Still, I watched you and him drive away, and all I could think about was how free Frank and I had felt after our wedding, there in a car he’d borrowed from an old friend, with tin cans trailing behind us, our clothes filled with rice. I felt free like I had not felt in years. I knew I would call my father along the way so he wouldn’t worry; I knew I would always call and check in with him, but I also felt free. We were going to Quebec City to stay at the Château Frontenac, a place Frank had always wanted to go because his grandparents had gone right after they got married, but it was a long way, and we stopped somewhere in New Hampshire at a small motel, the Sleepytime Inn, where I shook out our clothes and collected all the grains of rice that fell, and here they are, wrapped in tissue and now in this plastic bag. But before I did that, I called my father collect from the phone in the cramped office, a quick “Here,” simply to reassure him, and then I stood there in the tiniest bathroom I had ever seen—knotty pine paneling, a dim-watted bulb—and tried to see myself in my fancy pink nightgown bought just for that occasion, and what came to me was, “Once upon a time there was a girl named Lil.” And years later when you called, Becca (collect, from a pay phone), to quickly say that you were in Key West, I imagined you there in that same tiny bathroom, leaning into a dark mirror to see yourself as I had done years before, thinking something like, “I’m here.”

“But how could she have been there?” my father, still in shock, had asked a doctor, his white coat covered in soot as he stood there in the hospital lobby. There was an elderly couple holding each other, all of their children gone—the whole wedding party had been at the club, and the parents had left early because they were responsible for breakfast. “I should be serving the food right now,” the woman said, her hands clutched to a black silk purse. “The wedding breakfast should be happening right now.” My father sat with his hands clasped between his knees, his hat on top of his bundled-up coat beneath his seat. It was so crowded, the room filled with what sounded like machinery of some kind, only it was the low steady moans mixing and blending, sometimes a scream and you knew someone had gotten bad news.