We watched her go, and sat in silence, alone with her house, watching the candle inside its glass shield flicker. My husband swung to his feet, levering his body out of the low, soft chair. “I’m going for the brandy,” he said.

In the bay, the boats swung at anchor. There were no invading Turks, only the faint sound of laughing Danes. The English couple gazed at the lamp; the French boy studied his hands. The flame swayed, and I looked for something to fix on, but everything seemed swallowed up in the dark.

THIRTEEN & A HALF

ON THE MORNING of the eighth-grade dance in June, Gina woke to the sound of running water and the smell of papaya-mango-dewberry steam seeping under the door. She had an acute sense, listening to her daughter in the shower, that this was a fleeting moment in her life: the papaya-scented girl in blue eye shadow and body glitter would disappear as quickly as two and six and twelve had gone. Within a year, Amy would want to smell like perfume in tiny cut-glass vials, and Gina would never again wake to this tropical fog.

Her second-graders were already out for the summer, so the morning felt blissfully free. They exhausted her, but there was something comforting about the endless march of seven-year-olds. They never got any older; they wanted love more than independence; they would never be thirteen. Gina lay thinking of that unchanging procession of small bodies, then followed her daughter downstairs.

Her husband, Chase, had already walked down the road to get the paper, and now he sat in the living room reading a detective novel with environmentalist heroes. Amy stood at the kitchen counter, solemnly reading the funnies. Lanky and sandy-haired like her father, she wore soccer warm-ups that snapped down the side of each leg, a short-sleeved T-shirt with a flower on the chest, and rings with sparkling blue hearts and butterflies. Chase said thirteen-year-olds were like savages: you could buy Manhattan from them for a handful of beads.

Amy also wore a fiberglass walking cast that came up to the middle of her thigh. She had jumped from a tree and broken her ankle, and her metallic-blue toenails stuck out of the cast. Gina was torn: she was glad her daughter was still young enough to play in trees, but mystified at why she would jump out of one, a tall one. She had asked Amy why, and Amy said, “I felt like it.” This secrecy was a new development.

“How’s the cripple?” Gina asked.

“Fine,” Amy said, abandoning the funnies. She poured a big bowl of Grape-Nuts and milk, and seemed to consider each bite while she ate. But she couldn’t be thinking about Grape-Nuts, not the whole time.

“Who do you dance with at these things?” Gina asked.

Her daughter shrugged. “I guess it’s like dances at camp. Some with boys, mostly with girls.”

“There are dances at camp?”