He asked them to touch it. To touch his erection.

Sitting in the living room in Graham’s chair, the music swelling in the air around her, she recognized this memory. She had known this, she realized. It was familiar to her. It was almost as if it were a film she’d seen. Or perhaps a book—a scene in a memoir of abuse, or a piece of fiction. She had remembered it, at least some parts of it, before. But she had done an odd thing with it, with the memory—she had taken the danger away. She had made it somehow simply a strange event from her childhood, something she had only a vague sense of. It didn’t seem real.

He had asked them to touch his penis, and they had, they were such obedient girls. She remembered that. That they had to obey—he was a grown-up.

They touched him, as they were asked to. Quickly. Lightly. But by now, she was uncomfortable. Frightened. When he asked if they wanted to play a game—maybe he’d suggested hide-and-seek, or maybe he said any game, they should choose—Annie had said no. Or something like no. “No, sir,” maybe.

And astonishingly, he had let them go. Maybe because there were two of them? Because he couldn’t have managed to keep both of them there? Because they wouldn’t agree to be separated by the games he’d asked them to play?

In any case, their kindly predator had let them go. It seemed impossible, but it had happened. She had said no, she had taken Sofie’s hand, and they had walked together back out of the wooded park and onto the sidewalk that had been right there all along, busy with people, with traffic.

Maybe that was the veil she’d drawn across this event. That it wasn’t worth remembering because it had ended well. Happily ever after. The danger they’d escaped from was nothing, in the end. Like Glen, running down the stairs after her and her sisters, clutching his penis while they shrieked and ran away.

The music in the room had stopped by now, but Annie sat as motionless, as if she were still listening. She found herself mentally tracing her footsteps away from the bridle path this time. Away from the park, away from Stony Island Avenue, into the dark of the viaduct under the train tracks and out again into daylight on Fifty-Seventh Street, then around the corner to her street and safely home, home to her old house.

Her house, which Sofie hadn’t wanted to visit.

Not because of the life within it, as Annie had remembered it. No. Instead, because of the dangerous park and the bogeyman living there, between her house and Sofie’s.

Maybe, she thought now, they hadn’t drifted apart because they went off to separate schools, separate lives. Maybe they just didn’t have a way they could speak together about what had happened to them.

She shook her head, rapidly. How strange, what she had done with it, this event. She’d altered it, transformed it, made it something easy to forget.

How long had it taken, she wondered, before its transformation was complete? Before it was forgettable? Before she forgot it?

Did it matter? She had said no, after all. No, thank you.

She heard herself whisper this aloud, “No!”—and abruptly, strangely, she was remembering, not the man on the bridle path anymore, but the night that she and Graham and Sarah had shouted no, over and over again, to the imaginary man who might want to touch Sarah.

How odd. This memory again, the same memory that had come to her in the kitchen the day after Graham died, thinking of him in his apron, shouting, “No way, José!” And of herself shouting “No sir!” to Sarah’s imaginary man, the imaginary man who was so like the real man, the man in the park.

Maybe, she thought, she’d been shouting “No” to this, to this buried, lost memory. Maybe she’d been shouting a refusal to be again that girl, that frightened girl. Had she shed the memory in order to escape that self, that version of herself? That fear?

Were you in charge of your memory? Could you will yourself to forget?

It didn’t matter. She had said no to him. She had rescued herself, she had rescued Sofie. That was what was important.

Remember that. Frightened as she was, as she must have been, she had said no.

No.

Ixnay, she whispered in the dark, silent room.

Over the next days, the long weeks, she returned to this event over and over. Not even so much the event itself, but the way she’d forgotten it. It seemed threatening, somehow—the notion that you could lose something that at one time must have seemed so central to your understanding of the world around you, to your sense of who you were in it. It seemed connected to the loss of Graham and her almost daily fear of losing him further, in memory—in lost memory. Of losing the sharp, clear sense of who he was, of losing the sureness of her feeling for him.

Could you will it the other way too, memory? Could you make yourself hold it, as much as you could make yourself lose it? She found herself taking Memoir with Bookshop out again and again in these evenings, sitting on the couch and poring over the pictures. Using them to remind herself of what she was frightened of losing, what she felt might already be slipping away; and listening over and over to Sofie’s music, as if it were memory itself.

19

The night before Sarah arrived to help scatter Graham’s ashes, Annie had finally opened the box they came in—the wooden box that had been sitting at the back of her closet for the long summer months. They ashes were held inside it in a medium-size clear plastic bag that someone had closed with a twister seal. This seemed so utilitarian, so honest, such a contrast with the fancy box, that she nearly laughed aloud. It made her remember what Graham had said about his ashes when they were talking one day about their final wishes—that he wanted them scattered in what he and Annie jokingly called “the garden” at the back of the cottage—a stand of irises and roses slowly being overrun by Queen Anne’s lace and daylilies. “Think of it as bonemeal,” he’d said to her then. “Very expensive soil amendment. That will be me at that point, finally able to be of some use to you.”

There had been no surprise, no shock, for Annie in what was in the bag. With one or the other of her siblings, she’d dealt with both her parents’ ashes before this, and it was only with the first of them to die—her mother—that she’d been startled by the mealy quality of the ash, and the odd small bits of bone scattered like pebbles throughout it.

It seemed to her now that Lucas and Sarah were both surprised—or at least hesitant—as she held the plastic bag out. To make it easier for them, she plunged her own hand in first and then opened her fingers out, letting the ashes filter between them and fall into the mounding clumps of the daylilies, into the weeds. Lucas followed suit, and then Sarah. Jeanne stood at a little distance—she had said ahead of time that while she wanted to be there, she would let them do this. She had loved Graham, she said, but she didn’t feel this was something she should have a part in. “It belongs to you,” she’d said to them.

Annie had assumed she might feel more with Graham’s ashes than she had with her parents’, but that didn’t happen. She simply didn’t have a sense of connection to him through the ashes, or in them. Bonemeal, indeed. It made her recall again the feeling she’d had the morning he died, the feeling that he was not there in the body that was left lying in the bed with her. That the body had no meaning for her anymore.

Lucas and Sarah clearly did have some sense of Graham’s presence—or absence, perhaps. Their faces were somber as they passed the bag back and forth. Annie took her turn once again, and then stepped back a few feet to let them take over—Graham’s children, after all. She felt a bit like an intruder, watching. She turned away to look at the lake through the trees, busy with boats on this late-summer day.

Then in her peripheral vision she saw Jeanne step quickly forward and put her arm around Lucas. Annie looked over and saw the tears running freely down Lucas’s face. She moved to him then too, to put her hand on his shoulder. She turned to look over at Sarah, but she seemed all right, she seemed absorbed in the task. And in spite of his tears, Lucas kept taking his turns, snuffling and breathing irregularly, but reaching in again and again, and watching the ashes fall, slightly windblown, from his long fingers.

When they’d finished, when Sarah had turned the empty bag over and shaken the last of the ashes out, the four of them stood huddled together for a long moment, their arms around one another.

They separated. Swiping at his face, blowing his nose, Lucas went to the side of the cottage. He opened the spigot the hose was attached to, and they took turns watering the ash into the earth around and under the flowers. When Annie’s turn was done, she stepped back. Watching the other three, she moved a little to change the angle from which she saw them. She realized abruptly that she was composing a picture she might have taken, and felt a familiar sense of something like shame.