Mrs. Grendle picked up her bourbon again and downed it. “Maybe she was protecting herself. It was easier to think the child had gone to live with someone else, better to believe a lie than to remember the real story every day of her life. Anyway, she’s dead and gone now. And this was probably fifteen or twenty years ago.”

I felt a whirling sensation. Yes, maybe in her grief she’d concocted an alternative story about Baby B. But maybe it was true. I was overcome with dizziness. He’d been dead all these years! His grave was by the fence in the cemetery, covered with lady’s slippers. I remembered standing by Cole in the kitchen that first day, how Lucas had said so happily, Lydia, it’s Baby B. And here he was resurrected again, in a new way. How many times could he come back to life?

The idea took hold of me with such force I couldn’t think of anything else. What if Baby B hadn’t drowned? What if he hadn’t died at all? What if he had grown up somewhere else, with another family, and come back to find us later? The thought was too much to bear. When I saw Cole now I felt instantly queasy, overtaken by seasickness.

He was everywhere. In the kitchen when I wanted breakfast. In the living room when I wanted to sit on the couch. He was in the bathroom when I needed a shower. On the stairs coming down when I started to go up, and going up when I wanted to come down. We were passing each other in hallways constantly like figures from an Escher dream. I couldn’t stand to think about him. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

Finally, I went back to the police station. I almost cried when I saw Marlene’s plump face.

“Why do you want to linger on something like this?” she said. Her curls bouncing on either side of her head felt sinister, like something out of a horror movie. Shirley Temple’s hair on an old woman’s body. Maybe this was how Marlene’s past self met her future self, right here in this moment with a crash of curls. “This can’t make you feel good,” she said.

“All I want to know is which direction the ferry was going? Were they coming home, or going to the cape?”

“I don’t remember, honey. I try not to think about it.”

“Did they find him?” I said. “Or is he still out there?”

She blinked at me several times. “I don’t know about his body,” she said. “But he went to heaven and stayed there, honey, in the bosom of our Father.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s not that simple.”

“You can decide how simple you want it to be,” she said. “That’s your choice.”