For the next few minutes, we sort through them in what would have been silence had the rain not pulsed against the roof. It slows, then picks up, gusting and calming in the sky’s mimic of the surf. Margo shows me a shot of her working with Mom in the potting shed, then sets it under her thigh in the unobtrusive way that speaks of appropriation. I show her a shot of the three of us, our backs to the camera as we sit shoulder to shoulder at the end of the dock, silhouetted against a mackerel sky.

“Mom took this,” Margo muses. “She was artistic back then. It’s like there’s a part of her that she left behind when she left here.”

“Didn’t we all?” I say, thinking just then of goodies like sunrise and sunset and rain on the roof.

But Margo is distant as she studies the photo. “I did. No part of my childhood made it to Chicago.”

“Have you missed it?”

She doesn’t answer at first. Her made-up face is carefully composed, but those green eyes, so like all of us, are troubled when they rise from the print. “Last week I’d have said no. Hell, twenty-four hours ago, I’d have said no. Then I heard Dad’s voice coming through your phone, and a window opened. I tried to close it again, tried all last night, but I couldn’t.” She is so poised, so in control but for the pain in her eyes and her voice. “Memories are always there. Y’know?”

I do. “They’re like freckles under makeup—”

“Hold that thought,” she cries and, in a flash, is backing down the attic ladder. Had it not been for the rain, I’d have heard where she is going—her old room? Downstairs? Out to her car?—but her footsteps are lost.

While I wait, I push deeper into the box of photographs. The memories they bring are different from the ones I carried with me to New York. Those were dark. They were of loss and confusion, unanswered questions, distrust. But the ones in my hand are lighter. They conjure fun and closeness and love. Yes, love. Even in candid shots of Dad, who shoots daggers at my camera while actively, proudly posing for me holding a boat line in one shot and extracting a clam from the sand in another, there is feeling. I’ve always focused on the negative. Nightmares kept me away from this place, and staying away kept me from hurt. But what about comfort and warmth? There was positive here.

Margo returns with her iPad. “My next column,” she states, and though she sits beside me again, she is distracted typing notes.

Leaning in, I read, We can look the other way when a memory intrudes, or deny that it ever existed, but it doesn’t go away. Memories shape us as surely—and invisibly—as DNA.