“We’ll use the bubbles!” she said. She was so lonely, so ready to please me. How was I only seeing it now? Her eagerness came loose like unspooled thread. You couldn’t yearn like this unless you’d been lonely for years, practicing. Now her body was weak enough to yearn along with her.

I ran a bath with honey vanilla, her choice, and sat on the toilet seat while she folded herself—thin legs, white belly, arms like baggy insect wings and glimmering with soap—under the steaming surface of the water. I brought a book and kept my eyes tightly locked on it, line to line, so she wouldn’t feel me staring. I glanced up once. She curled her finger to beckon me closer. I leaned in.

“She filled a bath,” she told me. “To bring them back to life.”

“What?” I said. “Who did?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. Very slowly, she inched herself farther under the water. I could see the red flush of heat marking her skin where she’d gone under. Who had filled a bath? Who’d died? It could be from a movie. I knew she watched a lot of them. What else could you do, alone all day, with every body part giving up separate ghosts—eyes and legs, lobes of the mind?

“Who did what?” I asked again. “What came back to life?”

“She was gentler than your mother, no matter what she did. She gave me a bruise here once, but she was always gentle underneath.” Lucy ran two fingers across her cheek, leaving a film.

I said, “I don’t know who you mean.”

“No,” she said. “We never told you.” She hugged herself. She could have been speaking from the middle of a dream.

“Never told me about what?”

“About Matilda,” she said. “Your mother’s sister.”

“You have a—” I stopped myself. “Where is she?”

She spoke so softly I could barely hear: “I don’t know.”

In her croaking voice, Grandma Lucy told me about her younger daughter in reverent bursts, as if Matilda were a dream that would be lost if she weren’t told fast enough. It had taken all these years just to say her name out loud.

Grandma Lucy said she’d taken Matilda—only Matilda, not my mother—to the tide pools every summer. This was in Chatham, near the big salty mouth of the Atlantic. “I showed her sea urchins,” she said. “Little bundles of purple pencils.”

She’d explained—to her and now to me—about starfish. How they ate with their stomachs outside their bodies. Their color was like orange juice concentrate, she said, so unbelievably bright. Maybe she had shades of freezer foods in mind for every animal. I remembered all the times my mother had said, She’s just a housewife, through and through.

“Matilda loved those pools,” Lucy said. “She really did.”