“I might shoot Mom,” Minna said matter-of-factly. Some of her hair had fallen out of her ponytail and she brushed it back with a wrist. “We haven’t even made a dent in this room, have we?”

In one of the lower desk drawers, Trenton found a half-dozen cards, stuffed haphazardly on top of some ink cartridges. He opened one and jerked back in his chair. “Ew.”

“Ew what?”

“Hair.” He held up a small brown curl, held together by a faded blue elastic. There was no signature on the card. No message, either. Just the words that had been printed: Thinking of you.

Minna stood up quickly, snatched the card and the lock of hair from him, and tossed it back in the drawer. “Don’t touch Dad’s stuff,” she said.

“I thought I was supposed to be helping,” he said.

“Well, you’re not.” She slammed the drawer closed with a shin. She stood for a minute, massaging her temples, and Trenton thought viciously that she would probably look just like his mom in a few years.

“I’m getting old,” she said, as if she knew what he’d been thinking. Then Trenton felt guilty.

“You’re twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-eight next month.” She moved another box—this one full of books—from the chair opposite the desk onto the floor and sat down with a small groan and closed her eyes. She said, “Someone died in here, you know.”

Trenton felt the tiniest flicker of interest. “What do you mean?”

“Someone was shot. In here. Years ago, before Dad bought the house. There were brains splattered all over the wall.” She opened her eyes. “I remember Mom and Dad talking about it when we first moved in.”

It was the first interesting thing Trenton had ever heard about the house. “How come you didn’t tell me before?”

Minna shrugged. “You were so little. And then I must have forgot.”

Trenton turned this piece of information over in his mind and found that it gave him a little bit of pleasure. “Like . . . a murder?” That word, too, was pleasurable: a distraction, a temporary lifting away from the everyday. Like being just a little drunk.

“I don’t know the whole story,” Minna said. She seemed to lose interest in the conversation. She started picking out dirt from underneath her nails.

In the quiet, Trenton heard it again. A voice. Not quite a voice, though. More like a shape: a solidity and pattern to the normal creakings and stirrings of the house. It was the way he’d felt as a kid listening to the wind through the trees, thinking he could make sense out of it. But this wasn’t just his imagination.

There were words there, he was sure of it.

“Do you . . . do you hear that?” he ventured to Minna.

“Hear what?” Minna looked up. “Did Amy shout?”

Trenton shook his head.

Minna tilted her head, listening. She shrugged again. “Nada.”

Trenton swallowed. His throat felt dry. Maybe something had gone haywire in his head after the accident. Like a popped fuse or something. Because directly after Minna had spoken, he heard the word, uttered clearly in the silence.

The word was: Idiot.

ALICE

How do ghosts see?

We didn’t always; it had to be relearned.

Dying is a matter of being reborn. In the beginning there was darkness and confusion. We learned gropingly. We felt our way into this new body, the way that infants do. Images began to emerge. The light began to creep in.

Now I see better than I did when I was alive. I never liked to wear my glasses, and by the time I was thirty, I couldn’t see from one side of the parlor to the other without squinting.

Now everything is perfectly clear. We do more than see. We detect the smallest vibrations, minuscule shifts in the currents, minor disturbances, molecules shifting. We are invisible fingers: we play endlessly over the surface of things.

Only memory remains slippery and elusive. Memories won’t keep faith with you. They’ll go sliding away into the ravenous void of nonbeing.

Memories must be staked to the back of something, swaddled in objects, wrapped around table legs.

Trenton is so motionless in the armchair, if it weren’t for the way he occasionally reaches up to finger a pimple on his face, he might be dead. Amy sits at his feet with an enormous, leather-bound book on her lap. I recognize it as The Raven Heliotrope.

Minna was the one who found it, discovering the typewritten pages loosely stacked and stashed in an old crawlspace. She read it so many times she could recite whole passages from memory. When she was ten, she went crazy trying to figure out the writer’s identity—the manuscript was anonymous—and Richard Walker, in one of his spells of good humor, had it bound, and even called in literary experts and a Harvard professor, who judged from the language and imagery that the book might date from the mid-nineteenth century.

This was endlessly amusing to me. I know for a fact that The Raven Heliotrope was completed between 1944 and 1947. I wrote it.

“Mommy!” Amy cries out suddenly, excitedly. “I’m at the part with the bamboo forest. Do you want me to read it to you?”

Amy’s mention of the bamboo forest sends a small thrill through me. That was one of the passages I was proudest of: Penelope and the Innocents get attacked by a vicious band of Nihilis and are only saved by the sudden appearance of magical bamboo, which grows up around them, impaling the Nihilis army.

“Sure, honey.” Minna dabs her forehead with the inside of her forearm.

Amy moves her finger across the picture of Penelope riding a horse. “Then Penelope went riding away . . . and there were Nihilis and they were ugly and they liked blood.”

“You’re a terrible writer,” Sandra says neutrally. Believe it or not, I had actually managed to forget her existence for an hour, the way you do a shadow’s.

“She’s not reading,” I snap. “She’s making it up.”

“Bamboo,” Sandra says. “Bamboo! You might have at least used rosebushes. Thorns that punctured the eyes, and all that.”

I don’t bother responding. It was Thomas who told me about bamboo—that it grows so quickly, and with such strength, it can go straight through a human body. We talked about how terrible the natural world could be.

Of course the bamboo is only doing what it must. Everything obeys its own inner laws. Everything is greedy, and moving toward a version of light.

“Penelope made a wish and then a forest grew up . . . ” Amy says, after putting her finger, arbitrarily, in the center of the page. She trails off. She’s butchering it. The forest doesn’t grow because Penelope wished it. The forest grows out of the blood of the Innocents.