“ORCAS . . . THEY’RE THE black-and-white ones, right?” my mom asks from the back seat.

“Yeah, black and white,” I say from behind the wheel, “with a big fin.”

I’ve come to Austin to visit my family. We’re driving through the Hill Country a couple hours west of town, far from water or whales and my home on Cape Cod. But this parched sepia landscape was once ocean. Marine fossils lie embedded in the soil that surrounds the roots of the region’s magnificent evergreen-leafed live oaks. My father’s also in the back seat, but asleep, tuckered from a two-mile walk this morning, drifting quietly toward his ninety-second birthday. My husband and brother round out the passengers in the 1997 Camry that, Mom reminds us, could now be considered a “classic.”

“I like old things,” my father said earlier in our visit, his sweater vest, definitely classic, snug around his tiny torso. He was cutting-edge, once. Early 1960s. Wearing those cool black Clubmaster glasses and smoking three packs of Pall Malls a day as he studied the effects of lasers in an Indiana lab. He must have taught me as a kid that lasers emit light of a single color in only one direction. But when light shines, be it from a dim bulb or a burning star, it moves in all directions. Exists in all the colors of the spectrum.

My brother is quiet in the back seat. He’s physically there, but I can feel his absence from our pod. Even when he is with us, he hides behind closed doors or creates invisible ones. He holds long conversations with someone who isn’t present by silently pressing his thumbs against a device, letting electrical and magnetic charges carry the missives. I send out pings of sibling sonar. As kids, we could once convey so much in a single sideways glance, sitting in the back seat frightened by our dad’s distracted driving, or in the middle of a cousin’s wedding in India, swarmed by relatives both beloved and distant.

Now, I listen for his response. But it feels like we’re underwater, in a noisy ocean where he either cannot hear me or chooses not to reply.

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