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Thirty minutes was all the time we had to find it. The sun dipped low behind swags of salmon clouds. The children and I walked across fields, jumped down rocks, and pulled back branches. We were warm, I knew, but how warm?  It was my brother’s school. I visited him there once, on my college spring break. He was a high school senior with too many study halls and an itch for immortality. “This way,” he’d said. We darted behind empty bleachers, glancing back at a diminishing classroom where a teacher was calling roll.

“This way,” I echoed back to my children last week—and twenty-five years later. It’s a worn path in my memory. On that day with my brother, his school became my school. My museum. Maybe even my temple.

“What are we looking for?” my daughter asked, running to keep up. She recognized my determined stride from our visits to job sites. She stayed on my heels, digging after me like an archaeologist searching for prehistoric bones. Prehistory being my life before she was born.

We ran-walked in the lowering light, she looking for me, my son looking for her, and me looking for my brother. We turned this way and that, dead-ending into fences that probably square up on a map, but in real life, rack and slope on uneven terrain.

“Almost locked you in,” a coach said, jangling a ring of keys as we approached a chain-link gate. On the horizon, the silhouette of a team bent and shifted, gathering its gear. “How’d it go?” I asked the man, nodding towards the goals. “We’re 0 and 2,” he said. I smiled and nudged my children through the opening towards a swath of trees. When I last walked this field I might have explained myself. When I last walked this field.

It was letters we were hunting. They hovered on a vertical rock face somewhere in the overgrown thicket near the track. If we could just get there before dark, or get there at all.

J A M E Y   M   8 8.

My brother liked Zepplin, which was retro even then. And concertos by Bach. When I left for the northeast in the Fall of ’86, he gave me a hug, then returned to the headphones in the corner of his room. By choice, we went to different high schools. I, the bookish one, went to the small prep school where our mother taught. He, a quiet badass, opted for more elbow room at the neighborhood high school. We got along well and compared notes in the doorways of our rooms before homework and dinner. I missed him when I moved away.

Back then, I was passing through arches and changing subways. He was jumping from rocks and etching his name. He’d stashed a bag of carving tools in the dunlop of his school’s fields, like some adolescent descendent of Danny Zuko and Hadrian.

“I found the M!” my son called. The most nimble of our expedition party, he’d dropped down a four-foot rock face and threaded through a tight, inhospitable weave of branches. My daughter was next.

“Where’s the J?” she asked, tapping the letters like piano keys. Of all the capitals, it was the oldest. Its curves were softened, its edges spalled.  My son grabbed my phone but fumbled it, and I surprised myself by aggressively snatching it back. There were signs that others had been near my brother’s name before. Down the slope, tree roots caught bottles and butts. But I’d wager my name that no one had taken note of him, nor taken pictures in this place. I had to be the first. Then and now my brother called “I was here.” I called back, “I know.”