Nola stood facing the Connecticut shoreline. A quivering chevron of geese in V formation passed above, emitting garbled shrieks. Nola looked down at the beach, and her lips moved in a silent good-bye to her parents. “Yit’gadal ve’yit-kadash sh’mey raba,” she chanted, one of the earlier prayers she had studied, the Kaddish for the dead. The time had come to excise the sorrow.

Turning away, she followed the overgrown path through the woods to the spot where her family’s cottage had been. In all the years she had visited the big house, she had never come here. Now only the foundation and parts of the flooring remained, a dwelling for rats. Autumn leaves had piled up around the crevices.

Nola stood in the center of the empty rectangle. A lifetime ago, the issue of money had rarely come up among aging hippies. “We’re rich in love,” she could hear her mother and father say, “we share love with humanity.” She trembled at the absurdity of the words. Many former sixties radicals had thrown away their beads, brushed the dust off their college diplomas, and gone on to productive, stable lives, while her parents refused to grow up, to care for their children. Had her mother’s Jewish parents been damaged by wars and persecution? She would never know. Losing her parents meant questions to which there would never be any answers, except that she had seen destructive fingers that had pushed through the muck of history to poke at Jenna too.

The old oak that had shaded their kitchen porch, where her mother had once worked on her shoe collages, was now enormous, and its roots bulged from the earth. Nola sat on a massive root the size of a man’s thigh, breathed in the dusty smell of dry leaves, and stared at the wreckage that remained of her parents’ lives.

Her feet kicked at leaves as she walked to the spot where the old barn had been. An apple tree had taken root in dry manure and grown wild. Its rotting fruit smelled too sweet, too pungent, and drew hordes of tiny flies. Nola thought of her father’s unfulfilled dream of a ranch in Colorado. She heard once again the roar of his motorcycle and for a split second, she was the little girl under the covers, falling asleep at that sound of his return from a gig, secure for the last time in the knowledge that he was home.

Her hands flew up to her chest. She suddenly identified that roar as it segued into a bass string, into that dreaded tremble in her head whenever she was alone, her grottoes of loneliness.

She returned to the oak tree and pressed her forehead into the trunk. The rough bark pockmarked her skin. Her arms encircled the tree as warm, bitter tears burst through a dam.