I looked up the wooden steps to a closed door on the second floor of the old building. There must have been several apartments up there, since this was once a big, beautiful house, the home of a sea captain. I knew there were apartments above all the shops on Clara Day Street, like the one Eddie lived in. But this one. This door. These steps. The notes of the bagpipe suddenly became a story, and it was the story of a future, a real and possible future, and I could see myself walking up those steps and walking through that door and sitting on a couch and picking up a book. The couch and the book were both things I’d chosen carefully, and the cupboard was filled with cans and containers of foods I’d chosen to eat.

I could almost hear it, the ringing of this future. It filled my ears, shells crushed under a wave, the roar of a tide.

Chapter 36

36

There are only three things left to tell you, what Tuck calls miracles one through three.

(“I don’t believe in miracles,” I tell him.

“Are you sure about that?” he says.)

When I moved into the apartment over the post office, I left Lucas in charge of the house. Brother of mine, you can have the boxes in the attic. You can have the old bicycles in the garage. You can have the beds and the clocks and the blankets, you can have the ghosts. But all Lucas wanted was Cole. And since he couldn’t have Cole, he didn’t want anything. He stopped going to work. He stopped mowing the lawn. I visited him every day, but it took a long time before he wanted to get dressed, eat a decent breakfast, leave the house.

“Just come home,” Lucas sometimes said. But I felt safer in the apartment alone. And even there I locked my doors at night, and the circles under my eyes darkened from sleeplessness. So many nightmares.

The way Lucas felt about me was complicated. He missed me. He wanted me to come home. But he blamed me for Cole’s leaving. He didn’t come out and say so, but I felt it when he looked at me. All his sadness, he thought, was my fault. All that lost love.

I’d spent so many years taking care of my brother, it was terrible to think that I was the cause of his misery. I worried about him all the time. I worried he wouldn’t make it. I didn’t know how to take care of him anymore. It was a long winter, the worst one we’d had.

But it didn’t last forever. That’s miracle number one.

In the spring, when the sting of Cole’s leaving had dulled for Lucas, he showed up at the information booth and told me he’d gotten a new job, at the aquarium.