And then he looked at me, and I understood that he wasn’t sad about what he saw. He was exhilarated. His eyes were black and shining. He was a collector, only he wasn’t interested in collecting any of this old stuff. What he collected was much more complicated: our memories, our past. It was as if he wanted these things for himself.

“Here’s what you heard,” Lucas said from near the wall of Mom’s stuff. I took the moment to stash the COLIN folder under the old futon. Then I turned to Lucas. He was poking something with the toe of his shoe. It was a bat. Tiny and curled into a ball, like a stone thrown through the window. “Dead,” he said.

At the bottom of the attic stairs, Cole grabbed my arm.

“What is it you’re looking for?” he asked. He tilted his head and waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, he reached out and took a lock of my hair and held it between his thumb and finger, as if testing it for strength. He let it slip between his fingers. Your name, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Fear and exhilaration seemed to inch higher, into my chest, my throat. I felt like a high striker at a carnival. Cole was holding the hammer, trying to send that marvelous little puck right up to the bell. I felt the bell in my throat, in my mouth, that fearful ringing.

That night I lay awake for hours. I was thinking about Colin and his cause of death. Maybe drowning was what they called it when your lungs drowned in fluid from pneumonia. I knew that couldn’t be true even as I thought it. No, our parents must have lied to us about Baby B and how he’d died. Was this what my grandmother had thought my mother could never be forgiven for, this lie? He was seven weeks old. He was the size of my mother’s forearm. She’d told me that once, that she could hold each of us on her forearm, our heads cradled in her palm, the rest of us fitting neatly between wrist and elbow. How had he drowned? I imagined him in the bathtub, and shivered.