At first, the man in the Pink Floyd t-shirt doesn’t speak.
His long brown hair was dark and gleaming as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. His face was smooth and clean, the scabbed-over pimples on his chin now thoroughly washed away as if they’d never been. He was somehow older, with a rougher face passed over by a razor blade thousands throughout a thousand mornings. But essentially, he was the same, right down to the black t-shirt with the pyramid on the front, a beam of light shooting inward from the left edge and out the right side of the pyramid as a prism of rainbow colors.
He was the same, just a little heavier with age.
“Your hand,” David said to the man he’d only seen stuck inside the lanky physique of a gangly teenager.
The last time David was near him, the man was screaming, his hand stuck to the silver knobs of a car stereo inside a tiny white hatchback. Though he now looked different somehow, David knew this was the same person who’d locked him in the coat closet back in the Lake Hazleton cabin, another lifetime away.
David pointed at the man now. His vision was muddled, and his breathing felt light and thin.
“Your hand,” David said again. “It’s fine?”
The man in the Pink Floyd shirt held both hands in front of himself and rotated them, palms to back and back again. He looked as surprised to see David as David was to see him. Pink Floyd smiled at David then, with a surprisingly broad row of polished teeth, his lips pulled back in an exceptionally wide grin. But still, he said nothing as he slowly faded away, not as instantly as David suddenly found himself in this place, but more like pollen from flowers swept up by a sudden steady breeze, slow but all at once, before dissipating into nothingness.
In his place, others now stood, first one person and then another, looking back at David with wonderment and peace in their faces. Jeremy wore a pressed pair of blue jeans and a plain black T-shirt.
“We’re not dead,” Jeremy said with certainty to David. “I don’t know how, but we’re not dead.”
“I saw you falling,” David told him, and his voice sounded like when they were kids, trying to say the alphabet underwater after diving off the dock at Lake Hazleton. “Or falling up.”
“And I saw you down below,” Jeremy said. “With Olivia.”
“Olivia!” David said and spun around, the memory of her burying her face into his chest just moments before when — when, what? When the black hole…
Black hole?
“Daddy!”
Rosie, now five years old again, with a white silk ribbon in her hair, stood where Jeremy had just been. She came running to David and into his arms, smelling like the jasmine shampoo Olivia had bought for their daughter. It came in a purple bottle with a yellow screw-on cap. It was just for Rosie.
“Just for me, Daddy,” she’d told him when Olivia brought it home. “Mark can’t use it. It’s for girls.”
And somehow, he was now holding Mark, as well. Both of them were suddenly infants now, baby twins once more. He cradled them, one in each arm, just as he did after their birth. Their faces were like angels, and David couldn’t believe how beautiful they both were. The emotional upheaval was nearly crushing yet joyful all at once.
“I told you they were in here,” Grace said to him, standing now where Jeremy had just been, while Mickey appeared and placed a heavy but comforting hand upon his shoulder.
At one moment, Grace looked as he’d last seen her - somewhat crazed and panicked and angry but also lost and afraid — holding a shotgun directed at David from their farmhouse driveway. Then, in an instant, her face was beset with deep wrinkles with cavernous shadows, crow’s feet nested at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was sifting from silver to more translucent white, aged as she was before the world was sent into dreamlike disarray in a time before she’d held a gun pointed to his chest from the dusty farmhouse driveway over a hundred miles away.
Mickey, too, went from young to old as David watched. Olivia’s father slipped back from how he’d looked back at the farm and into his natural age from before all this misery. His hair was so thin and whispy that he showed more scalp than coiffured style.
“I can’t make sense of a lick of this,” he said to David and scratched at his chin, which was frosted with faint silver whiskers. He smiled with a warmth rarely exhibited outside of the presence of his grandchildren. “And if you can, then you’re a smarter man than me.”
“I must be dead for good now,” David said and hugged the babies closer to him, closing his eyes. “Truly dead this time.”
“If you are, then so are we,” Mickey said. “But I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s just something…different.”
“But it doesn’t matter,” Grace said, smiling. She placed a hand directly on David’s head as if bestowing him a blessing.
They were standing now in the open doorway to Mickey’s work shed, not having even realized they’d somehow been transported first from wherever they’d each been just moments before to that indistinct place of blinding whiteness, and now to here, back on the western edge of northern Illinois. They were somehow returned to the humid farm country with its low curtain of gray clouds, swollen and puffed, nearly ready to burst.
Mickey’s faithful rust-colored tractor was parked by the far edge of his work shed, oil dripping into a pan beneath the motor. His trusty radio made noise from atop his workbench on the other side of the room, a squawking distortion of babble. The words emitted from the device were all garbled and gibberish, yet still real and normal despite being nothing but nonsensical caterwauling emitted through the tinny speakers.
Despite the heavy clouds outside threatening another late afternoon downpour, the dry smell of dust and summer sifted through the room in a mild gust, ruffling David’s hair as he stood, still hugging Rosie and Mark tightly to his chest. The sun was bright and orange, coming from everywhere, every direction, all at once.
Then Olivia was there as suddenly as all the rest. She wore a ribbon, like the one Rosie had before their daughter miraculously transformed from a small girl to an infant. The ribbon pulled Olivia’s hair back from her face, which was glorious and plain and beautiful as tears streamed down her reddened cheeks, awash with relief as she gently slid her arms around her daughter, son, and husband and took them in.
“Is it over?” she asked, relief seemingly pouring from every ounce of her. “Please tell me it is. I need to hear that it is.”
Now, their children were teenagers again, looking like amalgamations of how David and Olivia had appeared these last few weeks, trapped in their bodies from a long past year.
Olivia reached out with both hands, cupped them behind Rosie and Mark’s heads, and pulled them closer to herself.
“We’re all here now?” she asked.
David leaned into his wife and pressed his cheek against hers, a tuft of her long brown hair falling across his face.
“I’m so sorry you were left alone,” David said as all that transpired on the river flooded through his brain in an instant: Jeremy reaching out, and for some reason, David needing to retrieve the pack from the back of the kayak. And then blackness, followed by Lake Hazleton and all that happened since.
But it didn’t matter anymore. None of it mattered.
“We’re all here now?” Olivia asked again and wrapped her arms tighter around her family.
“Yes,” David answered and closed his eyes tightly against the sun. “We’re all here.”
