The clock tick sounded time’s inexorable march as the family sat in the warm, dim, chintzy room and stared, each of them—mother, father, grandfather, boy of 12, girl of 8—into a vague middle distance not in the room but somewhere outside of self, each wrestling a question that ranged from “How can life go on when life’s very engine—the very thing that kept it going and moving forward—is suddenly gone?” to “Why isn’t anyone talking?”
