I have the girls and their needs to consider. Lunch boxes to pack, long hair to patiently untangle, missing math homework to locate before the school bus arrives. I have their unending questions: What day is today? When will it be tomorrow? They are good girls, rowdy and tender. They find a cricket with a missing leg and poke it with a stick. Later, they cry at their cruelty. I wipe their tears and try to explain how it is being a person.

My wife—the girls' mom—was diagnosed with MS last fall. She is tired all the time. Some mornings she can't get out of bed and the girls draw her pictures to cheer her up. Other mornings, it's the old her again like nothing ever happened. She and the girls dash outside and hula hoop in the yard under perfectly leafed-out oaks. I take their pictures. On my phone, I have hundreds of pictures of the girls and my wife. Close-ups of their faces. Bright eyes and smiles, eyelashes, freckles. Charms against forgetting.

At dusk we take drives through the orchards outside town. The girls' mom takes the wheel when she's feeling ok. I sit in the passenger seat looking out at the yellow light through the apple trees, searching for a black dog I sometimes see there. In back, the girls sing with the radio and hold their hands up to the light. Daddy, the golden light's on you, they call when we round a corner and sunlight spills over me.

I'm in the golden light, I call back.

I hold my hand out the window and let the air wash through my fingers. From deep in the woods comes a smell of the creek, cool and clear. Daddy, the golden light's on you, the girls call again, laughing. I love them so much. But I am far away from them. On the other side of the fresh-cut alfalfa field we're passing by. Beyond the tree islands to the horizon. The girls' voices are the thinnest, finest filaments of a spiderweb that pull me back to the dream we share. If not for them, I would float off forever, out the window, a blown-on milkweed pod spilling its fluff. I look at their mom behind the wheel. The girls look so much like her it's scary. She is far away, too. Behind her sunglasses. The flyaway strands of her brown hair.

At night the house is quiet and I'm the last to bed. I wander around turning off lights, cleaning up the last of the dishes, wiping counters, hanging up rain jackets, straightening shoes on the mat by the door. Everything I touch is a reason not to. But reasons don't stop the wanting any more than they stop my wife's MS. Any more than the photographs on my phone keep the girls from growing up and slipping away from me.

The gun is my dad's—a service revolver I inherited after a massive stroke took him in 2011. I keep it in a shoebox high in the utility closet where the girls can't reach. I haven't shot it once in all these years. But I know it's there. Every time I'm in that closet I glance up at the shoebox before switching off the light.

What I'm waiting for is a morning. A morning to drive one of these country roads and park in some out-of-the-way spot and wait for a sign. The way sunrise fills up the mist over a steaming field. The way a stranger driving by in an old pickup might lift a hand in passing. Until then, I'm in no hurry. I make the girls their lunches and watch them spin their hula hoops. I take pictures of our oak trees and the dinnerplate-sized blooms on the hibiscus by the driveway. I sit in waiting rooms with my wife. I hold her hand. I look up when a nurse calls her name. One day I'll just know. I'll get up early and slip off while they're sleeping. If anything could save me, it might be early morning. The last few crickets. Beads of dew sweating down the jointed stalks of every last weed in the ditch. If anything could save me, it might be how it feels to sit alone in my car, in the anonymity of the morning, that shoebox in my lap.


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