, and Silas and his mom had been wandering around in the dark looking for a switch. Could he blame her because she hadn’t found one either? Each of them had been looking for a way out of their own black midnights, and each of them still had a long way to go until they found some kind of dawn.”

“He could feel his father’s history like ruts worn deep in the road.”

“She thought he cared too much. Sometimes Dolores could see that her son felt what other people were feeling. He was sympathetic, she knew that. But Silas managed to make his feelings about others into another kind of absence. You’d laugh, Silas would laugh. You’d cry, he’d start crying. It was like he was tuning in to a radio station. It took a moment for the distant signal to lock in, but once it did, he’d be right in sync with you. Only when he got angry, or hurt, did the signal fail and he’d become very present indeed, and very annoyed to have his calm broken. Then it was nothing but static.”

“He could see now that asking the dead about his father was nearly useless, so burdened were they with their own losses and regrets and distractions. He had no right to press them. It was not enough merely to let them speak. If anything, he should try to bring them comfort, to shorten their suffering. Anything else was selfish, thoughtless, at best redundant. He was also finding it too easy to take on their pain, perhaps because he was more like them than he wanted to admit. Or rather, he had let himself become like them, a wanderer, someone lost in a world he had hewn from his own pain.”

“He wanted their worlds to pull apart and never rejoin.”