I no longer have a heart, so to say my heart speeds up is inaccurate. But there is a quickening, a drawing together of whatever pieces of me remain. For years, I’ve longed to see Trenton. He was the most beautiful child, with feather-blond hair and eyes the electric blue of a summer sky. Even at four or five he had a slightly tragic look, as though he had come into the world expecting beauty and elegance and had suffered such tremendous initial disappointment that he had never recovered.

But it’s not Trenton who comes into the house, practically doubled under the weight of two duffel bags, and lugging an additional rolling suitcase behind him. It is an absurdly tall, skinny adolescent, with a sullen look and dingy-dark hair, wearing a black sweatshirt and long jeans with filthy cuffs.

“What did you pack?” he mutters, as he steps into the kitchen, straightens up, and unslings both duffel bags, piling them on the kitchen floor. He bumps the suitcase through the doorway. “Did you put rocks in here or something?”

Sandra begins to laugh.

“It isn’t him. It can’t be,” I say, unconsciously parroting her remark about Minna.

“It’s him,” she says. “Look at his eyes.”

She’s right: under that jutting, unattractive forehead, covered with a smattering of pimples, his eyes are still the same startling electric blue and fringed with a girlish quantity of lashes.

“God, what a piece of shit,” Minna says. She leans over and places both hands on the kitchen table, as though to verify that it’s real. “We used to call it the Spider. Do you remember?”

Trenton says nothing.

The table is white and plastic—Lucite, Sandra informed me, when it was first delivered—and has jointed, twisted legs that do, in fact, make it look like a spider crouching in the corner. It cost $15,000, as Richard Walker was always fond of telling his guests. I used to find it hideously ugly. Sandra informs me that that is just because I have no modern sensibility.

“Modernity is ugly,” she always says. On at least that one point, we agree.

Over the years, the table has grown on me. I guess you could say, actually, it has grown into me, the way objects do. The table is my memories of the table, and my memories of the table are: Minna hiding, brown knees drawn to her chest, sucking on a scab; Trenton trimming paper for a Valentine’s Day card, holding blunt-edged plastic scissors, his fingers sticky with glue; Richard Walker sitting in his usual place at the head of the table the day after Caroline had left him for good, newspaper folded neatly in front of him, a mug of coffee cooling, cooling, as the light grew and swelled and then began to narrow over the course of the afternoon, until at last it was no more than a golden finger, cutting across the room on a diagonal, dividing him from shoulder to hip.

Other memories—from different times and places, from my old life—have weaseled their way in alongside these. It’s transfiguration, the slippery nature of thought. Wine turns to blood and wafer to body, and table legs to church spires white and stark against the summer sky—and the spiderwebs in the old blueberry bushes behind my childhood home in Newport, draped across the branches like fine gray lace—the spare pleasure of a boiled egg and bread, eaten alone for dinner. All of that is the table, too.

“It smells,” Trenton says.

Minna takes the coffee cup from the table and moves it to the sink. She turns on the faucet, letting the flow of water break up the surface of mold and run it down the drain. She moves in electric bursts, like miniature explosions. When she was little, it was the same way. She was on the floor. Then, suddenly, she was kneeling on the countertop; then she was striking her palm—bang!—against the window.

Now she leans over and strikes the window, hard, with her palm, just the way she used to. The catch releases; the window shoots upward. The smell of Outside comes sweeping into the room. It is like a shiver, or the touch of someone’s hand.

“Did you see that?” she asks Trenton. “The trick still works.”

Trenton shrugs and puts his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt. I can’t believe that this awkward, gummy, sullen thing is beautiful, tragic Trenton, who liked to lie in the sunshine on the wooden floor of the dining room, like a cat—curled against me, cheek to cheek, the closest I have come to an embrace since I was alive.

I used to imagine, sometimes, that he could feel me hugging him back.

“Mommy.” Amy has been straining onto her tiptoes, exploring the countertop with her fingers. Now she tugs on the hem of Minna’s shirt. “Is Grandpa here?”

Minna kneels so she is eye level with her daughter. “We talked about that, sweetpea. Remember?”

Amy shakes her head. “I want to say hi to Grandpa.”

“Grandpa’s gone, Amy,” Trenton says. Minna shoots him a murderous look. She places her hands on Amy’s shoulders.

She speaks in a lullaby voice. “Remember the chapter in The Raven Heliotrope, where Princess Penelope gives up her life to save the Order of the Innocents?”

“Oh, God.” Trenton rolls his eyes. “You’re reading her that crap?”

“Did you hear that, Alice?” Sandra says to me. “Crap. No wonder it was never published.”

“I never tried to get it published,” I say, and then regret it. She’s only trying to goad me into an argument.

“Shut up, Trenton,” Minna snaps at him. Then she continues, in a soft voice: “And remember Penelope has to go away to the Garden of Forever?”

Amy nods. “To live in a flower.”

Minna kisses her forehead. “Grandpa’s in the Garden of Forever.”

Trenton snorts. Minna ignores him, stands up, and switches off the faucet. It’s a relief. We’re very sensitive to sound now. The noise of the water is thunderous. Water running through the pipes is an uncomfortable feeling, and it still fills me with anxiety, the way I used to feel when I had to go to the bathroom and was made to laugh: a fear of leaking.

“But will he come back?” Amy asks.

“What?” Minna turns around. For a moment I see that underneath the impeccable makeup, she is just as tired as anybody else.

“In Part Two, Penelope comes back,” Amy says. “Penelope wakes up. And then Prince Thomas joins forces with Sven and saves everybody.”

Minna stares at her blankly for a second. It’s Trenton who answers.

“Grandpa’s not coming back, Amybear,” Trenton says. “He’s going to stay in the garden.”