Whenever she was out in the city, Polly searched for her dead aunt and grandfather. She always looked at the eyes, because it might be the only way she’d know. Evie had huge chocolate eyes with soft brown eyebrows. Polly didn’t know how old Frank and Evie would be now—time seemed infinite, since they’d left Michigan, and she believed they’d choose whatever age they liked. Frank might be a teenager, Evie a baby, but Polly hoped they’d both be her own age. She spied on people in museums, circled customers in the fish store to look up at their faces. Back at the apartment, she’d sort what she’d seen against photographs in the grubby brown photo album.

That spring, she finally found Frank and Evie at the dry cleaner’s on Sullivan and Prince and studied them from behind her mother’s legs. Evie, fourteen when her plane fell into Lake Michigan, now looked as if she were about ten but still had flat dark hair and a small mole on her cheek. Her eyes were right, clear rich brown, and her skin looked the same, and her voice sounded familiar when she asked Frank when they’d have lunch (another convincing detail). Frank’s eyeglasses were different, and he was pale, but everyone was paler in a city. He was counting a stack of brown-wrapped dress shirts while the Chinese woman who ran the shop scanned the shelves for a last packet.

Polly was stealthy; she was careful. She couldn’t bear the terror of them looking back, the answering flash of recognition or the disappointment of being wrong or being forgotten. When another customer entered, a large woman with curly hair and a shiny coat, Polly wedged herself between Jane’s leg and the counter, splitting the difference between strangers to avoid and strangers to watch. Jane counted the money in her red change purse while they waited for the man and his daughter to finish, coins tapped out onto the Formica counter. The old Chinese woman reemerged in a cloud of hot fabric and blue chemicals, and the smell of the place was like its own ghost. As she handed Frank a raincoat and hung Merle’s only suit and Jane’s blouses from a hook, the young Evie met Polly’s eyes and smiled.

Polly felt her face crack open. She gripped Jane’s leg so hard her mother gave a little yip and looked down in confusion. “They’re not dead,” Polly said. “I told you.”

The other people in the store heard her. Evie looked away and Frank took her hand. Jane led Polly outside, into the wet pavement smell of spring, but Polly knew she’d been right. Frank and Evie still existed, though changed. They’d come here to hide and she’d found them. They’d forgotten who they’d been, but she knew better.