That day in Maine now seemed at an untouchable distance — he and she at the long table where the family had all its vacation meals, talking, if perhaps in his own imagination, as adults. She had acknowledged his decision as his own; she had echoed the burst of selfhood with which he had declared, after so many invisible years, loudly.

But that day had come and gone. Today, he was a child walking anxiously toward an imminent outpouring of adult emotion — the kind whose trajectory was always downward. His “home base” was sitting in used plastic bags on the torn vinyl seat of his parents’ car. And the boy who had learned to shout, who had dared to threaten, now looked like no more than a fuming adolescent petulantly breaking rocks on a shoreline.

To them, maybe.

His aunt opened the door.