The light from the jack-o-lanterns shines through his skin, making him all veins and cheekbones as he reaches for his crumpled pack of Winston Lights. His bare feet stretch out on the sagging porch that he talks of replacing. In front of him, watermelons lie bloated in a front yard garden among a grove of new eighteen-inch oak trees. Ben Schlecht is taking a moment to reflect this evening, and his brother steps around empty bottles of Rolling Rock to sit with him and contemplate their future while keeping in place the memories of their failed family and the parents they buried almost three years ago.

Only 20 years old, Ben's staring at the gaping puzzle that is his life, and trying to talk through the holes. This isn't a new process for him; he's been struggling to fit himself together since he was a kid.

"I've always had a strong interest in the idea of different puzzles," he says, working to put together his first family memories. The first hole he remembers is his father's absence throughout his childhood. An airline industrial worker, his dad often lived and worked far from home.

"My family never reacted emotionally to the fact that my dad wasn't around. I really admire him for doing what he did; he realized that he had three kids and that they couldn't grow up without him having a job," Ben says. "He realized that with the responsibility of a family came the sacrifice of spending time with us."

In this early memory is Ben's first reflection. While his father was away, his grandmother died suddenly. "I didn't remember caring that much about it, until my second grade teacher told my mom that I had changed and was much more introverted. Even then, I started to realize that I could gauge myself by the way people reacted to me."

His grandmother's death also brought their family back together. Ben, his older brother, Pat, his younger sister, Lindsey, and his mom all packed their belongings to follow his dad to his next job in California. Within a few years, they would move again to Oklahoma. As a kid, he was starting to see everything as temporary: his friends, his school, and his home.

"I would always ask where dad was going to move next, and if we were going to get to go with him. The answer from my parents would always be, 'we'll play it by ear,'" Ben says.

While his dad worked night shifts, his mom raised the three kids and was the disciplinarian. He describes his mom as having a laissez-faire discipline style through his childhood. "I was never grounded. Not once. We always knew how to talk her out of punishing us," says Ben.

Ben sees another missing piece in his life in the lack of awareness he had about his parents' relationship. He says that they always put their marital relationship in the background, and this, combined with his young freedom, spawned ignorance of the secrets his parents were keeping.

The first secret came out when Ben returned home from elementary school one day to find notes left from his father giving apologies and phone numbers. He had checked himself into rehab for alcoholism. The kids would visit him, but did not understand why he was in the institution.

"I got really sad because I didn't know what was wrong with him, and I didn't know how to deal with it. But, again, I didn't realize how it affected me until a friend turned to me in class one day and said, 'What's the matter with you? You look like your dad died,'" Ben says. "I had never seen my dad drink, and we had never heard about it. My mom told us later that she had threatened to leave him several times earlier in the year when she had caught him drinking."

When his father emerged from rehab, his interests had turned toward religion and creating a better financial situation for his family. He got a new job and bought them a new house and his mother a new blue Corvette. He turned his interests to landscaping their large backyard and adding more possessions to their new life. He was somewhat quiet about his religious beliefs, but started laying Bibles around the house and protesting the comic books that Ben would leave out.

Meanwhile, his mother was removing herself slowly from the family puzzle. She spent her time either shopping with Ben's younger sister or going out with her friends at night. "My father was sure she was having an affair," Ben remembers, "and he would call her cell phone repeatedly while he was out."

Ben and his brother Pat, having been offered almost unlimited freedom, spent all of their time away from their home, attending high school student council meetings and frequenting the nearby Village Inns for coffee.

"We were your ideal democratic family. We were like five balls that touched each other, and everyone was doing their own thing and spaced apart. It was kind of dysfunctional, but for me at the time it was kind of fun," Ben says.

His father, however, did not enjoy this family "democracy," and his jealousy eventually led him to call family meetings to try to embarrass his wife in front of the children.

"He would put her on the spot, and we would try to get her to admit what she was doing. Though there weren't actually any problems out in the open, I knew intuitively that something wasn't right, and that this was a very singular event," Ben says.

Soon after these meetings, Ben's mother asked for a separation. She had revealed to Lindsey that she had been feeling trapped in her life. Rudely slapped out of their ignorance about their parents' relationship, the kids wanted them to try to work things out. Ben's father was left reeling from the news.

"I would wake up and find him sitting with his coffee, trying to figure things out and wondering what to do," Ben says.

His father continued to call in to check up on his mother, and Ben returned one night to find her home and annoyed from his numerous calls that night.

"I felt bad for her, but it wasn't really my problem, so I just said goodnight and went to bed. That was the last time I talked to her," says Ben.

It was an early bedtime for him, around 11 p.m., but when he woke up he would be missing pieces he would never find again.

His dad arrived home soon after 11, and walked into the bedroom with their mom.

"I woke up hearing and feeling three noises that sounded like someone was taking a baseball bat and slamming it against the wall. Then the house was absolutely silent, absolutely dead. I looked at the clock and it was 11:41 p.m.," Ben says.

Pat came upstairs and told Ben the house smelled like gunpowder. "At this point I think we both knew what happened," Ben says. They gave each other a hug and decided to go downstairs.

"Their light was shining under the door, and it smelled like gunpowder so strongly. But I knocked and said, 'Mom? Dad?' It was silent, and I don't know how long I stood there, listening for something to put my mind at rest," says Ben.

He called 911, and sat with Pat on the front porch in the cold November night. The police and ambulance arrived, and began questioning them. And it was the cops' questions that forced Ben to reflect and realize what had happened.

"The more questions we answered, the more fear they had in their eyes. They were feeling fear, real fear, when they went inside," says Ben.

Lindsey woke up to the sound of police pounding on her parents' door. She ran downstairs screaming, and the police ushered her outside with Ben and Pat.

"She kept saying, 'What will happen to me? What will happen to us?' I just kept telling her that I would take care of her, and that we would stick together. I was out of myself and a million miles away as I was saying it," says Ben.

The children were eventually taken to a neighbor's house. The cops came over soon after to report that Ben's father had shot his mother twice, and then shot himself.

The next few days were relentless with tearful visitors and funeral planning, and at night the remainder of their little family slept together in the neighbor's sofa bed. His grandparents arrived, and emphasized that they wanted to try to make things normal as soon as possible. This meant moving back into their house.

"I would sit on the porch of my neighbors' house and look at my home. It looked cold and empty and frozen, a frozen thing that was just sitting there," Ben says.

Within a few days, their grandparents put their plan of normalcy in action, and had even moved into the parents' old bedroom. Surprisingly, this was the room that would help Ben start putting his life back together.

"I went in there after a week. I sat on their bed, observing the room and trying to get a feel for things. Above me there was a hole in the ceiling from my dad's bullet. There had been chunks of carpet taken out and replaced, and I felt like that was a piece of the puzzle, seeing something tangible like that," Ben says.

These are the pieces of the puzzle that have propelled him into the future. Three years later, he's attending college at the University of Oklahoma with his brother, where they live in a house that Ben is working to own. They're saving a room for Lindsey, who is finishing high school while living with their grandparents. He's now searching directly for reflections of himself in his weekly therapist sessions, for all trouble has not passed for him; he has returned to college after he dropped out his first year. And when the weather brings cold November air it also brings a night three years ago that will remain frozen in his mind as the shattering of a carefully built picture.

But for now, he's sitting on his porch, bare feet tracing splintered wood, and he's almost finished his pack of cigarettes. He's tireless, still talking about his future and his life ("I'm still trying to figure what my major should be-I think right now it's girls"). He's also still interpreting the reactions of those around him and choosing how he wants to put the new pieces of his life together.

"What I'm trying to say through all of this is that I'm quite happy for being able to have experiences, relative good ones and relative bad ones, " he says. "The whole range fits into one big package, one gift that someone has given to me for no reason, and now all I want to do is enjoy this gift."