“I’m sorry.” He stood. He was shirtless, his eyes unfocused. He walked out of the room. “I sometimes sleepwalk,” he said as he passed me in the doorway.

“I heard you the first time,” I said.

He shuffled into Baby B’s room, closed the bedroom door with a small click. I didn’t go back to my room. I was wide-awake now. Instead I sat on my mother’s bed, felt the warmth there from Cole’s body. I looked around the room carefully.

The closet door was ajar. The top bureau drawer was open an inch. Had it been open like this before tonight? I couldn’t remember. It might have sat open for months, years. I crossed the room and opened the drawer, ran my hands over the little cardboard jewelry boxes. I took out each little box, pulled out necklaces, rings, bracelets. Shook the tiny silver casket that held our baby teeth. Little tooth rattle. In the closet a few of her dresses still hung, sandalwood in the folds. I closed the closet door, closed the bureau drawer.

I went to Lucas’s room.

“Move over,” I said. I stood at the edge of Lucas’s bed. In his sleeping face I saw the combined pieces of our parents that were there in my face, too.

“In the garden,” he said. “Under a toadstool.”

“Wake up.”

“What?” He lifted his head. “What’s wrong?”

“Nightmare.”

In our family, it had always been acceptable to wake someone in the night to tell them your nightmare since the telling of the nightmare was the best power over it. I never minded waking or being woken. I didn’t even mind the nightmares. My mother’s bed was the best reward. In the night she was warm, comfortable, happy. Maybe I liked her best when she was half asleep. She would pat my back, then fall asleep with her hand heavy on me.

I crowded into Lucas’s bed and lay on my back looking at his ceiling. I couldn’t see much, but it didn’t matter. I’d memorized his ceiling, which was different from my ceiling only in the shapes its rain stains had taken.

“What was it?” he asked. “What’d you dream?”

“I dreamed that Cole wasn’t Baby B,” I lied. “I dreamed that he was a stranger after all.”

“It was just a dream.”

The sound of the bay was part of the darkness somehow, some inner organ pumping out tremendous quantities of darkness. As long as we’d been alive, we’d heard the bay outside our windows all night long.

“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” I said. “Those parties at the golf course.”

“In high school?”

“Remember we would go, but then we would just stay in the woods watching. No one knew we were there.”

“It was better to watch than to be down there talking to people.”