“How certain did he sound?”

“Certain.”

“Jesus.”

Zy had stayed home, and worked at a motorcycle shop; he planned to go to a motorcycle repair school in Florida. In the meantime, he had amassed a dismaying string of speeding tickets, and had a few accidents. In our family, the famous Zy story was from the summer my wife chaperoned four of the boys and three girls on a trip to Florida. Zy refused to wear sunscreen, so got badly burned. The next day, when everyone else was back at the beach, Zy called an ambulance. At the hospital they gave him aspirin, some lotion, and the sort of looks you’d imagine. It was almost impossible to reconcile the dashing young man all the mothers loved, whose handsome features were married to a winning combination of bashfulness and good manners, with the boy who seemed either unable or unwilling to follow the rules of the safe driving school he had so proudly attended. He wore full leathers and a helmet, and he would cut the engine when he got to the foot of our driveway, coasting to the house, because he knew the noise agitated our dog.

When we reached the hospital, my son said, “For another minute, we can still hope.”

A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk outside of the emergency room. No one was speaking, but no one was crying, either.

In the hospital, she had sat clutching her brother’s cellphone, which rang and rang as more people called to ask him to deny the unbelievable rumor they had heard.

I asked Briggs, Ben’s father, a man who has helped raise our son, in the same way we’ve helped raise his: “Do they know?”

“They know,” he said.

“Jesus,” I said again.

Michael had chosen not to join the hospital scene. My son and Ben and Ian clustered off to one side, not talking, or hardly talking.

It was as awful as it should have been. Zy’s father sat with his back against a post, talking calmly — but he had initially responded with such rage that the police had taken him to jail, where the magistrate released him. Zy’s younger sister stood quietly, alone — “handling it well,” someone said later, as if that were something that should give us all comfort. In the hospital, she had sat clutching her brother’s cellphone, which rang and rang as more people called to ask him to deny the unbelievable rumor they had heard.

Zy’s mother came through the hospital’s glass doors, having answered a long list of necessary questions, including “What funeral home have you chosen?” — this, not hours after her 19-year-old son had died — took a cellphone someone handed to her, spoke a name, and then, as if something in her heart that she had tried to mend burst yet again, she shouted, “I lost my son!” On the dark road circling the hospital, she fell to her knees, sobbing and shrieking, drawing long, ragged breaths. “I lost my son!” she wailed again, and it was excruciating, it was like a scene from Shakespeare, it felt like the perfectly natural thing for a mother to do. We wept for her; we wept with her. We had all shared the nightmare; she had the burden to live it.

What felt like hours passed. There had never been any practical reason to stand outside the emergency room, but eventually it seemed time to leave. Ian, who had been closest to Zy the past year—they were the two who stayed in town — walked over to be with Zy’s father. My son and Ben followed. Before he left, Andy, the father, turned and hugged all three of his son’s friends at once. With their heads bowed, as tight as a team in a huddle, he said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Be strong as hell, that’s the way he would have had it.” Missing, the young man he most wanted to embrace.