If Dea and her mom had a rummage sale, practically everything they owned would fit in a single bin.

Connor pretended to be fascinated by the toasters, hamming it up to make Dea laugh and asking the heavy woman—who had succeeded in wrestling away the Wiffle ball from her younger children, and was trying to compel them to go wash up for dinner—questions about whether the toasters could be counted on to make toast crusty or just crunchy.

“Both. Neither. Whatever you want,” she said, pushing her hair from her eyes with a wrist.

Dea picked a bin at random and began flipping through it, sifting through the kind of miscellany that accumulated at the bottom of kitchen junk drawers: coins, scissors, unopened cans of rubber cement. She found a knitted potholder shaped like a hen, soft and often handled, and she wondered briefly whether she should pocket it, use it as a door to get into the fat woman’s dreams. But in the end she dropped it and moved on.

The next bin was full of random housewares: old whisks and lightly stained tablecloths, bronze candlesticks and a snow globe featuring a figurine of a topless girl in a grass skirt, who wiggled her hips as the snow came down. Hawaiian vacation, she decided, or maybe Florida. The mom had always hated it, and had finally convinced the dad to trash it, or had done it behind his back. She’s topless, Don. What message are we sending the kids?

She shoved aside a tablecloth and froze. All of a sudden, she felt like she did in those floundering moments of dark and cold when she was fighting her way into someone’s dream—as if she were falling, weightless, into nothing. For several long seconds, her heart didn’t beat at all.

Two identical cheap laminate picture frames were stacked together at the bottom of the bin. Her father’s smile beamed up at her from both of them, his teeth dentist-white above his red polo shirt. His dog was turned partly away from the camera, looking almost apologetic.

An advertisement. A stock photo used to sell cheap plastic frames. Man Posing with German Shepherd. How had she never seen it before?

The world came back in a blast of noise and heat. She could smell the bubble gum the girl with the iPhone was chewing, the booze-breath of the man rifling through an assortment of cutlery next to her, charcoal smoke on the air, sweat. She was going to be sick.

What had Miriam said when Dea had asked her what Dad’s dog was named?

I don’t remember. Then: Daisy, I think.

She thought of the other things her mother had told her over the years, vague references to her father’s importance, to his severity, to his sense of duty. Nothing specific—but ideas, suggestions that Dea had clung to for years, trying to wring meaning from them.

Lies. All lies.

“Find anything good?” Connor was behind her. She dropped the photos quickly, and shoved the tablecloth on top of them, as if they needed to be smothered.

“No,” she said. Little spots of color flickered in the edges of her vision. Her heart had lost its rhythm entirely. “I need to go.”

Connor’s face got worried. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine.” She couldn’t stand to look at him. She started speed-walking toward the car. “I just have to get home, that’s all.”

Connor caught up to her quickly. His legs were much longer than hers. For a moment, he was quiet. “Did something happen?”

“I told you, no.” More seconds when her heart cut out totally, like a song interrupted by a power outage. Then a sudden flare and it was pounding high in her throat.

“Because you seemed happy, and then all of a sudden—”

“You don’t know me,” she said. She knew she was acting like a crazy person, but she didn’t care. She was a crazy person. It was genetic, inherited. All lies. He might as well know it. “You don’t know whether I’m happy or not.”

That made him shut up. They drove back to Fielding, all one hundred and thirty-two miles, in silence.

FIVE

The light was long gone by the time Dea reached Connor’s house. Through the windows, she could see his dad and stepmom moving around the dining room table, clearing away boxes, occasionally stopping for a kiss. There was a tight belt of fury across her chest.

“Listen.” Connor spoke for the first time since they left the yard sale. “If I did something to, I don’t know, piss you off—”

“You didn’t.” She willed him out of the car, sick with jealousy, sick with guilt. It wasn’t his fault. Obviously, it wasn’t.

“All right.” Connor sounded tired, or maybe disgusted. He got out of the car without another word—see you later or that was fun or thanks for the tour—and at the last second she had to force herself not to call out after him.

She jerked the car into her driveway, climbed out, and slammed the door so hard it rattled. Good. She hoped the whole piece of shit fell apart. An illusion on top of an illusion.

It took her a few tries to get the key into the first lock. Her fingers were shaking, her heart still doing its jerky dance in her chest: she pictured valves opening and shutting desperately like the mouth of a dying fish. She slammed the front door, too.

“Dea? Is that you?” her mom called out, as if it could be anyone else.

Thick as thieves, Miriam always said, putting her face right up to Dea’s, nose to nose—practically mirror images.

She’d been lying forever.

“I didn’t think you’d be out so late. Did you remember to lock the door?” Miriam was sitting in the rented living room, on a rented leather sofa, listening to music on the crappy rented stereo. She straightened up when she saw Dea’s face. Her mug of tea had left rings on the rented coffee table. They might as well just be renting space on this planet. “Dea? Is everything okay?”

The photograph of the man who was supposed to be Dea’s father was sitting on the mantel above the defunct fireplace. Every time Dea and her mom moved, Miriam made a big show of swaddling the photograph, safe, at the bottom of her suitcase. So it won’t break, she always said. And then, when they got to their new place, still smelling of paint and plaster or maybe of the old tenant, like cat urine and burnt coffee, she removed it carefully again, untucking it like a baby from a diaper. Do you want to find a place to put Dad, Dea?

Dea was across the room before she knew she was moving. She grabbed the picture from the mantel.

“Dea?” her mom repeated. Then, more sharply, when she saw what was in her hands: “Dea.”

“Tell me about this photo, Mom,” Dea said, struggling to keep her voice steady.

Miriam’s eyes went wary, watchful, like the eyes of a wild animal when you get too close. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I want to know the story. Where were you?”

“Oh.” Her mother pronounced the word exactly. Oh. If she were smoking, a perfect ring would be on its way to the ceiling. “It was a long time ago.”

“What were you wearing?” she said. “Whose idea was it to pose?”

Miriam’s hand fluttered to her hair, then returned to her lap. “It was your father’s idea, I think. Really, I can’t remember. . . .”

“Why this picture, and only this picture?” White spots were eating the edges of her vision and her heart was stopping for whole blank seconds, stretches of silence when her body hung, suspended, between alive and not. One time when Dea hadn’t walked a dream for a month she felt just like this; she collapsed in the bus as she stood up to get off at her stop. She was hospitalized for two days and got better only after she stole a nurse’s crucifix and pushed into a dream, hot and disorganized, of hospital rooms and babies crying behind every door.