That was when I decided against a junior year abroad in Europe—I didn’t want to meet a girl who was as sad as me, or sadder. I was afraid of being twice as sad together (with anyone) until the sadness drove us apart. Like Em, I was melancholic enough.

When I came home to New Hampshire from Pittsburgh, I was only twenty. I’d not yet had a girlfriend who was a keeper, though Maud turned out to be a keeper as a friend. Fantasizing was what I did for girlfriends. (Commuting to college would have its drawbacks.) I was living at home with my mom and the snowshoer, which meant I was living alone with Elliot Barlow for long periods of time. And hadn’t I come home to watch over him, to keep an eye on what the little English teacher was wearing? Wasn’t that situation melancholic enough?

I don’t know if melancholy is good for the soul. Once you’ve seen ghosts, you’ve seen sufficient melancholy. If ghosts aren’t melancholic, what are they?

What did my ghosts, if they were ghosts, want? I don’t mean the infantile diaper man, as obvious in death as he’d been in life. I mean the static figures in those black-and-white photographs, their expressions frozen in time, their standpat characters not once revealed by action or dialogue—leaving me to fill in the blanks, to imagine the rest of their lives. What were those ghosts trying to teach me? What did they want me to learn from them? But didn’t I come from a family of secrets? I would wait them out—my mother and the ghosts.

Now I was older than that boy or young man posing in front of the snowbank. That fourteen-year-old was still leaning on his snow shovel—either a long shovel or a short boy. “He was just some kid, sweetie—he wasn’t shaving,” my mom had said. “He was small,” Little Ray had whispered when she kissed me. “He would have been a pretty girl,” she told me. She must have seen something of the small snow shoveler in the little snowshoer, I thought.

In black and white, his handsomeness, his shyness, his smallness alongside his tall snow shovel never varied—in black and white, he didn’t change—but now I could see the feminine prettiness my mother had seen in him, an attractiveness she’d no doubt noticed in the snowshoer. Yet I still sensed in the short boy with the tall snow shovel a different kind of ghost—the kind who can hurt you—and I still thought there was something about him that didn’t look dead. He may have been the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off Little Ray, but whether or not he was the no-strings-attached kid my mom slept with in Aspen, he had the look of someone who was still alive.