For years, at some point during each night, our son’s feet hammered the stairs as he fled his downstairs room, spooked by whatever dangers loomed large in his imagination. Once we gave up trying to jolly him back to sleep in his own bed — often dozing off in the chair beside it while he still lay awake — my wife made a nest of sleeping bag and pillows next to her side of our bed. I was sympathetic, as I’ve been subject to night terrors most of my life: on the verge of sleep, some irrepressible projector sends me or the people I love falling from great heights, or throws us in the path of speeding cars or trucks. I writhe and exclaim, sometimes even get up and read for a while. Our son would thunder up the stairs, usually half-asleep, yet somehow dragging his pillow or a blanket, and curl up to rest in his nest. This went on so long that, the first night he didn’t run up, we went down to check on him. There must have been a few years of normal sleeping, but soon there was music until all hours, and various parties and sleepovers, most of which involved no sleeping at all, and the birthday his friends slept in the woods, came to the house for breakfast, went back to their tents, and saw that an impatient bear, following the scent of some cheese-flavored crackers, had slashed through the fabric that, hours earlier, had seemed to protect them.

They had kept in touch, but they had also begun setting off on the next stage of their lives, following their own paths.

This summer was a homecoming for all of us. Last fall, when our son headed off to the state university four hours from the house he had grown up in, my wife and I began new jobs on the other side of the country. We’ve kept the house. Fifteen years, we lived there: returning after just ten months away, we quickly slipped back into comfortable patterns. Our son reunited with his high school friends, especially the tight gang who had slept over at each other’s houses without invitation or need for one, eased into booths for waffles and hash browns at various twenty-four-hour restaurants at three in the morning, then went to hit golf balls at the driving range in the dark (“We keep thinking someone is going to show up and run us off,” our son said, “but not yet”), talking endlessly about bands and teams, giving each other advice about girlfriends, complaining about each other’s girlfriends, ragging on their various teachers and coaches. Three of them had gone off to state universities; two stayed in town. They had kept in touch, but they had also begun setting off on the next stage of their lives, following their own paths.

And so while many things seemed familiar from that last year of high school, enough had changed that they did not fall directly into their old habits. They didn’t sit downstairs on our sleeper sofa playing xBox games or watching bad Japanese television shows late into the night. They weren’t suddenly immune to games or bad television, by any means, but they all had jobs for the summer, some of them had girlfriends, and of course they had new friends: people from college, people from work.

One night I heard, in addition to the ever-present music, muffled banging, curious thumps. I went downstairs and saw that our son had started taking his bed apart. It’s a sort of bunkbed, the kind with a desktop and drawers underneath, the bed above. Looking ahead to the start of the next school year, he had decided to move off campus, into a house he’d share with two other people. To give the place the feeling of home, and to save money, he intended to take from his room the sagging blue sofa, which all of his buddies had slept on at one time or another, and the desk/bed, which was wooden, defaced by various stickers and drawings and carvings, and so big that it needed to be disassembled to get through the door. Needless to say, the instructions were long gone.

When he saw me in the doorway, he turned down the volume. “I’m playing emotional music,” he said, without emotion, his way of acknowledging that taking apart his boyhood bed signified the end of something. Never again would he be able to come back to his room the way it had been in his high school years, the years when he more or less defined himself. Beneath the posters on one wall, beneath two coats of paint, you could still feel the ridges of the giant rainbow he and his mother had painted when he was four.

He slid the desktop off, then vacuumed (!) behind it. “Man,” he said, “those nights I was awake down here until 4 in the morning, you should have come down and beaten me with a baseball bat.”

…in my experience, there’s no statute of limitations when it comes to a parent’s interest in a child’s secret life

“Why’s that?” (For the record: I have never beaten anyone with anything, unless you count ill-chosen words.)

“All that time worried about all kinds of things not worth worrying about… what a waste.”

I was going to ask him which things in particular he wished he hadn’t worried about — in my experience, there’s no statute of limitations when it comes to a parent’s interest in a child’s secret life — when his phone rang, or played whatever song it played those days instead of ringing.

“What do you want?” Among his friends, feigned gruffness is a sort of comic gesture without a punchline. His next sentence, perfectly calm, was “Taking apart my desk. It’s all emotional.” Then, “You called me”; and, “Okay.” He tapped the off button.

It had been one of the girls who hung out, off and on, with our son and his friends. None of them had dated her, though several of them had been interested from time to time.

In less than a minute, the phone rang again; he answered, and I stepped out, giving him privacy. But while I looked through some books, I thought his voice was oddly subdued, rather than flirtatious or friendly. When he finally ended the call, he stepped out of his room, putting his wallet into his back pocket, and said, “We need to go to the hospital.”

I assumed I had mis-heard.

“Zy is dead,” my son said, and headed up the stairs.

“What?” I said again.

“He was in an accident on his motorcycle.”

In a minute we were backing out of the driveway. The second call had been from Muffin — who now wanted to be known by his given name, Michael. One of that gang of five.

“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.

Left with no one — not Zy, not Andy, not Zy’s mother or sister —to represent their loss, the boys understood their next decision meant something. They didn’t know what to do. They knew they needed to stay together. Eventually, they went back to a familiar booth, placed the familiar orders. They ate waffles and hash browns and remembered their friend.

Two days later, we learned the family would have a reception at their house. It turned out that Zy and his mother had recently discussed untimely deaths, and funerals, and Zy had described how he wanted to be remembered. It involved camping and a bonfire and food and storytelling, but it began with a viewing. With Zy, or Zy’s body, in his bedroom. My wife said, “I can’t go.” She isn’t squeamish, but she’s opposed to viewings of the dead. I’m no fan of them myself, but understand the impulse — not only to see the lost once more, but to confirm that he’s gone, that the body remaining is not the person we knew. Lying in his casket, my father looked so bloated, so unlike how we had known him, that my usually-reserved mother complained until the funeral director had the body wheeled into the backroom and adjusted. When the body was returned, and he asked my mother if it looked better — if they had better approximated what she wanted to see when she looked at her dead husband’s face — she said something polite, but was no more satisfied. What was truly wrong could not be fixed.

My wife’s sympathy was stronger than her repulsion. We took a plant, a card. Futile gestures. To get to the house we had to drive the road Zy had been killed on, pass the spot where he had seen a car begin to pull out, swerved, returned to his lane, and been hit. There was no cross, no marker. He had been close to home.

The wrecked motorcycle lay at the end of the driveway. We didn’t know his family well, didn’t recognize the other people at the house. Zy’s mother was keeping vigil by the body; his father greeted us and launched into a monologue that took strange turns. “Zy had a lot of adventures. He had a lot of girls, too — and I didn’t think he had any. That’s something I learned in the last day or two.” He smiled. “A lot of adventures. But we were counting on a lot more.” He began to weep, then stopped. “But this is a happy time. Like that time the kids had that run-in with the cops. That was fun, a lot of fun.” My wife and I wanted to express our sorrow, to offer comfort, but the battle he fought was internal, his logic twisted by grief.

Downstairs, the hallway was dark, the door closed. Something soft blocked the bottom of the door — to keep the air from getting out. Inside, candles illuminated trophies from childhood sports, walls covered with pictures of motorcycles, a giant ad proclaiming “Performance, Power, and Precision,” and a poster with a line from a song Jimi Hendrix said described a dream: “Scuse me while I kiss the sky.” A fan blew across the body. Zy lay in bed with his eyes closed, his mouth open awkwardly, the lump under the covers implying folded hands.

The day before, Ben and Ian and Michael had come over to our house. They let themselves in, as they had hundreds of times before. They scratched our dog behind her ears, checked the kitchen counter to see what there was to eat, and then they headed downstairs, where together the four of them finished taking apart our son’s boyhood bed.