The days of stories didn’t end when my soul flew out the window of our house on West Street. At first, I flew away. I looked for the places that my parents talked about over plates of food that our grandparents taught us to make. I looked for the places that we never saw with our own eyes, for one reason or another. Of course, the reason was always money. We never had it; we never had enough. It was the first thing I did when I could, and that wasn’t until I could fly away on my own.

There were so many holes in the story that I didn’t know where to go when I left. Mamma and Papa couldn’t tell me the proper names, so I had to fill in the blanks: the places where my grandmother might have walked, the church where all the children in the old family had been baptized, the crypts where they were buried. The stories were all there, but they had no particulars and no beginnings. I knew the endings, of course.

All stories end one way.

I came first to the shore of Mamma’s birthplace and stared across the straits into the sea. I could see the floating city shimmering over the water, rising up from the waves. It was just as Papa said, no fairy tale. I could have reached it with a thought from the shore, but I knew that I would find nothing but heat and air and the diamond surface of the sea. Still it was there, to my eyes, crystal buildings flashing and waving with the rippling heat on the horizon.

I could have stayed forever on the shore as the deceitful Morgana probably wanted, but I had more things to see. There was the old house made of white stucco with stone floors, where Papa had been born and where he’d left one day as a boy, never to return. It still stood, white seashells pressed into the concrete walk that led up to the front door. Wind still blew through chimes made from the shells of mollusks, bleached by decades of blinding sunlight. Bees still buzzed in the citron trees surrounding the house, bits of conversation between them reaching my ears. And just as Papa said, nobody was home. No footsteps in the house or yard, no shadows in the window anymore. Where had they gone?

Inside, I placed my bare feet on the cool floors, the speckled stone that my father and his family would drench with water and sleep on when the heat smothered the city and made it impossible to breathe. The lost breaths of the old family rose up to me from the floor, sighing around my ankles and lifting the hem of my dress. I stepped carefully around the absent bodies that once endured the heat together in that place.

There were marks on the wall of the kitchen, notched into the wall plaster with a small knife and colored with whatever materials had been at hand: candle wax, crayon, and what looked like beet juice. Each notch marked the progress of one child, and then another and another, but they had no names. They had sprouted and grown with only their mother’s memory to witness it, and now they were lost. I didn’t know what their names might have been. Papa left before his siblings were born.

I had become memory itself, nothing but memory. But I was memory patched with forgetting, something I had inherited. The great holes between stretches of time kept all of us apart, like relatives carrying on a feud though they can’t remember the cause of. I could stand there in the old house and see that it was real, I could even stare out from the shore and see the city that was not real, but I wouldn’t find the beginning of the story by looking. Without witnesses, the beginning had been lost to time.

It was in the church that I began to understand. I stood at the baptismal font and ran my hands along the marble. I put my face close to the surface and breathed across the lake of holy water, watching tiny ripples break its stillness. Had my great-grandmother’s body been lowered toward the water here? Had she screamed when the cold water covered her warm skin? Was this the bowl that caught the water that streamed off her hair? I couldn’t know. There were four other churches in the same city. I didn’t even know her first name.

So I turned my heels to the old house, and the church, and headed back to the shore. It is the place where the seas come together, where the Madonna surveys two dominions from her throne on the thrust of the land. It’s also the land that makes you choose between a rock and a hard place: the dangerous shore or the swirling waters of two seas flowing together. It’s no wonder that Papa chose the open blue waters beyond the unreal city floating in the harbor and the calm of not knowing what was out there.

* * * * * * * * * *

He was waiting for me there on the shore. His face turned to the water, watching the floating city change with the tide and light. He was smaller than I thought he would be. In a moment, I stood shoulder to shoulder with him and looked down at his hands. The fingers were long, the nails ridged and white like the shells littering the shore at his feet.

“I didn’t think I’d find you here,” I said.

He smiled without looking me in the face.

“Where did you think I’d be?”

I followed his gaze, only to see the floating city dissolve slowly on the horizon, leaving with the setting sun. The shore grew darker and cooler.

“To be honest, “ I said, “I expected to see you in the church. Was that wrong?”

His smile widened, an indulgent father too pleased with his child to offer anything but delight.

“You aren’t wrong. But I love this place. It’s spectacular.”

He raised his hands and spread them, palms turned to the skies. The setting sun cast a last shaft of pink light across his forehead. I wanted to stay with him on the shore forever in that moment.

“You are going, aren’t you?” he said. His sights had settled again on the distant shore, now a purple line on the horizon. The smile stayed on his lips as he spoke.

“You’re going, too,” I said. “Aren’t you? Surely you don’t live here.”

It took me a minute to feel embarrassed at the assumption and to follow up with an apologetic, “Do you?”

“I do live here,” he said, “Why would you be surprised? What did your grandfather call these places?”

He paused for me to find the phrase, but I couldn’t. If Nonno had ever told me, it had fallen into a dark place in my mind. My companion reached over and tapped my forehead, carefully fixing his eyes over the top of my head.

The phrase appeared before my eyes, written in the sand.

“Luoghi sottili.” I said. “Thin places.”

He snapped his shell fingers. “Thin places. I live in those. Now you do, too.”

I considered this revelation. I lived between two dominions now, like the shimmering spires of the floating city. I could stay in the borderland for as long as I wanted to, as long as I needed to.

“Then yes,” I said. “I am going.”

He took my hand in his, allowing his long fingers to wrap over the tips of mine. The palm of his hand felt like a small, melting sun. I didn’t want to let go of it.

“Very well,” he said, “But you will come back. I will wait until you’re ready.”

He smiled again and turned my hand up to kiss it. When he let go of my hand, I felt as though the center of it had disintegrated. By the time I looked up to find him, he was already disappearing around the far side of the Madonna.

So I turned my face to the sea and set my thoughts on home.

* * * * * * * * *

When I returned to West Street, I let myself into the backyard first. I felt small and cold, too thinly dressed for the cold weather. It was evening. The shadow of the building turned everything in the garden gray and black. I’d become a child again, seeking the safety of my father’s arbor. Though it was covered completely in darkness, it seemed to call out to me. So I sat there, clasping my knees to my chest, shivering under my white nightgown. I’m not sure when the nightgown came in—I had been wearing my dress and sweater earlier. My nightdress didn’t protect my little body from the night closing in around me.

I stared up at the house, wondering what to do next. I was back, but what good would it do if I couldn’t work my way back inside? The windows were deeply black, the entire house sleeping. Even the light that had been burning in my room around the clock had been turned out. Then, a small movement in an upstairs window: the girls’ room.

I could see Chiara staring down into the yard. It looked as if she could see me sitting there, staring back at her. I blinked and she was gone. In an instant (and far too fast for such a small girl), Chiara stood in front of me. Her stare seemed to go right through me, as it should have. Yet she reached out her hand and touched my knee. Confusion flooded my mind. Had something also happened to Chiara? Was she like me now? It seemed the only possible explanation for her ability to see and touch me.

“Aunty,” she said, “Why are you so small?”

* * * * * * * * * * *

Chiara had never spoken to me while I was alive. Now, the words poured out of her mouth like there’d never been a problem. Many astonishing things had happened to me recently. This somehow surprised me most. I didn’t want her to stop. I certainly didn’t want to scare her.

“Kiki,” I said, “Because I’ve come to be your friend now.”

She seemed to accept that explanation without fussing and came to sit by my side.

“Is it warm where you’ve been, aunty? You are shivering and it’s not so cold.”

I couldn’t recall what time of year it was. The yard was in that in-between stage: the trees weren’t bare, but I couldn’t see enough in the dark to tell if they were green or changing. There was no frost on the ground, and no breath blossomed from Chiara’s mouth. No breath would be blossoming from mine.

“I think I must be tired,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of adventures in the last few days.”

Her eyes sparked at that and she almost smiled.

“Where’d did you go to?” she said. “Was it heaven? Did you go there first?”

“It wasn’t heaven in the sky,” I began. I wasn’t sure how much Chiara understood, if she understood anything. NoNo had us believing that Chiara didn’t know anything and never would.

“But it was the most beautiful place in the world. There was a city floating in the middle of the sea, very sparkly and colorful.”

This was the right thing to say. Chiara smiled and put her head close to mine.

“Okay, Aunty. You need to go to bed and get warm, if you want to grow up again.”

I trailed behind her, our hands clasped together under the moonlight. I could feel that I was drawing the warmth out of her body as we walked to the back door.

“Do you want to snuggle up in my bed with me?” she said.

I didn’t know why Chiara never offered this to me before I flew away, and I desperately wanted to accept. It had been a long time since another person had held me while I slept. But I could see that her hand was turning pale under my touch.

“Thank you, Kiki,” I said, “But I’d better go to my own room for tonight.”

“Rules?” she said, half-smiling.

I didn’t really know the rules, but Chiara astonished me. She always lived in a place outside the rules. It seemed she understood more than I had believed.

“Yes, amore,” I said. “For now.”

I woke up dead on the morning of October 15. I don’t remember the year. I don’t remember who was president. I knew I was dead because when I sat up and moved to look out the window my body didn’t make a dent in the bed. I had no weight to bend the edge of the saggy bed or to press down on the shag carpet at my feet. I looked back over my shoulder to see if my wife noticed. She didn’t budge. Lately she’d been sleeping hard in the mornings. Not even something like this could move her.

But there was something else.

When I looked back, I saw myself lying there. My body, that is. Or that was. Just lying on the bed, eyes closed, looking pale and still.

You would think I panicked about the situation. I didn’t. I stood and turned to look down on myself for a moment.

It’s strange to step outside yourself and see what others see when they look at you. I was very small and thin. I thought at first that I was looking at my father as I last saw him, small and pale on white pillows, greasy salt-and-pepper hair plastered against his forehead.

I didn’t look like anything.

You can see why I was glad to walk away from that.

Nothing prepares you for being dead. You go to church and they tell you about bodies and souls, and how you’ll be judged the second your soul splits from the body. But that just isn’t true. There I was, sitting on the edge of my bed with October sun pouring through the window, making everything painfully yellow and white in my room. Total silence in the house, too. No voice calling to me, beckoning me by name.

No Jesus.

No judgment.

No wheat and chaff or sheep and goats. Just unbearable brightness all around me and my deflated body on the bed.

Carina didn’t feel my stare as I willed her to wake up and look.

There were sparkling flecks of dust floating through the air and I didn’t know what to do. Like I said, nothing prepares you for being dead. I decided to put on my clothes and get out on the street. I thought, if something’s going to happen, it will be out there on the sidewalk. Not in my house, which never belonged to me anyway.

I couldn’t feel my legs when I stood, but I felt no panic as I walked down the hallway. I passed the kids’ rooms and it seemed like a good idea to take one last look at them before going. I knew I wasn’t coming back. It didn’t bother me at all. There were no tears to fall because I guess I didn’t really have a body anymore. I don’t know, exactly. I hadn’t figured it out yet.

Matty was face down on his bed, butt in the air. He looked different to me now, too, now that I was standing outside my own life. He was so thin and pale and I thought what bad luck it was for him that I was dead. Boys don’t recover so quick from a father’s death. I couldn’t do anything for him.

I noticed Matty’s skin most of all. Very white, almost transparent. I could see the skin on his neck just under his jawbone fluttering steadily and I thought I could feel the blood traveling in his veins. I could feel the difference between us growing, his weak, little life now stronger than mine.

The girls were wrapped around each other under their blanket. Beautiful Marianne. Smart Marianne. Her dark, curly hair flowing around her on the pillow behind her head. Panic set in then. I wanted to stay for Marianne. It wouldn’t matter if I stayed because she didn’t need me, but I wanted to anyway.

I couldn’t look at Chiara, who was nothing more than a silent lump under the blanket next to Marianne. I didn’t want to see her. There was nothing I could do for her now or ever.

My hands seemed to be vanishing from the fingertips down. The cuticles were bright half moons smiling at the nothingness of those fingertips, which I had loved so much. They were my point of vanity, Carina said. Clean nails no matter how hard the work, a sign of dignity that I didn’t have.

It was time to go.

Mamma was in the kitchen. She’s always awake, so that didn’t seem surprising. She peeked around the corner and looked right at me as I came down the stairs. She was drying a pan that she’d used to cook her breakfast. She stopped mid wipe and watched me walk to the doorway. I put on my windbreaker and walked out the door.

My heart--wherever it was--did not skip a beat.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The light on the street overwhelmed my eyes. I don’t understand why it hurt because I couldn’t feel anything else. I must have had new senses, something that didn’t need the rest of my body to think and feel. I’d read that in a book from Uncle Alex’s library, a textbook on how to ascend. It seemed important that I should remember more of it now.

I kept walking toward the baseball field and up to the corner of Gravesend. I didn’t see anything unusual and didn’t know what to do next. I couldn’t feel my feet in my shoes, not even the ties that usually bore down into my skin like dull drills.

I lost track of where I was for a minute. I thought I saw the church on the corner, but it couldn’t have been. The church was in the other direction. I thought I heard the train, but the train wasn’t there on my street. I thought I might be standing on Avenue U, in front of a line of stores, staring at the displays. Then it seemed to be a tree-lined street somewhere I had never been, a dog barking in the distance, a boy I’d never seen staring up at me with rage on his face.

I couldn’t feel my hands at all.

I could sense the air melting around me, like chalk colors melting off the sidewalk in the summer heat. Then I was standing on the corner of Gravesend, looking into the face of my friend, Mike. His mouth was moving but my ears didn’t work right away.

“Hey, Max,” he said, “You decided to come anyway. Good choice!” He slapped me on the back and the other men with him grinned at me and said “Hey, Max!” They seemed glad to see me but wondered where all my stuff was. There were two work trucks idling near the curb.

“Come on, you assholes!” Mike called. “We’ve got to rock n’ roll! We won’t get to the land of sunshine before next week if we don’t leave. NOW.”

Mike pushed me into the truck. Some other guy I’d never met squeezed in beside me. He was gray-skinned and thin in places and looked like light would pass right through him. He had sores on the edges of his lips.

Mike got in the driver’s seat and put the truck in gear.

My journey to another life began.

Ryan Blodgett called me at 10:30 the next morning. I had just dropped my car with Cory, my high school friend, for a quick service before the trip. He has a shop down the corner from our old place and Ma says that we should try to help him out as much as we can. Cory still can’t read more than a sentence or two at a time.

“Education never stuck on him,” Ma said.

Of course Ryan would call at 10:30 the morning before I left town to look for my dead father. That’s my luck.

“You can’t possibly be grading all weekend,” he said.

That was a stupid thing to say. Of course I could. We’ve all done it. I would be grading for 48 hours – minus a couple to watch old movies -- if I wasn’t taking this trip.

“You should come out with me,” he said. “We could go outside. You know, for a walk. Remind ourselves what sunlight is.”

The offer was insensitive, but it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know that I’d taken emergency leave from the school, that I had to drive in a cramped car with three siblings to a place I’d never been and would probably despise. That currently, my sense of reality was sliding off the edge of the earth.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t do anything with you this weekend.”

My annoyance had crept up from my stomach and worked its way into my tongue. I’d been devouring him with my eyes for a year -- and this was the moment he chose. Ryan’s unexpected offer fed my anger at the universe. It was so inopportune, so unfortunate. It strengthened my belief that good things didn’t happen on my side of the street. But my words sounded worse than I’d meant them to.

“Wow. Ok,” Ryan said. “I’ll just stay in my cave with my papers.”

I tried to recover. This was Ryan, after all. Ryan. Blond and green-eyed, tall and so slender that most of my family would tease him about his girlish figure. His eyebrows were dark and perfect.

“Maybe some other time?” I asked. “Maybe next weekend?”

I hated myself for promising something I couldn’t make good on. Would I be home next Saturday? I didn’t know how deep this rabbit hole would be.

The line was quiet for a few breathless seconds. I could sense his confusion. Maybe it was mine.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course that would be fine.” His voice had become gentle. Had he sensed something in my voice?

My frustration hit a new high. In a flash, I could see a different kind of weekend, spent with him. He would take me for a picnic (outside), to the botanical garden, maybe even to the Cloisters, where he would translate all the Latin inscriptions on the gilded banners at the sculpted feet of martyrs and virgins. I would pretend I couldn’t read them for myself. He would talk about art and music and things that were happening in the world. We would talk about teaching: our beautiful students, and the evil ones.

A weekend with Ryan would have nothing to do with corner grocery stores or family dinners crouched around chrome-edged tables in stuffy kitchens. No silent sisters or grieving mothers to balance before they tipped too far over the edge. Ryan seemed to operate outside of family bonds and neighborhood entanglements. And here I was, like a moth to flame. It also made me insanely jealous.

Ryan promised me we’d have fun next weekend, not to worry.

I hung up the phone and thumped my forehead against the kitchen wall. The potentially blissful weekend with a green-eyed man vanished as I watched the phone cord swinging against the wall. Before me was the certainty that I’d have to lie to my mother and NoNo, that I’d be sitting in a car with Joe and his nervous legs for 24 hours, that we’d have to scour South Florida for someone who couldn’t be there. That I’d lost a hoped-for chance to be with a person who was so far beyond the ridiculousness of this story. At that moment, I really couldn’t stand it.

And then the phone rang. It was Cory, telling me that I needed at least two new tires to make the trip.

* * * * * * * * * *

Matty met me on the sidewalk outside Ma’s house. I was hoping for divine inspiration as I walked up the stairs to the front door.

We really hadn’t thought the whole thing through.

“So what’s the story?” Matty asked. For once, I’d like Matty to make up the story. But he never could tell a convincing lie, even when we were kids. He’d much rather avoid being asked anything directly, which resulted in his being elusive, a bit sneaky.

“I was thinking we could say that Kiki wants to go down there to see the beach. We could say that she’d been reading about it and you know how she gets. Once she has an idea.”

There were several ways this plan could backfire. First of all, Chiara did not care about the beach. She was better than Matty at making up a story, but she wasn’t convincing. She would surely confirm any story I made up, but she knew she couldn’t make other people believe it. Especially NoNo.

Also, NoNo never believed anything we told her, even if it was true. When I told her I’d taken a job at Briarly, she wanted to know why I didn’t take a job at the public school down the street. She was sure it was because I didn’t want to keep living at home with them. She wouldn’t accept that I wanted to work with children who were not typical. And let’s be honest: I did want to live on my own.

That was the problem with NoNo. Even if you had a really good excuse or reason for something, she was great at rooting out something deep and dark. It might not have influenced a decision or course of action, but it might have been there, lurking behind everything. And she was always sure of the worst when it came to people, including family. Maybe especially family.

“We have to go in at some point,” Matty said.

He was right, but irritating.

“We’re going with the beach story, then,” I said. “That will be fine. NoNo won’t buy it, but what story would she believe?”

Matty nodded once and headed up the steps. I admired his stoic approach to NoNo and Ma. He always knew it would be difficult, but he never turned away. I couldn’t tell if he was brave or fatalistic.

Ma already had her apron on and the house smelled of sauce simmering on the stove. That was normally a Sunday smell, but Ma had started leaving the house on Sundays more and more, bringing communion to elderly parishioners and staying with them to chat and help them clean up their places a little. She didn’t have all day for cooking anymore.

“Marianne, Matty” she said, taking our hands. She looked surprised, even though we always visited her on the weekends.

“I’m just cooking. NoNo is at the shops.”

I didn’t look at Matty, but I could feel that he was relieved.

“Are you hungry?” she said.

Matty was always hungry, and Ma loved it.

“I’m good,” I said.

We walked through to the kitchen and I poked my head around the corner to wave at Aunt Beatrice. She squinted up at me, like she was looking through a thick mist to see my face. As soon as she recognized me, she brightened up and waved.

“So,” Ma said, “What’s doing?”

Matty shoved a cookie into his mouth and concentrated on chewing. So helpful.

“Well, we actually have something on this week,” I said.

Ma continued to poke at the sauce with a wooden spoon, not looking at us.

“I thought I’d take the kids with me to Florida this week, seeing as they’re training up a new teacher at the school and they want to give her time alone with the students.”

It came pouring out of me just a little too quickly. The stirring continued. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Beatrice had suddenly become interested in the conversation. I could feel her staring at my profile, squinting as if she could see the words tumbling from my mouth. My temperature felt like it dropped a couple of degrees since I’d sat down.

“Oh?” said Ma. That was all.

“Yes. And Chiara has this thing about beaches all of a sudden. She was listening to some friends talking about it, about some vacation they’d had down there, and how the beach was so great, so now she’s been bugging us all to go.”

I crumbled a cookie onto the vinyl tablecloth.

“And you know how it is when Kiki is onto something.”

I glared at Matty, who was sitting with his back to Beatrice. That was a mistake. Of course she would know what we were up to—at least, we’d always assumed that she had some way of reading our minds—but it made me uncomfortable to give any outward signs of lying.

“Yeah,” Ma said, still preoccupied with the stove. “She does obsess about things.”

She banged the spoon on the edge of the pot and then turned to us, spoon raised in her hand. Ma looked like an icon of St. Rita, patroness of housewives. She was only missing the headscarf—something she hadn’t worn since the late sixties.

She smiled a little and continued. “Well, that will be nice. How long will you be down there?”

It was too easy.

I looked quickly at Beatrice, who had turned her head away to stare out the back window. She’d already lost interest, like she knew what would happen next. Of course she did.

“I hadn’t really thought it through,” I said, finally telling the truth. “But I have to be back to work next Monday, so…”

“Did you call Triple A?” she said. “They can make a trip tic for you and that will make it so much nicer.”

Matty finally joined in, wading into safe waters.

“Yeah, Kiki called them. She loves the whole map thing,” he said. “Also, she’s got an atlas that she marked up already.”

Ma put down the spoon, wiped her hands, and moved to ruffle Matty’s hair. He would never be too old for this, apparently. I felt uncomfortable about the ease of this conversation.

“Ma,” I said, “Are you really ok with us going, just like that?”

Matty looked at me like I’d suddenly gone insane. I was poking a hornet’s nest and we’d almost reached safety.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t like the idea of you going on a wild goose chase, but I’m happy that you’re trying to help.”

Matty looked at her as if he’d been transfixed. She knew.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Had Joe somehow given her the letter without telling us?

Ma sat down in the chair opposite me and wiped her hands on her apron.

“Beatrice and me were talking the other day,” she said.

I looked over at Aunt Beatrice, who sat, nearly transparent, in her silk chair by the window. She refused to look my way.

“I see,” I said.

My mind was racing. I didn’t know if we should talk openly about the letter, or if now was the time to ask Ma the million questions I’d had about the day that Pop left the house. I didn’t know if she wanted me to tell the truth, or if she preferred the way we were going about things when we walked through the front door.

“Good,” she said. “I just want you to be careful. It’s a long ride. Do you have enough money for gas and tolls?”

This was my answer.

We would proceed as planned, no revelations necessary.

We had hit a kind of tipping point, a place where an important choice might have been made.

For the second time that day, an alternate scene played out in my head. One where we talked about all that had happened and made a clear plan together. We might have broken through to normality in one conversation. I felt our lives skittering down one path, while the other went off into a brighter distance without us.

I was late coming home from work on a Friday night when Aunt Beatrice dropped a bomb on me.

She has a way of doing that.

Sometimes I think she spends all day in that chair just staring out that window and thinking of ways to shake us apart. She does it without saying a word or moving a muscle. It’s like she wants something. Like she’s pushing us toward something just by being here.

Ma and NoNo had been asleep for hours. The house was pitch dark. I could hear snoring from upstairs: NoNo suffocating in her neck rolls.

Ma had left a plate of dinner covered in plastic wrap for me in the fridge but there was no way I could eat it. Too tired. I grabbed a Coke from the door of the fridge instead.

Aunty was sitting up in her chair, as usual. When I walked in to the living room she didn’t turn her head to look at me. More and more these days she looked at a point somewhere in the backyard and her focus seemed to get farther and farther away every day.

At first, this behavior freaked me out. I’m Aunt B’s favorite, outside of Chiara—I’d say it’s about even between us—so I’m used to getting her attention when I walk into the room. But she first started ignoring me when I was 12. It wasn’t a big deal. It just took her an extra minute to notice me and wave me over to sit at her feet.

That was her place of focus before: the patch of carpet just in front of her feet. It was like she hadn’t noticed that my legs had gotten long and my feet too big to sit cross-legged comfortably on the floor anymore. It felt like my feet were going to snap off at the ankles, but I liked Aunt B and didn’t want to upset her. She always seemed to be interested in me so I kept up the routine from my baby days.

It wasn’t until I turned 15 that I really noticed her change toward me. I’d sit on the floor for 10, 15 minutes before she’d pull her gaze from the arbor in the backyard and focus on my face.

And then she’d smile. It was a forgetful and vacant smile, her pupils still large and black from whatever faraway place she’d just been. When she finally recognized my face in front of her, her eyes sharpened up and she’d give a little embarrassed smile.

Joey. How was your day?

She’d started to say my name not so much to call out to me but as if she was naming an object in front of her, identifying it before she could deal with it. It made me shiver. At 15, I couldn’t put all this into words. I was only exhausted from being in school all day with people I hated (who listened to shit music I couldn’t stand) and teachers who knew just a little more than we did. By the time I got home to Aunt B, I’d just stretch out on the floor in front of her and let my mind go. I gave her complete access to my thoughts.

Are you still running, Joe Joe?

She’d see me coming down the stairs on my way out to school with my running shoes knotted together and thrown over my shoulder. Ma didn’t know that I wasn’t really on the track team at school—but Aunt B did. I ran by myself after school, on my way to work. My counselor said I needed to work on anger management and that was my way to do it. Pounding pavement was better than pounding faces. Or walls.

Aunt B’s drifting away from me came at the worst possible time. School got in the way of my mind. I constantly heard music playing inside me (In my head? In my body?), like I was a transistor for my own personal round-the-clock radio station. The chatter of the outside world felt like white noise screwing up my reception of something crucial.

Back then, I had just figured out that the daylong soundtrack in my head depended on what was going on in my life. It changed with how I felt, or with what crazy shit Chiara was up to at the moment, or what mood NoNo was in by the time I got home. It changed with Ma’s tiredness—which changed from one season to the next.

Most days started off with something whiney—that annoying crap that Matty loved to listen to. I knew the day would be shitty if Morissey was the first thing streaming through my body. Worse if it was Marianne’s Rick Astley album or some other pop horror.

If I could get to Black Flag or The Bad Brains by the time I got to school, I’d be feeling pretty good. The problem? When the hardcore stuff turned on during, say, Algebra.

Matty knew about my problem and was sympathetic. Matty would be. He was the first to understand what was going on. When I didn’t answer his questions right away—there’s always some lag time when talking to me—Matty knew I was listening to him through another frequency. He always cut me some slack.

But NoNo didn’t deal in hesitation. She snapped her fingers in my face. Or slapped. The right side of my face was permanently pink from her trying to snap me out of my disrespectful silence.

“Why don’t you listen?” she would say.

* * * * * * *

When Aunty finally noticed me that late Friday night, I had already arranged myself on the floor in front of her feet and was beginning to doze on the carpet. I woke to her stare. Her eyes were wide and barely focusing on what was in front of her.

Joe.

What’s up, Aunt B? I asked.

I was frightened by the look on her face. Her shadowy brow seemed to wrinkle up above her eyebrows. I’d never seen her look anxious before. But it was also something else. She looked pained, like she had just done something she wasn’t proud of.

Aunt B. Look at me.

And then she opened her mouth to speak.

She’d never done that in my life.

No words came out. She’d forgotten for a second how things worked in this world. She’d forgotten the rules.

And then she reached behind the pillow and pulled out something white. It was so white, it glowed in the darkness.

It was a letter.

We are ticking away in the silence of the old eight millimeter, flickering in and out with fall light dappling the ground of the park, flashing in spots where the film has been eaten through by the heat of the attic we have been stored away in for twenty years and better. My brother and sister and I have left Pop and Ma behind in the wind and cold to stare after us, Ma smiling and waving and Pop chasing after us with the bobbing camera. Marianne breaks away from us, feeling guilty that Matty and I have forgotten our parents in our glee. She turns her head to make sure Ma and Pop are still behind us. She looks to make sure they haven’t tricked us and quickly jumped into the car to head back home or to some far away place that children can’t go.

Matty leaves the worrying to Marianne. He is a big boy with hair sticking up in blond feathers from the crown of his head. He stretches his arms out like an airplane to show how much he’s not worried about them, buzzing down the browning grass toward the lake, away from Pop and away from Ma. He zazooooms! to the brink of the water, baring his teeth to the wind and cold.

I stop pelting through the crackling grass and turn toward the camera. I am so small and still that Pop has to stop running before he knocks me over with his stride. There is a shift, a lowering of the point of view.

There I am!

Staring up into the open mouth of the clicking camera, looking into its face, looking for its eyesnoseandears, and I smile because there’s no need to talk (it can’t swallow my voice the way it swallows my shape). I couldn’t if I wanted to--I am still years away from speaking out loud.

I am so small that anything could take me away, so tiny that my legs don’t have real knees yet, so round that all you can see are eyes, mouth, nose. The camera angles so sharply downward that the earth all around me is warped, coke-bottled, seen through a fish eye.

I used to think that the camera grew out of Pop’s right eye on the days we went out to the park or on vacation. I thought it would suck up all the sound and light that made me up and then—

Where would I be?

I didn’t sit still when the camera came out of its case and Pop started chasing us around with it. In the first days, when I learned to walk, I learned to escape. I wouldn’t let it catch me, hold me. The friends and neighbors who gathered around the tiny screen hanging in our apartment would never see my face flashing before them in Pop’s movies. They might see the edge of my houndstooth coat brushing past the lens or the back of my honey-colored hair as I made for the nearest tree or bush.

Later, I saw the work of the camera and understood at last that the thing couldn’t take me whole out of the landscape. It flickered on the wall in patterns of light that looked a little like us--sort of like us. I would look around and count heads: we were all still there. Ma and Matty and Marianne and me. I didn’t have to worry about Pop. He hardly features in any of the films—always the taker. But we were all there, in body and voice. If we had moving pictures to remember our days together, we still had to store the words in our memories. The eight millimeter was deaf.

Now we sit in Matty’s apartment watching the images of ourselves sliding across a smooth white wall. Joe sprawls, belly down, on a squashed beanbag chair. He looks like a leggy blackbird trying to squeeze through a gap in the back door of a grocery. Joe picks bits of paper and lint from Matty’s carpet while the rest of us stare at the wall, deeply interested in ourselves.

But Joe isn’t flashing on the wall with the rest of us. The films come from a time before him, when Pop and Ma were there every morning in the kitchen to greet us. When there were outings to the park and a camera to avoid. If there were voices to put to the bodies on the wall, he might look up from the dirty carpet. But there’s nothing new for him here, no role for him on that fall day that stands out so brightly in the minds of his sisters and brother. This is not Joe’s story.

The rest of us are enthralled by the clicking and darkness and flickering light surrounding us. The heat from the projector warms the room and makes Marianne’s dark curls frizz at the ends. In the films we seem younger and paler and more alive than the day we ran through the park away from Pop and Ma. Film has a way of doing that: making children look like wind-up toys skittering through leaves, black and white painting skin and sky in matching tones.

The film shows the day we remember—just another outing to the park--but it’s also extraordinary. For one moment, Pop steps away from the camera and appears in the shot, no longer the invisible man. The camera that cannot hear and cannot speak can see, and seeing is the only sense that counts. Once you see and have been seen, there is nothing to take it back. The image always stays on the edge of the seer’s mind. The voice fades from memory instantly.

In the unsteady light Pop makes his appearance. He wears a maroon sport coat and gray lambswool pants, slicked black hair and dark sunglasses. He is all swagger, walking backward through disintegrating leaves. He curls up one corner of his lips at the camera (or maybe at Ma behind the camera). We run away towards a sparkling lake in the distance beyond his shoulder. It’s all there in the images flipping past on aging film stock, playing on the wall in Matty’s apartment. But I’m not watching.

I am seeing.

Sunlight, naked, scratchy trees, a child too small for knees bending over a puddle of freezing water; a father hovering over her, miming for her to look into the unhearing camera; a mother with long, black, wavy hair and heavy white eyeshadow silently cursing and asking if this thing was really working. Then come the flashing white frames: over, over, over.

The story of this day never ends.

It began here, after this silent moment that now fades by the second. Marianne can’t remember this day in the time before baby Joe was born. She can’t even remember seeing the film before tonight. In her mind, I’d made it up. In a second it will be gone, lost to the imperfect chemistry of emulsion swallowing itself with age.

Its loss means nothing to Marianne. For me, it’s everything: the beginning of my memory. Nothing lives in my mind before this. I return to this point always, like the film itself playing out again and again, spooling on a farther spindle for the next viewing. I can project that day endlessly on the back of my eyelids, playing the image of my father in his sport coat until I can almost read the maker’s mark on his buttons. I am arming myself against loss; the holes in the fragile film stock widen by the second. I know that one day soon, the memory of that day will be nothing more than scattered splinters inside cracking plastic cases. But the images are pressed in my mind, like Uncle Alex’s old-fashioned seal into hot wax. They will stay there, flickering and flaring whenever I close my eyes.

I tell myself the story because words were never part of that day:

We are ticking away in silence on the reel of the old eight millimeter, flickering with fall light across the barren ground of a park, flashing in spots where heat has eaten through film. It’s the time before baby Joe, before Pop’s leaving, before Beatrice’s death and resurrection. Matty and Marianne and I skitter like wind-up toys ahead of Pop and his camera. He follows us, bobbing up and down in the white sunshine. Look, now: Three dots in coats disappear into the rainbow-edged holes of decaying film, disintegrating from thoughtlessness and summer heat. They won’t come out the other side.

I don’t know exactly what Matty and Marianne think as the film plays out on the wall. Matty, always with his mouth slightly open, stares with dilated blue eyes at the images before him. Marianne smiles and closes her eyes, as though she’s trying to keep something from escaping through her eyelids. She doesn’t remember the film, but it pleases her. She watches Pop backing away from the camera, smiling rakishly, and puts her chin down on her folded-up knees. This memory isn’t part of the story she tells herself about Pop, but she has so many others. I can see from her pose that she is moving away from the images in front of her, reaching for other days in her mind.

Joe has fallen asleep face down on the beanbag chair. Memories don’t touch him. He needs action, a solution to a mystery that has existed his whole life. The story doesn’t interest him. The ending does.

On the wall, Pop becomes another tiny dot to the camera’s eye. Matty and Marianne have fled far beyond its scope and I am straggling past the lens’ peripheral vision, no longer interested in the chase. Ma quickly gets tired of waiting for everybody to return and stops filming.

Marianne uncurls herself from the floor and flicks on the buzzing fluorescent lights. For a minute, their noise takes me over completely. I’ve entered a mechanical hive, with hundreds of robot bees murmuring to each other. The light awakens Joe. He stretches and rolls off the beanbag chair onto his back and reaches a long arm up to Matty, who stands above him.

“Good nap?” Matty says and grabs Joe’s hand like they might wrestle. Joe easily twists Matty’s arm and brings him to his knees. Matty laughs.

“Did you figure out how to get around Ma and NoNo yet?” Joe asks.

Marianne moves to look out the window. The film has made her dreamy and slow, unable to find words. Matty grabs the top of Joe’s hair and pushes him playfully backward. Too many beats pass after Joe’s question. It makes me uncomfortable.

“Maybe we just bring them, too,” I say.

I haven’t really thought this through.

Marianne is the first one to be alarmed at my suggestion.

“Oh, no, Kiki,” she tells me, “I don’t think that’s the thing to do.” She leans against the windowpane and considers her words, which are slow to return to her.

“Well, there’s not enough room in the car,” says Matty. He makes it sound like the most important consideration of all, though we all know he’s bluffing.

“I can’t drive from here to Florida with NoNo breathing down my neck,” says Joe.

There’s no reason for Joe to mince words. He’s the youngest and not interested in peacemaking.

“It’s just that we shouldn’t involve NoNo and Ma until we confirm what’s in the letter,” says Marianne.

I suddenly feel uncomfortable because I realize that the careful language coming from my older brother and sister isn’t for Joe. It’s for me. They are making things all right for me by telling me the best version of the story. We aren’t keeping our mother and grandmother in the dark because we fear them or dislike them. We’re doing it to protect them.

It’s not about our own comfort.

It’s a good lie.

Marianne calls this “modeling good behavior.” She’s been doing it for me since I can remember and it’s very useful. But right now, I want her to take Joe as her model.

“I see your point,” I say. I want her to understand that I’ve been listening to everything she’s ever said about the give-and-take of conversation.

“But what if we find out that the letter is true? What do we do then if we haven’t told them why we’re going on this trip?”

Joe is utterly bored by this conversation. He’s already looking at an old road atlas that Matty has given him, sliding his finger down the blue I-95 corridor running south. NoNo isn’t in his plans. The conversation slides past him as if it—and the speakers—didn’t exist.

But Marianne is thinking about what I’ve said. She’s back at the window, staring over the tops of light posts casting pools of lemon-colored light on the sidewalk below.

“If that happens, Kiki,” she says, “If that happens…”

She isn’t sure what will happen if that happens.

She hasn’t thought it through, either.