She looked at me with a terrible expression. She was sorry for me. She was scared of me. Me!

I hated her, but then on Clara Day Street, I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the T-shirt shop. I was hunched forward, my whole posture announcing to the world how afraid and anxious I felt. When I tried to stand up, I looked stiff and ridiculous. No wonder Marlene looked at me like that. I hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten much of anything. All I’d done for days was think about my mother and the baby, and whether or not he was alive. It was the worst thing I could imagine.

I spent the following days looking for someone who remembered the accident, someone who had been involved in more than a marginal way. The fishermen, Sebastian and Gordon, remembered it, they said, but they hadn’t been around that night, and they hadn’t been at the funeral. I had lunch with my mom’s old friend Peggy, who lived inland by Hiram’s Bounty.

Her house was tiny and cramped, and she seemed that way, too—a bony woman, who lived alone, and seemed intent on taking up as little space as possible. She crouched in her seat as if there were low-flying birds above her. We ate a tiny lunch—apple slices, cheese, crackers, and pickles, arranged on a plate. When Peggy talked she moved her hands, but in such small ways it looked like she was knitting. No wonder my mom had liked her—Peggy left plenty of room for my mom to take up. She’d been at my father’s funeral, and at my mother’s funeral, but I hadn’t seen her much since then. She hadn’t been at Colin’s funeral, she said, because she wasn’t yet friends with my mom at that point. She hadn’t even met her.

“Are you sure there was a funeral?” she said. “It might have been very small.”

“I found a program from a memorial service. Did my mom ever say anything about it? About Colin?”

“Oh sure. All the time. She never stopped talking about it. Losing a child is the most traumatic event in a woman’s life. It defines you.”

“It defined all of us,” I said. “Our whole family.”

I thought about that as I walked away from Peggy’s house. Being defined. What your meaning is, what your very existence means. All my life we had meant grief and sadness, we meant missing something that could never come back. We meant loneliness and isolation. We meant being stuck here. But we meant other things as well, I told myself, remembering sitting on the porch with Lucas, looking out at the bay night after night: love, intimacy, intensity of closeness. Passionate care.

I asked Jim over and over again about the night of the accident.