And finally he was told who had done it. His father had come home drunk, and evidently there had been an argument. (He nodded as he took this in, nodded unconsciously, because this was something he already knew. But he wasn’t supposed to know it, because who could have told him? He’d been at the camp the whole time.)

The person who told him made nothing of the nod. Maybe it only indicated that this was nothing uncommon, that his father often came home drunk, that his parents often argued.

But this argument had an atypical ending, because Billy’s father had concluded it by taking a handgun from his desk drawer and putting three bullets into Billy’s mother and, in remorse or anger or God knows what, blowing out his own brains.

The boy knew whose fault it was. It was his, his and his sister’s. While they were crossing the last barrier, their father was murdering their mother, then sinning against the Holy Ghost by taking his own life.

As he remembered it, the ensuing days and weeks passed in a blur. While the authorities tried to find a relative who could take them in, Billy and Carolyn went on living in the house where their parents had died. No agreeable relative emerged, and the two were of an inconvenient age, too young to be on their own, too old to be placed in foster care. The officials shuffled papers and forgot about them, and they stayed where they were. Carolyn did the shopping and prepared the meals, Billy cut the grass and raked the lawn and shoveled the walk.

A week after the tragedy, they resumed sleeping together.

“ All we’ve got is each other,” she told him. “What happened’s not our fault. I’ll tell you something, it was going to happen sooner or later, and if we’d been home that night we’d have wound up dead, too. The way he drank, the way he got when he drank? And the way she provoked him? ‘Man Kills Wife and Self.’ If we had been home, it would have been ‘Man Kills Wife, Two Children, and Self.’ That’s the only difference.”