Nana is always saying how things didn't used to be how they are now, things like, "Rain wasn't this color, before." She says that a lot.

I'll nod, or make some noise like I agree if she can't see me. I never point out that rain doesn't have any color. It's black. One time I asked her, "What color was the rain, then?"

"Rainbow colored," she said after a moment. "All the different colors." That didn't make any sense to me but she had that look, the one that means she's far away, thinking of something else, something that I've never seen and probably never will. She never did explain properly. Every time I ask she answers something different, never straightforward, and I wonder if she really remembers. Another time it was, "The color of tears. We used to say that rain was God's tears."

Evan's no use for explaining. He's old enough to remember the way things were, but he doesn't talk about it. Or about anything. When he first showed up he was sick with fever, stayed in bed for days, but even after he got better and started helping out around the house, he never said a word. He understands us fine when we talk -- he's no dummy, he just doesn't speak.

Nana said he must have lost his voice, that it can happen when people get sick, or hurt. I know that's not exactly true, not about Evan anyway. Once I heard a noise in the night that wasn't the rain, and when I went into the other room, it was Evan. He was curled on his cot with his arms up covering his face, making a moaning sound, not real words. It went on and on, getting louder and softer like waves. I wanted to stay and listen, or even get closer, but I didn't dare let Nana catch me.

Lying in my bed that night, I kept thinking about his voice. So he still had it, it wasn't lost, but maybe he forgot how to use it. I wondered what he might tell me about the world before, if he could. I always feel like Nana, and Evan too, know more than I ever can. They have these worlds inside them that I can never touch or understand the way they do.

Let me try to explain. I was yea high when I first came to live with Nana, but it's more like a fact that I've learned than something I just know. It's on the doorway of the kitchen, a faint black line that Nana made, she said, when she first found me. She's done it ever since, I know. Every once in a while she has me stand on that spot and she makes another mark. But I don't remember the very first time. I see the line on the wall with the others, and suppose it must be true.

Except one day I thought: it could all just be a story. Where I came from, rainbow tears, disappearing voices ... like the fairy tales that Nana admitted weren't real. And I made up my own stories. I'd listen to the sound of the rain falling on the roof every night, and imagine it washed the dark out of the sky, so that when we woke up in the morning everything'd be bright again. I wondered, if Evan had stories to tell, would they match Nana's or not? Or maybe mine? But I knew the stories Nana told about the way things used to be were important to her, and even if I didn't really understand, she wanted them to be important to me, too, more than something made up. So I never said anything to her about what I imagined.

Kept it to myself, something of my own world inside.

There was something wrong the moment I woke up. Quiet. No rain. Sun shining through the window. Nana would never let me sleep this late unless I was sick, and if I was, she wouldn't leave me alone either. She'd be taking care of me.

I walked into the main room. No Evan, though he's usually out of the house before I'm up. Nana's door was closed, but before I got to open it I heard a noise outside. Through the window I saw Evan running toward the house, carrying something. I opened the door just as he got there himself.

"Ka... Ka, Katrin." I thought he was coughing at first. I was so surprised to hear him speak, and that the first word he ever said was my name, I froze for a moment. Then he did start coughing. He collapsed on his knees and lay the bundle in his arms on the ground in front of our door. Nana.

"Is she okay? What happened, where?" She felt cold. I stared at Evan. Tell me. I know you can, you have to tell me.

He sat on the ground, trying to get his breath back. He looked at Nana, then at me, raised a hand in the direction he came from and let it drop. He turned back to Nana. Wouldn't leave her. He put his head in his hands and started shaking it back and forth no, no but the sound coming out of his mouth was the moaning I once heard.

"We should get her inside. She ... We have to." I opened the doors as he carried her into her room and laid her on her bed. Her eyes were closed. I tucked a sheet under her chin, wondered if she'd ever gotten any sleep last night. She just needs rest, she'll be fine ...

Evan was sitting in the main room, holding a cup, mostly empty, staring at what was left in it. I wanted to say, I knew about your voice, you always had it. But what came out of my mouth was, "You have dreams at night." He looked up at me. "Nightmares."

His eyes dropped back to his cup. Just a flick of his eyes but I understood. I poured myself some water and sat next to him. One of the fingers on his left hand was twitching. He has a metal ring around that finger that kept hitting the side of the cup, tink tink tink. Then he stopped and leaned back in his chair, and I could see tears running down his face.

I drank some of my water. "Nana told me, rain used to be the color of tears. But she said a lot of things. About rainbows, all different colors. Didn't really make sense. I had this idea, when I was little. I never told anyone. That rain was the night turning into water and falling out of the sky. So in the morning there's light again. But I know Nana would say, that's just a silly ..."

"I --" Even though I wanted to make him talk it still startled me to hear him. "I ha-ad the same, thought." His voice was thin, like a sheet so worn you can almost see through it. He drank the rest of his cup.

Was he serious? It was just something I made up ... "It's real? It's true?" He tilted his head a little, no. Stories are just stories, after all. I turned my cup around, making ripples on the water. "Nothing is the way it should be, is it?"

He rocked his empty cup back and forth on the table, then pushed it away. "I dream. Go backwards in time. Everything," he looked around the room, gestured with a hand in a big swirling motion, the whole world that you've ever known, "I see it, undone, can't stop it, I'm falling. Until. That moment ..."

Nana has the same block. There's things that even she can't talk about. "Everything changed. The whole world, Nana said, no one ever knew until ..."

But Evan was shaking his head. He took his cup and turned it upside down, put a plate on top of it, then a bowl. He started picking things up from all over the room, piled it all up on the table, higher than my head, pieces sticking out on all sides. Then he took my cup, balanced it on the very top, and let go. "Look." He touched the plate near the bottom, turned it just a little. For a second everything turned with it, and then it all started to slip, and fell apart. Rainwater spilled out of my cup all over. "Simple."

I jumped up from my chair. "Why ..."

"No why! Happens, some day. Has to happen." He turned and walked to the front door. "They didn't know? They didn't look."

In the dark I heard Evan through the wall, in the room that used to be Nana's. I got so used to the rhythms of his dreams, it fades into the background like the rain, but I heard it even in my sleep. Something different. A murmur like talking, getting louder then softer again. He does sometimes talk now, but never as much as Nana did. I asked him once why he never spoke for all that time, and he answered, "Same reason you never said anything about the rain. It didn't make sense, you said. Nothing makes sense. Why talk about it?"

I quietly got out of bed and went into the other room. I stood outside Nana's door for a while before opening it slowly. I don't often see Evan sleeping, he's always up before I am. He was curled up again, like he was trying to protect himself, and he was saying something but I couldn't hear what it was. Then there was one word, "Hazel." He repeated it again and again, "Hazel, Hazel."

At breakfast that morning I asked, "Do you always have the same dream? Is it always about Hazel?"

He looked at me and then away again, the same flick of the eyes I saw the last time I brought up his dreams. We sat silently for a few moments, Evan holding his left hand in his right, touching the ring on his finger. "Two years before it happened, the day everyone remembers. There was an accident, she was ... I lost her. In my dream, it's not the day that the world changed that I dread. It's what happened before, the way it was. It was clear that the world as we understood it was always going to end, we just never knew when it was coming. But my world ended two years earlier, and I still think about it, I keep coming back to it."

"Like Nana and her rain."

He gave a small, sad smile. "Like the rain. Hazel and I, we had a daughter. That day when everything ..." I nodded, though he wasn't looking at me, "I thought I lost her too."

"You thought?"

"I may be crazy, Katrin." He says it with the emphasis on the trin, instead of on the Kat like Nana did. "But you look so much like her. Like my ... like Hazel."

He looked straight at me, the way I used to do to him, when I wished so hard that he would say something. "Well ... if nothing makes sense anyway, maybe it doesn't matter if you're crazy." Maybe each of us is what the other needs. Stories may just be stories, but that doesn't mean they're not important.

We heard a loud cracking that came from outside, and then a familiar sound. "Is that rain?" Evan nodded. "But it's daytime ..."

He got up and took my hand. "Come and see. It used to be like this, before." It wasn't bright out, but it wasn't exactly dark. When it stopped we went outside, and I followed Evan, walking around the house. "Look."

I looked where he was pointing and there was an arc in the sky, made of all the different colors.