It is and is not. It’s for another Teresa, perhaps, one who might board and be carried someplace else, to live out a different life and become—who knows?—the model for someone’s painting, or the title of someone’s song, or just a person remembered for having vanished. “Is-this-your-bus?” the woman asked, articulating her words as if Teresa were a foreigner. “I don’t know,” Teresa said, taking in the length of the bus, its massive, openmouthed tires, its dark interior. “Well, you ought to find out,” the woman said, placing one aqua shoe on the first step. “Otherwise, you’ll be standing here all day.”

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Ragazzino, she writes. You don’t know who I am. We’ve never met, but I’m your daughter-in-law. Dermot is with you, I believe, or at least you know where he is. Please tell him I’ve been proposed to by someone, and have declined the offer. Should your son wish to contact me, my number is listed. But there’s no immediate need.

She signs the note with her initial, T., folds it and slips it into the envelope without the pictures of the children. Better, she thinks, to let them guess a little. Better to keep her options open.

So Much for Artemis

1974

At the beginning of the summer Jennifer hypnotized him with her MedicAlert bracelet. “You are in my power,” she said. “You will do exactly as I say.” She told him to bark like a dog, and he barked. She told him he was a car, and, sitting across from her on her bed with his eyes closed, he honked and lurched forward, screeched and reared back. “Now you’re a beggar,” she said. “Go ask my mother for a dollar.”

Frankie got up and walked out of her room and down the hall, fluttering his eyelids, his arms raised in front of him like a zombie. Jennifer’s mother was in the aboveground pool in the backyard, floating in a donut-shaped raft that had a holder for her iced tea tumbler. Her hair was piled onto her head with bobby pins, and she was reading a book through a pair of large round sunglasses. At the top of the metal steps, his arms still raised, Frankie said, “Mrs. Woodrow, I need a dollar, for I am a beggar.”

“You certainly are,” Mrs. Woodrow said.

Standing next to Frankie on the deck, Jennifer told her mother she’d hypnotized him.

“Well, I don’t go swimming with my purse,” Mrs. Woodrow said.

“You can promise,” Jennifer said. “You can give it to us later.”

Mrs. Woodrow promised and asked them to please go do something else.

Back in the bedroom, Frankie sat cross-legged on the floor and said, “Half that dollar’s mine, right?”

“You will have no memory of this,” Jennifer said, and snapped her fingers.