Patrick, who is growing into a smart, kind man, says he doesn’t remember that. He remembers burying Amanda up to her neck in sand on the beach after the rain finally let up for good. That day is vivid in my mind, too. Amanda begged to stay there, stuck like that, even when the wind picked up and Lisa made the call that it was time to head home. Patrick got frustrated and started digging up the sand around her neck, flinging it into her eyes and hair. Over Amanda’s screams, I told him to cut it out. We packed up all of our things, making a big singsong show of leaving without her, and then, when she made no attempt at escape, we started trudging up toward the dunes to the street.

“Goodbye!” she called to our backs. “I love you! Visit soon!”

Attention

Cassie’s remembered life began in the garden of the house in Surrey, crunching on chips and watching her brother swing on a tattered karate belt from the crotch of a low tree. The belt broke, or the branch, she wasn’t sure, and he slammed to the ground on his back. She remembered the panic in his eyes and his silence before the air came back into his lungs. She ran inside as he began to howl, certain she was witnessing death, even if she didn’t have the name for it. She was excited, but mostly terrified by this revelation of the world’s dark secret. Her brother was fine. Philip, later, could not pick out that particular minor injury from a childhood rife with them. But it stuck with her. In her imagined memory of it, there was a soft voice in her head saying, I am three now and I can think now, I am in the sun and I am alive, and then sudden movement and the crash, the gasping and screaming, and a return to blind instinct, further consciousness delayed until a more agreeable time.

She remembered herself as happy enough in those early years of patchy self-awareness, but in pictures and home movies (which she was glad she’d watched enough times to memorize before the obsolescence of the technology on which they were captured made them impossible to revisit), she looked worried, or more often simply confused by what was going on around her. She’d been an easy child in most ways, she’d been told, but when she thought about it now, she was angry that she’d been allowed to be easy, that she hadn’t been encouraged to put up more of a fight against complacency or timidity or whatever it was that had kept her from experiencing more of the highs and lows that were presumably the hallmarks of most childhoods.