It was the movie’s ending that did it. The von Trapps climbing through the Alps to escape the Nazis, a unit of togetherness, a family. The way she presented it to my father was, we don’t want to be alone when we’re old, do we? No, my father agreed, we shouldn’t grow old alone.

She spent two years trying to get pregnant. No luck. And then she was forty, and suddenly hungry for babies, starved for babies. She began taking human menopausal gonadotropin—a new drug at the time—to encourage ovulation, and it worked. At forty-one she was pregnant, not with one baby, not with two babies, but with three babies. Just what she’d wanted! She prepared to sew matching play clothes cut cleverly from curtains.

Both Mom and Dad had small inheritances, which they combined to buy the house on Wolf Island. Their dream house, they said, even though the wind blew through cracks in the wall, the floorboards were full of sand, the roof sagged and leaked. They liked the huge kitchen overlooking the bay, the big lawn with a tire swing already tied to the branch of a tree. A house with plenty of room. A house meant for children.

They were moving to a place that was gloriously out of the way. What they liked best was the sense of adventure. They would have three children, but they were young at heart. No suburban cul-de-sac. No PTA potlucks and Tupperware parties! My father would commute to Boston, where he’d been appointed dean of a tiny college. Eventually he hoped to write full-time.

We looked like beans on the ultrasound monitor, she told us, three little beans of light in the dark. They called us Baby A, B, and C. I was A, Lucas C, and the other baby was B. We were born too early, at thirty-two weeks, struggling into the world: me, then Colin, and finally Lucas. We were skinny, our stick-bones visible through translucent skin. Lucas and I weighed less than four pounds, and Baby B was even smaller. Our miniature mouths didn’t yet know how to nurse. Doctors dripped milk into our stomachs through tubes in our noses. Our lungs were reluctant to breathe out of water, but only Baby B needed a tube for that as well.

For weeks, our mother believed we were dying. She sat in the NICU day after day, her hair turning gray, her bones losing density.

After one month in the NICU, we turned some corner finally, our lungs and hearts and stomachs working efficiently in our tiny bodies. We drank from bottles. We grew. They brought us home to Wolf Island. And we lived all together in the big house on the bay for three weeks, until Baby B developed pneumonia, which was common in premature babies, the doctors told my parents.