Rebecca’s strongest memory of her father, who spent long workdays away from home and was rarely present for meals, was not a happy one. They were at the beach with Esther, whose union friends with ocean apartments always gave them guest tickets for access across the boardwalk to this stretch of sand. Esther, in her ancient navy one-piece with white polka dots, had been set up on a folding chair under an umbrella, next to the Styrofoam picnic cooler, while they spread towels on either side of her. Rebecca had been taken into the water by her father, and after some initial splashing, he had picked her up and swung her onto his hip against his wet skin as they waded out into the receding tide.

“Do you want to go out?” he had asked. Yes, she had replied, apprehensive about the surging waves that repeatedly pushed against his legs and challenged his balance, but he had only walked farther into the sea. “Oh, you want to go in, you mean?” he had asked then, and she nodded, too scared to speak as the water had lapped at her shins tucked inside his arm. But he laughed then, and walked them deeper, taking step after step, teasing her as she squealed in rising terror while the water smacked against her waist, saying, “But you said you wanted to go in, into the water.” No, she pleaded, I mean I want to go out. “Oh, you want to go out to sea!” he had cried, walking them deeper yet.

A therapist in New Haven, hearing this story, had asked Rebecca to say more about her family, to say whatever came to mind, and what had come to mind startled them both. She believed that her father wouldn’t have died in the car accident along with her mother, that they would both be alive today if it were not for the Triangle fire. But Esther herself would have died years ago had she not been so busy surviving the fire so effectively.

“How does that work?” the therapist, Roberta Waxman, had asked respectfully in her gentle voice, leaning closer to Rebecca over her Eames ottoman in her quiet and tasteful office on Bradley Street. “Say that again please? I want to be clear. If it weren’t for the fire in 1911, your parents would be alive, they wouldn’t have died in the car crash that occurred when you were eight years old, but your grandmother who raised you, meanwhile, the one who is now one hundred and three, she wouldn’t still be alive? She wouldn’t have needed to keep living the way she has if they hadn’t died? So the fire caused the accident, and the accident made your grandmother live to be one hundred and three?” And of course Rebecca, scientist that she was, had no logical explanation for this construction, nor could she even understand where those thoughts she didn’t know she possessed had come from.