“But he is your father.”

Lucas had looked at her and nodded, the smile still on his face. “I wanted both of them,” he said. “For me, I wanted them together. Don’t you get it? What they had together. I wanted this very house to be mine.” He looked around, as if newly taking it in. They were sitting at the kitchen table, where everyone sat when they talked. He laughed then and said, “I wanted exactly what you had, sister Sarah.” He made his hand like a gun, pointing his finger at her. “I wanted your life.”

“And I wanted yours,” she almost said. But of course, that wasn’t true. Because though she would have had Frieda then—so steady, so safe, so much the same, always—she wouldn’t have had Graham. And that was at the heart of what she and Lucas had been talking about, really, she thought now. They both wanted the same thing. And for different reasons, neither of them could have exactly what they wanted.

She could feel the tears rising to her eyes, the cottoning in her throat. She got up from the oversize worn chair and went into Graham’s office. She lay down on the daybed there and looked up and around at everything there—the books crowded onto the shelves, in places two deep. The books stacked on the floor, on his desk, on the table. The papers with his backward-sloped handwriting on them. The photographs—of Annie, of Lucas, of her. The room actually held his scent somehow, though you could as easily have said that Graham had held the room’s scent—the scent, that is to say, of books, of paper. Everything, down to the fraying cushion on the daybed where he lay to read. Where she lay now, beginning to cry.

Throughout the summer, Sarah had been intermittently overwhelmed by her grief for her father—always taken by surprise, in ways that felt like a siege sometimes.

Not right away, no. When Annie called to tell her he had died in the night, in his sleep, she hadn’t seen her father for six months, not since Christmas. His death had hardly seemed real, it had happened so far away from where she was then, in distance, in time. Not seeing him was the norm in her life, and in some ways it was hard for her to believe he was any more gone now than he was from her every day. She wept a little, even then feeling constrained by Thomas’s presence. But also because there was just so much to do. Getting the ticket right away, arranging for her absence from work, packing.

And then, when she was in Cambridge for those few days, there was her mother, so lost in sorrow that Sarah felt obliged to be strong. It didn’t seem that this was the time for her own grief.

Once she was back in San Francisco, though—oddly, once again so far away from her father, from the place where he’d been so alive—it came to her unpredictably and illogically at odd moments. She was making a solitary dinner for herself one night in the middle of the summer, and the thought occurred to her, as though she hadn’t really taken it in before, that she’d never see him again, never hear his voice, that joyful, deep voice.

She carefully turned the burners off, taking an absurd kind of pride in how responsible she was being, and sank to her knees on the floor, rocking herself back and forth as she wept.

And one afternoon at work as she walked past the staff room, she first heard, and then saw, that there were three people in there, three people cracking up over something, laughing uproariously, one of them bent over and pounding on the table, so carried away was he in the hysterical hilarity of whatever the joke was. She had felt such a wave of rage at them—for laughing, for not knowing—that she had to go directly to her office and shut the door to calm herself, to wait for her hands to stop shaking.

And the first time she and Thomas made love after she was back from the June trip home, he was treating her so tenderly that she couldn’t stand it. She wanted to disappear in sex, to be no one, to be just her sensations. She pulled him down next to her, turning under him, directing him with her body, her hands, to enter her this way, that way, pushing her body hard against him over and over until they were both slick with sweat, until she’d exhausted herself.

Afterward Thomas had held her and stroked her damp hair back off her face. Had whispered, “What are we doing here, Sarah? Why are we doing this now?” and she had burst into tears and cried out, “Because we’re alive!”

What did she mean? Thomas didn’t ask her to explain again, he just held her. But later she had asked herself, what was she doing? Was she mourning her father in this crazy way?

She didn’t know, and it shook her—her inability to understand herself in that moment, and the way she’d let Thomas see that intimate confusion.

She’d stopped crying now. She sat up on the daybed. She’d been wrong—she didn’t want to stay here alone. She got up, turned on Graham’s computer, and began to look for flights later in the day for San Francisco.

When she got home, a little before eleven, she dropped her bag in the hall just inside the door. She went down the long hallway to the bathroom to wash her face, to brush her teeth. In the bedroom, in the dark, she took off her shirt and dropped it on the floor. She undid her jeans and lowered them quickly. The tiny pale shells she’d stolen from home fell out of her pocket and scattered themselves with a gentle, scuttling, animal sound over the floor, under her bed.

24

As Annie turned off the engine, slowly looking around her at the overgrown field the cottage sat in, she felt it deeply: it was a mistake to have come up here. It wasn’t going to help this time—being alone.

But she couldn’t have stayed with Sarah a minute longer, she felt. She couldn’t go on pretending her fury at Graham didn’t exist.

She opened the door and crossed the yard from the car. Under the gray sky everything looked unwelcoming. The cottage itself needed paint. The stepping-stones laid by Graham the first summer they owned the house were almost hidden in the wet grass. The leggy plants where they’d scattered his ashes were losing their petals, turning to dry stalks.

When she stepped inside, the house was chilled and musty. The very opposite of a refuge. She set her purse, her overnight bag, her keys, on the table and then stood there in the main room, overcome by a nearly bodily sense of irresolution. Because there was nowhere else to go—that was it. No place to escape herself, to escape her brain, which kept going over and over the thing she didn’t want to remember—Rosemary, lifting her face from Graham’s desk, offering her grief to Annie. And the other visions, the imagined ones she couldn’t stop from pressing in. Graham moving over Rosemary, Graham pushing her legs apart, Graham laughing with her, Graham sitting across a table from her, talking.

When she’d come up here those few weeks after he’d died, she hadn’t been able to stop calling him up either, all her memories of him. Her face twisted into a bitter smile at the thought, at how much she’d wanted to remember him then. She’d wanted to remember everything so she could feel him with her and be comforted by that. She’d sought those memories, they were the balm she needed. And of course they were exactly also the wounds she needed balm for. She’d thought again and again during those days of everything—of the darkness when they’d made love here, of the daily quiet and ease between them. His warming her lake-cold feet with his hands. His hand on his heart, thanking her for dinner. Even the old dishes she ate out of by herself seemed dear to her, seemed to bring him close. Imagine it, she thought now—my fear of losing all that, of forgetting him.

Now what she wanted was to forget him, was for her brain to stop its circuit of all these images.

There’s nothing there to comfort me, she thought.

“Everything I remember is . . .” She shook her head fiercely, “Shit.”

Shit, because each of those memories came trailing pure bitterness. Trailing too its own corrective—the imagining of the other person he might have been thinking about when they did this, or this. How he had done these very things with someone else. Again and again the thought of Rosemary, turning her face to the light falling in from the hall.

Suddenly, quickly, she crossed the living room to the line of books sitting on the horizontal boards in the wall. With one long swoop, she knocked all of the books between two of the studs to the floor, welcoming the loud thudding. She was panting. She spun around and walked over to the kitchen. She made herself stand still there, facing out the window over the old kitchen sink, gripping the edge of the counter, looking at the glitter of the lake and not seeing it. Not seeing the trees on the opposite shore, not seeing the touch of yellow and cerise on their leaves.

Who is this version of me? she thought. So jealous. So full of rage.