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Paul Brightman was sixteen years old when he lost his mother. He learned this news from his father, who was still living in a hut in the woods but temporarily staying at the house in Bellingham. Even though he mostly wasn’t there, his influence over Paul’s mother remained strong. When she discovered a lump, he convinced her not to go to the hospital. He hated industrialized medicine. When you’re a hammer, he said, everything’s a nail. He had his natural cures. Snakeroot and saw palmetto and aloe vera and ginkgo and garlic. Meanwhile, her tumor got bigger and bigger, until it was too late.

Paul had last seen his mother the night before she died, at home, before Stan Brightman reluctantly called for an ambulance. She’d looked terrible—her white hair sticking up wildly from her skull, her eyes dark and sunken, her thin mouth a rictus of pain. She didn’t look like Marjorie Brightman any longer. To Paul, she appeared already dead, even though he’d never seen a dead body before. That was what death looked like, he was sure.

At around nine in the evening, Paul had gone into her bedroom and found her mumbling, calling out faintly in pain, “Help me!” To his father, he said, “She needs to go to the hospital, now!”

“They’re just going to kill her,” Stan had said. He had a full beard and was unwashed and smelled bad.

“She’s already dying,” Paul said, weeping. “She should be comfortable now. Call the ambulance!”

To Paul’s surprise, his father had picked up the phone and punched in 9-1-1. Stan took the one extra seat in the ambulance, even though Paul had wanted to. His father told him to stay at home.

“She’s gone,” he said on the phone a few hours later, in a tone Paul rarely heard from him, soft and sad. Paul was already crying when the phone rang, because he knew.

He heard his father come home after midnight, but he didn’t come out to see him. At breakfast, Stan was all business. He told Paul that he was going to sell the house and that Paul would move with him to the hut in the woods, off the grid.

Paul’s reply was quick and firm. “I’m not living that way,” he said. “I won’t go.”

“I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”

“I’m not living like a crazy person in the woods. I won’t do it. I want to go to school. I don’t want to live like some freak.”

They argued back and forth like this for a few minutes until, finally, in great exasperation, Stan Brightman called his brother Thomas, who lived on Cape Cod with his two kids.

A few days after Marjorie Brightman’s funeral, Paul got on an Amtrak train, alone. It crossed the country in four days, taking him to Boston, where he caught the bus down to the Cape and out to the town of Wellfleet.

Thomas Brightman looked a lot like his brother at a slightly younger age, except clean-shaven. Paul had met him a few times when he and Paul’s cousins came to visit them in Bellingham. Now he hugged Paul for a long time, and Paul noticed how good that felt. His father never hugged him, not even when his mother died. Paul got into the backseat of his uncle’s Jeep Explorer with his two cousins, Jason and Alex, who were thirteen and eleven, and the three of them immediately agreed to play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time when they got home.

“This is your new home,” Uncle Thomas said. “And your new family. You’ll share a room with Jason, okay?”

Jason pouted long enough for Paul to see it, which was probably his intention.

“Okay,” Paul said uncertainly.

After getting over his initial resentment at the near stranger invading his personal space, Jason became friends with Paul, as much as a thirteen-year-old could be friends with a sixteen-year-old. Paul became the elder brother. Uncle Thomas was divorced, apparently amicably, and went out with women from time to time.

And for the next two years, Paul shared a room with Cousin Jason and gradually became a full-fledged member of the family. It was not without fights. His cousins didn’t always like sharing their things with Paul. But Uncle Thomas was always there to mediate fights and to hug Paul, to remind his sons that he was a member of the family, too.

Thomas Brightman built and repaired boats. His two sons had no interest in what their father did, but Paul was intrigued. He liked to watch his uncle plane and sand and paint, the radio playing softly in the background. Whenever Thomas did something menial and uncomplicated, like sanding or painting, he used to disappear into his head, go all Zen. Paul had liked watching his uncle build duck trap wherries, dories, and sharpies, cutting marine plywood on the CNC, a computerized saw. There were always multiple copies of WoodenBoat magazine lying on the coffee table near the TV. Paul’s two cousins loved sailing, though, and after a few lessons from Jason in Wellfleet Harbor, Paul learned to sail and got good at it.

Paul had thought about what his life would have been like without the kindness of Thomas Brightman, his thoroughly uncrazy Uncle Thomas. He couldn’t imagine what might have happened—he’d have been sent, maybe, to a foster home, tossed into the maw of the social services bureaucracy, where he’d surely have been lost. His life would have become a nightmare because his own father was crazy. Uncle Thomas had saved his life.

So it was monumentally unfair that Thomas, who’d later moved to Westchester, should have had a stroke at the age of fifty-five that rendered him speechless. Ever since then, Uncle Thomas had lived in a nursing home in New Rochelle, where Jason and Alex had placed him. Paul visited him there every couple of months. He wasn’t sure if Thomas understood him when he spoke, but he behaved as if he did. And Paul believed he did. The staff at the nursing home made their rounds a couple of times a day, and there was such turnover that most of them barely knew Thomas. So it was all the more important to Paul to make time to see him.

Two days after he stayed over at Tatyana’s, he did so again. The nursing home smelled faintly of excrement and cleaning fluid, as it always did. Thomas looked pallid and weak, though they put him in a wheelchair and wheeled him to the courtyard every morning when it wasn’t raining. Thomas’s room smelled urinous.

“How are you this morning?” Paul asked that day.

Thomas didn’t reply. He looked at Paul warily, his mouth frozen in a grimace.

“You look good. Jason and Alex seem to be doing fine,” Paul said. Empty words that might be reassuring to Thomas nevertheless. He paused. “Hey, I met a new girl. Her name’s Tatyana. She’s Russian American.”

Thomas blinked a few times.

“And she’s beautiful, and smart.”

Uncle Thomas looked into Paul’s eyes.

It made Paul physically ill to see his beloved uncle reduced to such terrible circumstances while still relatively young. That and the odor in the room made him want to leave quickly, but he spent a good half hour talking to Uncle Thomas, hoping against hope that his words were registering, though Thomas gave no sign of comprehension. Finally, after about half an hour, he gave his uncle a kiss on the cheek. He thought he noticed what might have been the very faint beginnings of a smile.

On his way out, he glanced at the chart outside the neighboring room. The room’s inhabitant was a man a few years younger than Paul. He’d been in a coma for five years. A nightmare for this young guy and for his family. There were still worse fates than Thomas’s stroke.