Probably not. Most likely, those memories were swallowed up in the long, tangled dream of childhood, swept back into the darkness that used to surround us, thick as syrup, when we slept side by side.

I’ve had to come to terms with that.

But who knows? It’s possible. It’s possible that underneath the layers and layers of resentments and fights, of distance and criticism, some memory of those early days was preserved, in some rarely used place, the way that a body stores memory of motion and rhythm. Perhaps, later in her life, she was able to excavate the feel of my arms around her, the repetition of my voice saying I love you, I love you. Perhaps it brought some comfort to her.

The body restoreth, and the body taketh away.

I remember:

Ed’s fist; an explosion of pain, like a sudden burst of color.

I remember:

A mosquito bite on my knee; scratching until I bled.

I remember:

Thomas’s chin bumping lightly, once, against mine, the first time we kissed.

SANDRA

What does Alice remember about the turtle?

We’ve never talked about it. We’ve never even talked about how Maggie and I were buds for one afternoon. Tit for tat. God knows there’s plenty Alice has never discussed with me. If secrets were stuffing, the woman would be done up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

For example: the suitcase in the bedroom wall.

The funny thing is it never would have come out if Martin hadn’t made that idiotic comment about Jimi Hendrix.

It was January 1987. Martin and I were lying in bed, drinking wine, watching the snow come down. Snow was falling soundlessly outside, piling in heavy drifts against the doors and windows, softening the fields and wrapping the world in silence. In all the years I was up north, I never got tired of watching the snow.

We’d been at it for a few hours—the drinking, I mean—and were already pretty wound up when the Doors came on and Martin said, out of nowhere: “I don’t see what the big deal about Hendrix is. I think Krieger’s just as good.”

We started going back and forth, and I got up to pour a drink, and just because I was distracted and busy calling Martin an idiot, I tripped over the lip of the carpet and wound up on the floor.

Instead of helping me up, he said, “Don’t you see, Sandra? Don’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?” And he looked at me like I was some smelly, homeless beggar—like he wanted to turn away but was too polite.

I kicked him out before he had time to put his pants back on. The sight of him hop-skip-jumping over the gravel on the driveway, barefoot and ass shining like a moon, almost made it worth it.

That was when I put my foot in it. Literally. Back in the bedroom, furious, I sank my foot halfway through the wall before I realized what I’d done—and realized, too, that instead of support beams and drywall I’d kicked straight through to a narrow rectangular laundry chute made of hollow pressed tin. And there was something inside it: a large box, I thought at the time, wedged in at an angle.

I had to rip my wall open even more to get it out. It was a small leather suitcase, layered with dirt. I was hoping for something scandalous, a skull or a pile of stolen jewels, and I have to say I was pretty disappointed when I opened it to find a brown tweed jacket, a single black sock, a St. Aquinas University pin, and a length of pink ribbon, like a child’s hair thing.

To this day, Alice won’t tell me why she hid the suitcase, or when. Of course I have my theories. But I don’t press. When you’re up each other’s asses all day long, you really have to draw the line somewhere.

For three months the suitcase sat in my bedroom, in front of the hole in the wall, safe on its mound of plaster. I didn’t think of trying to return it. I didn’t know who to return it to. I knew it wasn’t the Killigans’—one look at the peach wallpaper, and I knew Mrs. Killigan would never let that piece-of-shit luggage in the house. I vaguely remembered an old lady and a daughter who lived in the house way back in the day, but so what? Mind your business, that’s my motto, or at least it was before everybody else started traipsing their business across my rooms.

All that changed after the rains. For weeks in May the skies opened up, bringing a glut, a gut-spilling onslaught of rain, vomiting leaves onto the windows and driving surfs of mud down the hill and onto the porch and pushing a tunneling rush of water from Lackawanna Creek into the basement. For days the water rose in the house, creeping up toward the staircase, floating cans of paint and revealing little drowned frogs, bloated, pale, belly-up.

I remembered sitting with the little creased bible on my knees in Sunday school, listening to stories about the Flood, and thought for the first time that maybe there was something to it. But finally the weather broke. The sky turned clear as summer bluebells, and the sun sat high and fat, smug as a cat, curled up on a drift of clouds.

The rains brought everything up. The lawn was a trash heap, a beach littered with the dead. The mudslides had unearthed men’s shoes and washboards, eyeless dolls and socks stiff with mud, lost mittens and old Coca-Cola bottles and hats reeking of mildew.

And on my front porch, unblinking, mouth open like it had been calling for help: a goddamn turtle. A strangely human face, puckered and tragic. It was a big sucker, too, the size of a dinner plate. And the words: bright red, barely chipped, obviously painted painstakingly by a child on the turtle’s dark, patterned shell.

Please return to Maggie Lundell.

Like I said: everything comes up in the end.

TRENTON

This time, Trenton did not smoke weed, but just lay very, very still—so still his lungs ached from the effort of controlling them. He had left the window open in his bedroom, then partially lowered the blinds, trying to replicate the quality of the light in the greenhouse.

He wanted to see her again, but he was afraid, too.

“Hello,” he whispered.

He thought he heard a snicker, or an echo of a snicker. The voices were still there—sporadic, often indecipherable, like footsteps that stop as soon as you pause to listen.

Was it her?

The memorial for his father was in just six days and Trenton had not anticipated being alive to see it. But the ghost had changed things. He could not—he would not—kill himself until he knew the truth about her.

He lay there, listening to a fly buzz somewhere, watching bits of cottonseed float in through the half-open window on long fingers of sun. He was tired and hungover. He’d drunk too much at Katie’s stupid party.

He should never have gone. Trenton had thought it would be a high school thing, and everyone would know one another, and he would feel out of place. Instead it was just a bunch of random people floating between the kitchen and the basement. He wondered where Katie picked her friends: they looked like refugees, or people who might work in a shitty dollar-for-a-pound thrift store, if they worked at all. Trenton was positive he recognized one of the boys from the butcher counter at Mick’s Deli. Even Katie hadn’t seemed to know anyone very well. Several times, she had confused a girl’s name, calling her Megan instead of Melissa. And when Trenton had asked how she knew everybody, she had responded vaguely that she liked having people around, which of course wasn’t an answer to his question at all.