“Oh, that’s just a beer delivery,” she said. I doubted that the horse’s ghost was dangerous. And when I asked her about the shy, childlike hotel maid, Little Ray said, “Oh, I didn’t know she died—I think she was Italian.”

No—I didn’t ask her about the boy, or the young man. His handsomeness, his childlike smile, his smallness alongside his tall snow shovel—that kid from the 1940s, whoever he was. I sensed he might have been a different kind of ghost, the kind who can hurt you. There was something about him that didn’t look dead. I’m sure I saw skis leaning against the building.

“I have to go now, sweetie,” my mother was whispering. “The ghosts can wait—they’re good at waiting.”

“Okay,” I said. “When will I see you again?” I asked her.

“When the time is right,” my mom said.

16. WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT

I once asked Nora if she brought her girlfriend, Em, to my mother’s wedding to create a distraction—to overshadow the evident incredulity toward the unlikely lovers who were getting married. The circulating gossip, which was started by my aunts—namely, that my mom was Elliot Barlow’s beard—was not as obvious as Nora’s decision to be publicly out as a lesbian at a family wedding in her hometown. The submissive demeanor of the dollish and anxious-looking Em was belied by the reputation of her unruly and clamorous orgasms; as Nora had plainly put it, “Each orgasm sounds like it’s her first or last time.” The wedding guests who were staying at the Exeter Inn were visibly changed by the experience of overhearing Em’s ridiculously loud and hysterical orgasms, particularly a contingent of the North Conway Norwegians. The girly-girl blondes, the ones Nora used to beat up, were looking at Nora with newly frightened eyes.

But Nora denied there was any willfulness behind her bringing Em to the wedding. “I don’t have that kind of foresight, kiddo,” Nora said. She told me she made an easy choice: her childhood bed in Uncle Martin and Aunt Abigail’s faculty apartment or a bigger bed at the Exeter Inn, where Nora could have noisy sex with Em. In retrospect, I might have been wrong to ask if Nora had purposely shortened Emily’s name to Em—as a rough but abbreviated way of dominating her. So much was violently expended in a single one of Em’s orgasms, it’s possible to imagine that the last three letters of Emily’s name had been lost in the climaxing process.

That the bride wore white did not escape my aunts’ condemnation. They were quick to judge both real and imagined violations of Little Ray’s virginity and purity.

“A bride who’s had a child does not wear white, Rachel,” Aunt Abigail told my mother.