Annie was thinking of how odd it was that this had come up again, this memory that had also come to her the day after Graham died. The connection it had to her remembering the man in Jackson Park. She thought of telling Edith and Peter and Sarah that story now, the story from her own past that she’d forgotten and then recovered. The story of Sofie Kahn, of Sofie and the molester.

But Edith was expanding on the recovered memory phenomenon and how insane it was—her word—to rely on little children for accuracy. She began to explain the way memory worked in young children, its pliability, its responsiveness to adult expectation.

Annie wasn’t really listening. She was recalling the night of the no game. Remembering that later, after she and Graham and Sarah had finished playing it, after Sarah was in bed and the kitchen cleaned up, she and Graham had gone to the living room to sit, each with a glass of wine, and out of curiosity, he’d gotten up to look up the derivation of the word molester. She remembered watching him cross the room. He had turned on the lamp and bent over the dictionary they kept open on one of the shelves. The thin pages had made a faint fluttery noise as he flipped through them. The lamp was behind him, and he was in profile to Annie, almost silhouetted. After a minute or two, he had stood straight and turned to her, grinning, his whole face alive with delight.

“It comes from the Latin,” he had said.

“The Latin for what?”

“For the verb to irk.”

They had both laughed. “I’ll say,” Annie said.

He shook his head slowly, and said, “You’ve got to admire the understatement there.”

He had turned the light off then and come back to sit across from her in the slightly sprung wingback chair she’d sometimes called his throne. They still had that chair. Peter had been sitting in it before dinner.

She felt an unfamiliar pang, a feeling she hadn’t had—hadn’t allowed herself to have—in a long time. Not since Rosemary.

She missed him, suddenly. She missed Graham.

28

When everyone had finally gone home and only Annie and Sarah were left, Annie went out the kitchen door and across the yard to bring Sam back.

“And here he is,” she said to Sarah as she came in. She set the cat down. While she was opening the can of his food, Sam circled her legs, his tail twining around them—as it used to twine around Karen’s, Sarah thought, looking carefully at her mother, thinking of her as old in a way she didn’t often. Annie set Sam’s bowl on the floor under the tall windows, and he hunkered over it to eat, his head moving down and then quickly up as he tossed the chunks of food to the back of his mouth.

They both watched him, Annie leaning her butt against the kitchen counter, Sarah still sitting at the table.

After a moment, Sarah said, “Does this bring it all up again?”

“What do you mean?”

“The cat. Karen’s death. Does it remind you of Daddy dying?”

“Oh!” Annie shook her head. “Not in the least, sweetie. I’m sad about her death, of course. And sorry. Sorry that she was so . . . alone, it seems. Mostly that.” Annie came and sat opposite Sarah. “But she was old. And she was failing. I’m sure you’d noticed. I was glad things hadn’t gotten worse. And I was glad for her that she’d more or less managed things on her own up until she died. That’s an achievement. One I hope I’m capable of.”

Sarah made a noise, a raspberry. “Come on, Mother,” she said.

“Well, you know what I mean.” Annie looked over at the cat. She shook her head. “No, your father’s death was completely different. It was way too soon. It was untimely.” She turned back to Sarah. “There were things . . . some things I would have liked to talk to him about, I suppose.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Oh. Just. Married things. How we would . . . have gone on being married, I suppose.”

“What do you mean?” Sarah’s voice was alarmed.

Annie heard it. “This is . . . kind of personal, isn’t it?” She laughed. “Very personal. Why don’t we talk about the cat?”

“But you brought it up, Mom.”

“Not really. It came up, I would say. And then you asked.”

Sarah stood and began to pick up the glasses, the delicate little glasses that had held the sauterne. “Well. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be . . . personal. Or I did, actually. But . . .”

“Oh, hon,” Annie said, “I’m the one who should be sorry. And I am. I’m sorry.”

“But . . . what do you mean?” Sarah had set the glasses in the sink, and now she turned to face her mother.

Annie inhaled sharply, and then let her breath go. After a moment she said, “Just, there were things I would have liked the time to talk to your father about.”

“But you talked all the time,” Sarah said, remembering their voices in the night. The laughter, the music downstairs after they’d put her to bed. The way he turned to her, expectant, smiling, when she spoke.

“Yes. Of course, we did. But some things . . . There were things, things we didn’t have time to talk about.”

“How could you not have time? You had years.”

“Well, I suppose you put things off, don’t you? The hard things.”

Sarah was about to ask, “What hard things?,” but she didn’t. Later she thought that she must have been afraid. That she didn’t want to know, whatever it was. Whatever they were. She turned back to the sink and began to wash the little glasses by hand.

After a long moment, she said, “How well did you know Lucas’s writer? The guy you met at the artists’ colony.”

“Ian?”

“Yeah, Ian. What was his last name?”

“Pedersen.”

“Right. He was a friend?”

“Well, it was kind of a strange setting.” Annie had poured herself another tiny glass of the sauterne. She was twirling it slowly by its stem. “You got . . . very intimate, very fast, in a kind of unreal way. So yes, I knew him well, in exactly that way. That odd way.” She laughed, quickly. “He was a friend. I suppose I had a little crush on him or something like that.”

“When? This was before you met Daddy.”

“No, it was after. After we were married, actually. But it was one of those . . . just lovely, fizzy things. Nothing happened.”

This phrase struck Sarah, all the parts of it. First, of course, fizzy. A fizzy thing. Something she’d never had, as far as she knew. Certainly not with Thomas, things had gotten so serious so fast. Because of her father’s death, she supposed.

Or maybe because she wasn’t fizzy. Maybe because she just wasn’t a fizzy kind of person.

Then, “one of those.” One of those lovely fizzy things. Implying—did it not?—that there were other lovely fizzy things her mother had lived through. Implying another life for her. A life beyond the whole, complete, private world she’d created with Graham. The world Sarah had grown up sensing all around her. The world that she’d felt shut out of.

“I’m going to head up, I think,” Annie said. She tilted her head back to drain her glass, and then brought it over to the sink. She crossed to the door to the back stairs.

“Okay. I’ll follow in a bit.” Sarah said. “I’m still sort of on West Coast time.”

Annie stood at the door for a moment, looking back pensively at Sarah. Then she said, “You shouldn’t hold your father too dear, sweetie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just . . . oh, I don’t know. He was . . . human, after all. And maybe it keeps you from looking around. At, other men, I suppose.”

Sarah waited a moment before she said, “Now who’s being too personal?”

Annie bowed her head, as if conceding the point.

Sarah felt her anger fully seize her. “And I’m allowed to, anyway. Children are allowed to hold their parents too dear. As dear as they want to.”

Annie must have heard the anger in Sarah’s voice. She said, “They are. They are allowed, of course. I’m sorry.” She came across to Sarah and hugged her. Sarah barely responded, holding her mother loosely for just a few seconds. Then Annie turned and went up the back stairs, Sam trailing behind. Sarah heard the door to her bedroom close.

Sarah was still thinking of this, and of the evening generally, as she finished clearing up. As she loaded the dishwasher and set it going, as she covered the leftover cake and chocolate mousse and put them in the refrigerator. As she wiped down the table and the counters.

She turned off the kitchen lights and went into the living room. She sat down.

Claire’s wooden spoon was on the floor in front of her, and she bent over and picked it up. She stretched out on the couch, the spoon in her hand, tapping it on the top of the couch back. Tump, tump, tump, tump, tump.

A strange night, all right. Her mother and Lucas’s writer. The way her face had changed across the table when Lucas said the man’s name. His fizzy writer’s name. What would the right words be? That it . . . what? Became guarded, maybe.

She thought of Claire then—of her sweet unguarded face, of the game she’d thought of, born of what must have been her idea that the adults had made a circle so they could jump. She had been looking at Lucas when Claire yelled, and saw his face change in pleasure, watching his daughter.