"Can I have the earphones?" He meant stethoscope. "I wanna see if you have a special beat. Maybe I can feel mom that way."

I found my medical bag and lent him the scope, showed him how to find the sound in my chest. There must have been something too wondrous and soothing still locked beneath my ribcage despite the hollowness I felt, because for next three months, that is exactly how he fell asleep.

He was searching around our house like a mouse sniffing for cheese.

I watched him as I sipped coffee from the kitchen table, and at first it seemed like a perfectly normal thing for a kid to do, but the more he snooped under couches and inside of closets, the more I felt compelled to investigate.

"Andy," I called my son's name.

His head was tucked under his bedframe. "Yeah, Pop?"

I sat on the edge of the mattress. "Have you lost something?"

He pulled away from the bed and faced away from me.

"You look like you lost something," I pressed.

"I'm just playin'," he said quietly, still turned away.

"Hey," I called, "What's wrong?"

Small feet shuffled against the wood floor. I couldn't hear his mumbled words so I kneeled beside him. "She . . . sometimes . . . she hid in the closet . . . or under my bed."

"Who?"

He tried-Heaven help him he tried-but as "Mamma" slipped from his lips tears streaked from his eyes.

"Andy," I sighed and then pulled him into a tight hug. "You can talk to me. It's okay to be sad and miss your mom."

"I'm not sad!" he cried, trying to twist out of my arms. "I'm mad! I wanna punch something's face off!"

"That's okay too. You can hit a pillow, or scream, or stomp your feet. Whatever you're feeling is perfectly okay."

But then my son fell into my arms and cried his tender heart out. "I want her back. Pop, I want her to come back right now!"

"I know . . . I want her to come back, too."

"Grandma Marta lies to me all the time and says we can see her again in Heaven but I pray to God and he never sends her back. IT'S ALL LIES! God isn't real!"

I soothed his back with my hands and then lifted him to sit on the bed with him cradled in my arms. "Andy if there was a way to bring your mom back I would. I promise you I would do it in an instant, because there's no one, other than you that I have ever loved as much as Everly. But what Grandma Marta told you about seeing her, that's the truth, she just didn't tell you the whole story."

"Itsnot!"

I held him steady and shushed him in my arms. "It is true. Tomorrow . . . tomorrow I will show you it's true. I promise."

He cried softly for a moment before he sniffled and whispered, "With both pinkies?"

I held him tighter. "What other kind of promise is there."

I handed Andy a key to a newly renovated drawer in my desk. Inside sat a jar filled with numbers that made his eyes light up in a way I hadn't seen since his last birthday.

"What is it?" he asked curiously.

"It's everything I loved about your mother."

Andy rolled the jar in his hands until his face scrunched. "They all fit into this little jar?"

I smiled at him. "You are so much like her it's uncanny, Andy." I sat him on my desk and explained, "Do you remember when I took you camping last summer and we looked up at the stars before we went to bed?"

"At Orion! Yeah!"

"Well, this jar is kind of like those stars. When you're far away from them, they seem so small, like you could reach up and collect them all in your hand. But when you look closer you see that they're connected to something even more spectacular. Your mom was like that. She had so many good things that I loved, each one was beautiful on its own, but then I looked at them all together, and I realized how special she was. She was like those constellations, and I had to share her magic and beauty with the whole world so everyone could see."