The final document was Colin’s death certificate. It was a strangely cheerful document, like the awards I used to win in school for good penmanship. There was even a gold seal at the bottom of the page. I read through it.

Name: Colin Matthew Moore. The middle name struck me suddenly. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten his middle name; I just so rarely thought of it. Date of birth: that was our birthday of course. Date of death: less than three months later. Address at time of death: the same address we still used. Primary cause of death: drowning.

I held the paper closer to my face.

Primary cause of death drowning?

This made no sense. Colin had died of pneumonia, on his way to the hospital with my mother. I’d heard the story from my mother. I could picture it as clearly as if it had been me on the deck of the ferry so many years ago.

I shuffled through all the papers again, as if I might find an answer I missed.

“Lydia?” I heard my name faintly, someone calling from downstairs. I closed the folder and held it against my chest.

“I guess she’s in the attic,” Lucas said. And I heard their feet on the ladder coming up, Lucas first, his head, then shoulders, then the rest of him. “What are you looking for?” he asked suspiciously.

“I thought I heard something,” I said. “I thought something was moving up here.” I put the folder quickly behind my back.

Cole emerged next, and I felt both afraid and inexplicably guilty. But they didn’t look at me. Instead, they moved from thing to thing in the attic, touching what they saw: an old double stroller. Two tricycles. Four old suitcases with broken zippers. It’s both sad and comforting to stand among the detritus of your life. Your mother’s stuff, your father’s stuff, the treasures that belonged to you as a baby, a child, a teenager. Except for the boxes that were open or out of place, the rest was thoughtfully organized and stacked, even labeled. We might not have gotten rid of stuff easily, but we knew how to put it away.

I watched Cole touch the roof of a broken dollhouse. I watched him run his fingers over my father’s suits on the garment rack. For a minute I felt sorry for Cole. This whole room was about memories, the past. Maybe that was what the whole house was about. We could look through these old things anytime we wanted, we could gather the past around us, touch it all, count it all. And his past was somewhere else, inaccessible.