Th e ember of the cigarette flared, and he let the smoke out slowly.

Finally Grace coughed and began to breathe, he went on. And as the life came back into her baby sister, your mom told me she felt another life going out. Going out of herself. She dove back in the water and searched, and she came up to make sure Grace was still on the dock, still crying, and dove under again. It took too long. She could feel that other part of herself slipping away. Just slipping away.

Grant stared into the distance as if into those waters. Faith had misjudged her dive, he said. She hit a rock on the bottom and her lungs filled with water and she drifted under the dock, into the shadows.

He took a last drag on the cigarette and crushed it out.

Th e boy had found photo albums in his aunt Grace’s garage, the plastic pages separating with a loud kiss of time on the twin girls as babies, as blonde birthday girls, as teenagers who with their pure, rudimentary features looked more like daughters of the grown woman he knew than his sister did. After sixteen, it was one blonde girl alone, and to study pictures of his aging mother was to wonder if, in some other, ongoing world, some divergent world, that identical sister once so happy and pretty remained happy and pretty, or must she grow as well into the same tired, beclouded woman who went on in this one?

He didn’t know what to say. He understood that his mother grieved not only for a daughter but for the lost half of herself.

But it didn’t change anything.

School just started, he pointed out, and Grant said they would get him into school up there or down in Denver; they’d have to look into it.

You’ve got your license now, don’t you?

Yes.

And you can drive all right? He glanced at his son’s knee.

Yes.

He handed him a key and took three twenties from his wallet and handed these over too. He told him to go over to the house after dinner and get the old green Chevy and gas it up and drive it back to Aunt Grace’s. Pack up his things. Be ready to go at 7 a.m. sharp.

Your mother knows the plan, he said.

16

It was a modest but handsome house, gable-roofed, with large ground-floor windows that caught both the morning and evening light. There was a time, pulling up to it, when her heart would fly out of her, like seeing the ocean, like seeing the mountains. Here was the shape of her life, of all she loved. A solid house. Nothing in disrepair. The house of a carpenter. Grant had done the bedroom over the garage himself when Angela was pregnant with Sean, and when it was finished, Robert and Caroline across the street, who’d watched the whole process, said they couldn’t believe it hadn’t been there all along.

It was late and the sun was dropping through the washed and dripping trees. Above her reached the long arm of the sycamore where her children once swung. She became aware of a dog barking but only when it ceased. Lights coming on in the houses. Yellow-warm lights in houses where once they’d gone for dinners, drinks, to see new babies. Birthday parties in the backyards. She was almost surprised to see no lights in her own windows. No boy doing homework at the dining room table. No woman at the kitchen sink.

A minivan rounded the corner with its lights burning and Angela went up the walk fishing in her tote bag for keys. Finding them and getting the right one in the lock and opening the door as the car prowled by and stepping in and shutting the door as if casually behind her.

In that first moment, that silence, she heard the clicking of little toenails as Pepé came skating around the corner. But Pepé was years ago, his crooked little body buried out back under the elm in a pine box that Grant and Sean had built. Such a profound absence for such a small creature. Days of grief and Sean lobbying for replacement.

We’ll see.

When? When will we see?

After Colorado.

She stood looking up the stairs into the shadows. The absolute stillness of the house. Silence like a pulsing deafness. Smell of some depleted candle perhaps but otherwise nothing, not even the smell of dust.

She poked at the thermostat and listened for the furnace to kick in, and then she went into the kitchen and turned on the light and ran water in the sink—something to do with the traps, you had to keep water in them. In the basement she filled an old plastic pitcher at the utility sink and poured water down the washing machine drain and into the floor drain. Finally there was nothing to do but go up to the second floor. Three sinks up there. Two showers. Two tubs. Two toilets.

We need to talk about the house, Angela.

All right, let’s talk about it.

Neither of us has worked in over a year.

Th at was the point of the second mortgage, I thought.

It was. But we’re burning through it. All these flights back and forth. Th e bills. Th e hospital bills.

Grant.

It’s just a house, Angie. It doesn’t mean anything.

Just a house?

You know what I mean.

Is that what we tell her? Sweetheart, it was just a house? It didn’t mean anything?

She stood before Sean’s door at the end of the hall. Her impulse was to knock, and she shook her head at that and opened the door on a fantastic scene: military airplanes swarming in outer space. The sun’s last rays flaring along wings and stabilizers against a backdrop of stars.

He strode before the wall-sized map like a little explorer, Here’s Polaris, Mom, the North Star. Here’s Andromeda.

Just above her in diving attack was a fighter plane with its wicked shark’s smile. It banked and shuddered at her touch.

She shut the door and took a few steps and stood before her daughter’s door. Her hand on the knob.

You don’t have to, Faith said.

I know.

She turned the knob and stepped inside.

Posters. Pictures from magazines in the way of young girls since there were magazines. Wild-haired crooners at the microphone, one shirtless guitar player, but mostly athletes, caught in one marvelous instant or another, the unbelievable physiques.

The white girlhood vanity stood as Caitlin had left it. Scattering of makeup. Books, CDs. Small gifts from friends: a rubber heart with legs and arms, standing on clownish shoes and waving hello. An open jewelry box holding mostly hair bands. Pictures of family, pictures of friends. Lindsay Suskind and three other girls in the air, in casual stances, as if levitating.

Angela saw her movement in the mirror but did not look, her gaze landing instead on the silver brush, a thing she’d always loved. The rich weight of it, the raised cameo of a young woman on the back, head slightly bowed as if to receive some blessing. Burnished by generations of young girls’ touching. Our family hair-loom, Caitlin called it when she was little. It rested on its back. After a long moment Angela reached and touched. Fine lacings of hair deep in the bristles. Hairs still eighteen and silky. Hairs that would never age.

Here were her trophies in a fine dust. Here the layers of ribbons, so many of them blue. The handsome small Christ on his cross. The neatly made bed. The pillows. A stuffed ape with gleaming eyes, a lapsed, shabby bear of countless washings and dryings, propped like a couple, just as she’d left them.

Dusk had come into the room. She was so tired.

She slipped the tote bag from her shoulder and set it on the bed and reached into it for her phone, the bottle of water from the market, the amber vial, placing each of these with care on the white lamp table by the bed. Then she moved the ape and the bear and lay down with her hands over her stomach, over her womb. The room slipped into darkness. Heat breathed in the vent. The dog began yapping in the backyard, mad little Pepé, tormented by the neighbor’s fat gray tom. In the metal building a blade hummed to life and went singing into a length of hardwood—oak, maple perhaps—Grant calling to Sean to feed it smoothly, smoothly, and any moment now the front door would swing open and her gym bag would drop from the height of her hip to the floor with a joyous whop and she would be so hungry, she would be famished, my God, Mom . . . when do we eat?