WHEN I LEFT the hospital, it was snowing—large wet flakes that would whiten the sidewalks and streets only briefly—but the snow was beautiful, and as I paused to watch it fall, illuminated by the building’s lights against the darkness of the evening, it struck me as a moment when the boundary between inside and outside loosens, and there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely. After the first major snowstorm, my father wrote, we were snowbound until spring. I remembered the great drift against our front door, the hoarfrost on the window with its complex patterns, my nose against the cold glass, and the vast white dunes formed by the blizzard overnight. Dunkel Road was invisible. The known world had disappeared. “When Lars died, it was snowing,” my mother said. “I watched it fall through the window. It fell straight down, and it fell steadily. A change, like a shadow, came over him; it seemed to crawl up his body and then it reached his neck and moved up to his chin, his nose, his cheeks, his forehead, over his head, and then I knew he had died.” The night Eglantine woke up, it was snowing. Ingeborg was so tiny, my grandfather said, they buried her in a cigar box. Somewhere on the twenty acres out there in the country, out home, the bones of a stillborn infant lie buried. My father digs the grave. An unborn child speaks from inside his mother on Cut Hill, and the English slaver falls to the ground dead. Uncle Richard is lying in a street in West Kingston. My great-uncle David hobbles down Washington Avenue in the snow with his stumps in his specially made shoes. He manages to get inside the lobby of the hotel and then he collapses. It was his heart, not the cold. King Edward and Mrs. Wallis Simpson. I see Dorothy expounding on the street, pontificating on the state of the world, the preposterous orator. Dear, old, sweaty Burton, memory man, rescuer of ladies in need, lady himself, mourning his mother, the one before the stroke, the woman of “yore.” My father is speaking at his eightieth birthday. He begins with the little ad in the paper: Lost Cat. Brown and white, thinning fur, torn left ear, blind in one eye, missing tail, limps on right front foreleg. Answers to the name of Lucky. I hear them laughing in the room. I see Laura laughing across the table and I feel her warm ass under my hands in bed. Miranda’s head is on my shoulder. I see her dreamed streets and her house with its disquieting rooms and curious furniture. I see a woman lying beneath a man struggle for an instant under his grip. I stand in front of her chest of drawers, and I want so much to look inside, to touch her things. A man slams his desk with a hatchet and finds manuscripts inside. Like the body of his father giving up secrets. I see my father’s orderly desk: paper clips, ammo, unknown keys. Sonia’s closet is messy now. She throws her clothes all over the room, and Arkadi pulls open the chest of drawers in the vast room and finds nothing but a voice. He gets on the train and sees a woman who looks like Lili but isn’t Lili, someone else who will capture his imagination, a creature of his invention. When was it, I think, just three days ago, Inga read the first letter aloud to me, her voice shaking. “Dear Lili,” Max wrote. “I write to you now in that other person, the one who has written all these years to live. He didn’t live to write. He wrote to live. There are days when there are no stories left in him, when he feels he can’t do it anymore. There are days when he feels dead. He can’t say this to anyone else. He says it to you because you have the armor he gave you, because you can’t see him, because you don’t know who he is. You don’t know he’s dying.” But Edie must have known that Max was chasing a figment, that he was writing to someone else, to a woman in a movie, a woman he would never find.