Outside I heard splashing. I went to the window and peered out but there was only darkness.

“How are you so comfortable with him?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you so at ease with a person. How can you just talk to him like—”

“I’ve been talking to him all my life.”

“Lucas—”

“He remembers things. He knows things only we could know. He knew how to turn the hose on, even with the spigot hidden under the porch stairs. And he knew the trick for opening the shed. And when I asked him how he knew, he had no idea! He just knew, that’s all.”

I thought of how he sat at the end of the dock with his legs crossed, the way our mother used to sit. With his hand on his neck, in his hair, how he looked so much like her.

“This morning,” Lucas said, sitting up, “he grabbed that old net with the long handle and started spinning it the way I used to. Remember I would do that for hours.”

“How does he know that stuff?” I said. “If he were Baby B, he wouldn’t be able to remember any of that. He was a few weeks old.”

“You can trust him,” Lucas said. “I know it.”

“I just found him in Mom’s room,” I said. “I think he was sleeping in there. But I don’t know. The closet was open, and the top drawer. He says he sleepwalks.”

“Then he sleepwalks,” Lucas said.

“It feels like there’s something else going on. Like he’s not telling us the whole story. My heart is telling me not to trust him.”

“Then our hearts are at war,” Lucas said.

“Jesus Christ, Lu. Don’t say things like that. No one’s at war. I want what you want!”

That was a lie, though. Lucas wanted to go back in time. I wanted a future. But the problem was the same for both of us: we were stuck here—the two of us together—perpetually in this present moment, this tender scene, a page ripped from a calendar, a little childhood.

I returned to my bed but only to sit awake looking out the window as the bay became visible, an apparition rising from the darkness, sailboats, houseboats, docks, and dinghies. I asked again the question I probably should have been asking more insistently. What was he doing here, with us? A few tarnished old memories weren’t really enough to hold his interest, and I knew it. I knew it but I didn’t want it to be true.

What do you want with us, Cole Anthony?