“Will you get back in the goddam car?” I said again.

I was driving beside my little brother a couple of nights after a snowstorm. The roads out here had finally been plowed, and my car could start up when the temperature wasn’t freezing. A plain of shriveled fields lay on both sides. I’ve never seen an ocean before, but that was what I thought of whenever the snow formed white waves rising against the dark. Somewhere warm would be nice. A beach. Palms. No shirts, no shoes. Marty walked in the cold without a jacket. His shirt was too big for him. It was one of mine. He didn’t have much of his own clothes.

“Marty,” I said, “you’re going to freeze to death.”

“Good.”

Wind blasted into my car and flung flakes through the window. In the distance, snow-dust whirled on the waves like shapeless ghosts. The snow and the wind cut against my car. It was almost March, but winter showed no signs of leaving.

“Are you crying?” I said.

“Shut up.”

I honked the horn.

“I’m not getting in.”

I kept honking, but he didn’t stop, and I almost said how sorry he looked, shuffling and sniffling, how I should just leave him here in the snow. Don’t be that way now, I told myself. “He’s under more stress than you,” Kara had said, “and he’s too young to understand, and you need to be there for him.” We were in bed, and I was about to make her leave, but the snow had started falling, and seeing all that white come down so fast made my chest feel soft, as soft as her back and hair, soft like snow on a windowsill, and I pulled her close and said I’d try.

But right now, I wanted to grab Marty and shake him. Dad had done that to me, only once, snapping out of his far-gone trance, and although I couldn’t see my face at the time, I somehow still knew the look of hate and dread I had given back to him, the same face I met in the mirror some mornings.

We came to a crossroads. Nothing appeared. Only us and the snow. Dark and empty. Vast. I felt so small the wind might sweep me out into the black silence of the plains, a feather off a dead bird, swept away like our parents. They let themselves drift into the flat nothing. And if I had the chance, I’d tell them I was glad to see them go, glad they left us out here.

“Are you done now?” I asked him.

Marty took a turn, and I idled at the crossroads, watching him go off in the night, listening to the hum of the engine and the blast of the heater. What would happen if I let him go off alone tonight? A farmer or a truck driver might find his body on the road, fresh snow on his hair. I once did the same thing, said I was leaving after my father moved out because of another family he had across town.

And I did. Mom split in two after Dad left. She could get me ready for school one day, but the next she locked her room, only came out when I was hungry. I put Marty in the back seat, just a baby then, and drove mom’s car to my grandma’s house. I was twelve.

You’re not them, I told myself. You’re not them. I turned down the road.

“Come on,” I said with a softer voice. “That’s enough.”

He stopped now and stared ahead. I looked, too. There was nothing, no lights, only dark. In the sky, the slice of the moon looked so fragile it might shatter any moment now, its white pieces coming down like another snowfall. Kara said he was delicate and fraught, and when she told me what that meant, I thought Marty had a heart like this kind of moon above us right now. Maybe everyone had their own kind of moon in them. Full ones and halves. Slivers and curves. Our parents let so much of the dark cover their insides. Dad was flat like the plains, so subdued and faraway it seemed he was out of his body some nights, and when he shook me, he removed himself for good and left us with Mom until I put Marty in the car seat.

“Get in,” I said.

“I never wanted to be left with you,” he said.

He walked on, not looking back. I sat there with my foot on the brake. He looked so little against all that snow. I wanted to tell him a story about the day I put him in the car. I wanted to place him in my shoes only for a moment, to see me another way, and then, maybe, he could put me in his, and we’d know enough about each other to never let ourselves drift like our parents.

You were still asleep as I backed out the car and drove for the first time. It was this car, too, this rusted hatchback. You slept the whole way, and it was the slowest ride of my life, so slow a few cars rushed past from behind, because I wasn’t going to get us in an accident and I wasn’t going to make you cry and I wasn’t going to let you learn the same pain I learned when I said goodbye to Mom behind a closed door, when I carried you to the car, when I followed you down the road, watching you grow small and thin in the dark, thinner than the moon, and I waited for you to get back inside, where it was warm and where I could say what you needed me to say.