She was quiet as she examined the objects one by one, like she was puzzling over a crossword. I started getting impatient and made a joke about it, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

I started thinking about food, and whether I should eat something and risk killing my buzz, or whether I should just open the whiskey, which I didn’t particularly want to share. Would she notice if I refilled my glass in the kitchen? Was she too drunk to notice?

“This isn’t my father’s jacket,” she said abruptly. Her eyes were red and her mouth wet, like a wound in the center of her face. “It’s too small. Not his style, either.”

I was bored already—wishing now that I had asked her to leave, so I could open the whiskey and drink it in peace, while the shadows swallowed up the hill.

“I never really knew her,” Maggie said. A little bubble of spit had formed at the corner of her mouth.

“Who?” I asked automatically.

“My mother,” she said. “My father, either.” She was quiet for a bit, and I thought this might be a good time to excuse myself, take a pee, sneak some whiskey into my glass. She wouldn’t even notice.

But then she blurted out: “Did you know your parents?”

I knew what she meant, but I didn’t think it was the right time to tell her: about my dad playing tug-of-war with his buddy’s privates, about my mom babbling to Jesus in nonsense words behind the chipped white doors of the Holy Light Pentecostal Church, and bleaching the walls until plants withered in their vases and cats asphyxiated on our doorstep.

So I just said, “Parents are a bitch.”

That’s more or less how I’ve always felt about it, anyway. Parents teach you a lot of things, but the most important thing they teach you is this: how people will f**k you up in the future. If they’re any good, they teach you to get used to it.

“She never said she loved me,” Maggie said. She didn’t bother to try and wipe her nose or eyes, just sat there with her thick arms useless in her lap, one hand still wrapped around her drink. “Never once.”

Something in my stomach tightened, like she’d sunk a fishing hook just below my belly button and started to pull. I never could stand the sight of crying—hadn’t cried myself since I was a little girl and Mom walloped me ten times over the head with the King James Bible after she heard me tell my cousin Richie Rodgers to “go to hell.”

And maybe it was because I was thinking of that—the old home in Georgia, and Richie, and what had happened to him—but when Maggie looked up at me, eyes big and pathetic and desperate as an animal’s, I had a sudden memory of this time when I was twelve and my uncle Ronnie took me hunting. Richie was there, too: by then fourteen, with a face like an open sore and teeth too large for his mouth and a laugh like a donkey getting kicked.

Ronnie and I split off from Richie—I don’t remember why—and halfway through the afternoon we came across a deer, and Ronnie fired like an idiot, too far to the right. Still, the deer ran for a good half a mile before collapsing. By the time we got to it, it was gasping, kicking in pain, eyes rolling up to the sky. And I remember it fixed on me for a second and I could practically hear it: kill me, it was saying. Please kill me. Ronnie was shooting with shells the size of a thumb and I knew that inside the deer, a hundred sharp-toothed pellets had exploded like shrapnel, burrowing into its organs.

I grabbed Ronnie’s shotgun and fired three times straight into the deer’s head, until it didn’t even look like a deer anymore and I knew it could feel nothing.

That’s exactly what Maggie looked like in that moment—like that deer, silently pleading with me. And I knew that those unsaid words, I love you, were her own exploded shell: that those hurts were embedded deep, killing her slowly. I guess we all have some of these—memories like artillery shells, fired at close range.

“Well, maybe she didn’t, then,” I said to her. It may seem cruel, but sometimes, you got to just pull the trigger.

And like I said: I didn’t know Alice was watching.

CAROLINE

Three more seconds. Two. That’s all she needed.

She had to know.

She knew she shouldn’t. She tried to stop. But her fingers weren’t obeying her brain.

Caroline picked up the receiver and dialed Adrienne’s number again.

PART VI

THE ATTIC

SANDRA

Martin loved the attic. Don’t ask me why. Until he insisted on exploring the house bottom to top, I’d probably been up there twice in the whole time I lived in Coral River: once, to unload the dump of stuff my dad saddled me with after he died; and once to check for a dead animal after the whole house went rank with a bad smell. (It was a raccoon and I found it after two days of searching, in the old laundry chute; it had crawled halfway up the wall before getting stuck. The plumber had to draw it out with one of those steel wires they use for breaking up matted hair in the drain.)

If you’d asked me—if you asked me, still—I would have said attics are like the spleen of a house. Ignored, forgotten, useless.

But six months after Martin and I first shared that watermelon, we went exploring. It had been snowing for days—that was a bad winter. Even in the ten seconds he stood inside the door, stamping ice from his boots and shaking it from his beard, a half inch of snow gathered on the kitchen floor and afterward melted all over the linoleum. He hadn’t been inside twenty minutes when they announced on TV that the road back to town was closed.

“I guess I’ll have to spend the night,” he said, putting his arms around me. Cheeky bastard. Like there was any doubt.

We were deep into a bottle of cognac (Martell, 1950) when he said it: “I want to see where you live, Sandy.”

“You’ve been here plenty of times,” I said. “Besides, I never get to see where you live.”

He ignored that. “I’ve seen the kitchen. I’ve seen the den. I’ve seen your bedroom.” He leaned forward and put his hands over mine—warm hands, but raw from the weather and the cold and rough from long-ago summers spent hauling lobsters at a wharf in Maine, calluses that had never gone away. Funny how the past gets down into the skin.

It was so cold in the attic we could see our breath hanging like miniature ghosts. Martin went back downstairs for a second bottle of cognac and a blanket, and we sat together on the hardwood floor, between the boxes, inhaling the smell of wood and damp and cold.

“Close your eyes,” Martin said. “Listen.”