They finally cleaned off the dining room table for the meal. Over their heads Maude thumped around, packing for her morning flight. She refused to stay to see a local doctor. Merle and Ned were belatedly taking an interest in the photos that hadn’t been displayed, the ones that weren’t about Maude: their own childhoods and families, the other lives of the house, left behind in the messy boxes. The smiling aunts Inge and Odile, posed in front of the porch—if Polly looked out her bedroom window, they would have been standing directly below, and she’d have seen their coiled silver hair and smelled their lily of the valley perfume. Merle as a bedridden child and a tanned, fit teenager on a dock, the withered arm hidden by a towel. Scrabbly shots of Polly and her toddler sister and brothers, the surprises, sitting on a draft horse. Ned leggy and sixteen next to a tower at Glendalough, Ned and his uncle and Rita, taken the day before she walked into the ocean at Sandymount; Ned and Polly lying on the grass in Prospect Park. When Polly had mailed this last one home to Michigan with the news of their meeting, a bomb went off. Merle opened his first bottle of wine in a decade, and Jane took to her bed. It was all somehow funny in hindsight, but that first visit to Michigan—Merle and Ned arguing, Polly and Jane arguing—had been fraught.

When she and Ned first slept together, and for the next several months, it shocked Polly, over and over. When he wasn’t in her presence, she’d start feeling woozy and nostalgic, thinking of them as children, thinking of the strangeness of it all. When they were together, he wasn’t that boy, and she wasn’t that girl. They were new.

It took a long time for Merle and Jane to leave the guilt behind. There were constant small scenes. “Just let us go then,” said Ned, pulling Polly out the door on the third day of their visit. They went swimming and found a place in the dunes in the hot wind, and nothing would ever be that good again, pleasure that ripped at your heart and skin and bones.