She smiles wryly. “Don’t worry. It won’t last.”

She’s right. The next morning, which dawns clear and dewy, a sleepy aftermath of yesterday’s agony of rain, I find Mother in the backyard sitting in her wooden Adirondack chair and gazing with glazed-eyed nostalgia at the tumble of overgrown greenery and puddled marsh leading windingly to the swamp beyond. A tumorous weed-choked garden has grown wild over a defunct stone fountain, now bone-dry and weathered as a tombstone, ensnared by possessive vines, collecting the odd damp leaf to decay in its bottommost parts. Tomato plants bloom enthusiastically amid bushes that haven’t been trimmed in so long they’ve grown rough and rogue, with an air of neglect that doesn’t belong in an inhabited home. But who has the money to hire a caretaker or a gardener in these times, or the energy to keep up such a sprawling, schizophrenic place?

Playing in the jungle-grown yard are two little girls: one small and freckled with two unraveling braids, the other a posh little adult of twelve with dark hair swept coolly over her eyes. The sun cants over them in a goldish halo that doesn’t quite touch them at the correct angle because it wasn’t morning when this moment first occurred, but afternoon. They chase one another in a game they have invented whose rules are lost to me. A faint smile ghosts my mother’s face.

“Look how young we are,” I say as I come up beside her.

Young Sam’s foot slips into a shallow ditch and she goes sprawling in the weeds, while young Elizabeth cackles with cruel glee.

“Careful, girls,” calls my mother, even though the children cannot hear her through the span of time. “My girls,” she murmurs with amused pride. “They’ll come in covered in dirt and licking their wounds like battle heroes. And here I used to worry that boys would be the bigger handful.”

“Lizzie’s having a boy,” I say, to draw her back to the present.

“Silly. Lizzie’s just a girl. Oh,” and she turns away from the girls playing in the yard and finally looks up at me as if just remembering how much time has passed since the memory she is watching. She looks into my face and frowns as if surprised to see me all grown up. “That’s right. She is.” She turns back to the girls wrestling on the ground. Young Elizabeth yanks on young Sam’s braid, and young Sam cries out indignantly. “It will be nice to have a boy in the family.” A distant smile plays on her face. “We need to finish getting everything ready. There’s so much to do.”

“Why don’t you come inside, Mom.” I help her up, though she is hardly so old as to need my aid in getting out of a chair. But something about watching the dance of memories seems to age her considerably. “They’re not going anywhere.”

Finding Elizabeth in the labyrinthine house isn’t easy, but Mother prefers not to shout our names through the halls lest those shouts ring out at random intervals in the future, echoing from the house’s memory so that we wake to hear our names called out by ghostly voices in the middle of the night. This is why the house bears such a tomblike quietude. Occasionally you can hear soft music whispering from empty rooms, music from decades ago playing eerily of its own volition. Once I heard a big-band tune crackling through a phonograph in the billiards room, and it drew me there where I could hear but not see its source. Just an echo of a memory. I danced until the music faded away into nothing and went in search of good omens and other mysterious ephemera of the past.