Later, drunk, we walked Cole back to the Island Inn. Lucas was chatty, nostalgic. He remembered Eddie finding Lucas’s lost harmonica in second grade. He remembered when Eliot’s mother drove her car into Hiram’s Bounty, the grocery store, right through the big glass door. He remembered eating at the Island Inn restaurant with our parents, the waitress bringing him maraschino cherries in a cup. I listened to Lucas, to the waves rolling onto the sand. I wanted Lucas to talk forever. I wanted to stay for a long, long time in that moment on the beach, with the warm air and the rhythmic shushing of the waves.

We stopped before we got to the inn, near Tame Jaw Beach, and I watched the two men walk toward the water. The air was humid, shimmering with moisture, and I was still drunk and thinking about the past. “You know what I don’t understand,” I said. “What about the dreams?”

“What dreams?” Lucas turned toward me.

“The dreams about Colin. We know exactly what he looked like. And it wasn’t anything like—”

In every dream, his hair and complexion had been dark, almost oily, and his eyes amber like Lucas’s. He had a smooth dark head and a sleek nose. The whites of his eyes glowed, as if he had to light his own way through our dreams. I held out my arms for a moment, as if I could see him away across the water.

Lucas shook his head. “In your dreams Baby B looked the way he would have looked if he’d grown up with us. But after he died, he was born in a different place, to a different family. Cole doesn’t look like us. He doesn’t share our DNA.”

“Then how is he Baby B?”

“Soul,” Lucas said.

My mom had believed pieces of the soul could splinter off over time. You didn’t notice it happening, but from that point on you were—in small ways—crippled, going through life without the benefits of a whole, intact soul. A shaman could lead you back on the path of your life, looking for the missing parts.

My mother had found her missing part in a dressing room in Saks Fifth Avenue. Her soul was seven years old and had been in the store trying on hats for fifty years.

Lucas went to the very edge of the water, and lifted his shirt over his head, let his jeans fall to the ground. Naked, he walked into the water, vanished. Cole and I sat down on the sand, watching the dark surface, waiting for Lucas to reappear.

It was almost midnight, a clumsy swollen quarter moon overhead.

“Have you moved to room eleven?” I asked.

“Not yet. But I put in a request. The clerk looked horrified.”

“You don’t seem like someone who’s afraid of ghosts.”

“Depends on the ghosts, I guess.”