So séances worked, Lydia thought, catching on. When she was alive, she wouldn’t have been caught dead at one! Mrs. Always was pointing at her, her face contorted. Roger was shouting something, and Anna was crying in her handkerchief. The relationships were so complex that Lydia wanted to laugh and cry at once. Yet she related from her own present. It was almost impossible for her to find the part of her that meant so much to these two middle-aged people. They’d never really been close. Had they forgotten?

“Over there, I see something over there,” Anna shouted to Roger.

Mrs. Always cried out, “You’ve left the physical plane. You’re dead. Rest in peace, dear soul.”

“I know I’m dead,” Lydia shouted, but no one heard her.

“There isn’t anything there. Or anyone. It’s all your imagination,” Roger said. “I don’t hear or see anything.”

“That figures,” Lydia muttered, thoroughly disgusted.

“Oh, Mama,” Anna cried; and this time when Lydia heard Anna’s voice, the room shimmered. The walls and tables and people turned into flying fragments of stained-glasslike jigsaw images that rearranged themselves until a new picture was formed. Now Anna was five and Roger was twelve and they were in the living room, playing, on some heretofore-forgotten spring evening. The white curtains were blowing in the wind. A dog howled outside, and the sweet damp night odor rushed through the open window.

“Where do the dead go, Mama?” Anna asked.

And Lydia saw herself, the young mother with her children at her feet, and she felt stabs of tenderness. “The dead go everywhere, honey,” Lydia the young mother said.

But Roger stood up suddenly, his earnest face filled with rage; with the deep inexplicable passion of a child. He shouted, “You’re just saying that, but it isn’t true. When you’re dead, you aren’t people anymore. Dead people don’t really come back, like sometimes in the movies. It’s scary!”

Then it seemed—to Lydia, the young mother—that the night itself waited, that everything waited for her answer to the child, as if the question itself had implications she only felt but didn’t understand. She said clearly, lightly, smiling, “I’ll come back years from now, when I’m dead, and tell you all about it when I know more. okay?”

As she said the words, Lydia the young mother shivered and glanced at her son. Did he smile slyly? Did the child send the mother out ahead of time where he would be afraid to go? Awful thoughts, she told herself, as the young mother—as the mother still remembered by the grown children. And now Lydia thought that it was those children lingering in the adults, who still asked the question, and for whom she’d momentarily returned.

Roger said, “Promise?”—frightened, biting his lips, feeling his new youth rising in the suburban night.

“Promise,” Lydia the young mother said.