But this wasn’t about scary movies. Her whole way home from school after the slide show, Joey had thought of just one thing. “They gassed them like nothing,” her grandfather had once said at the dinner table. “My family.” Joey had already finished dinner so she’d been playing with a yo-yo in the corner and hadn’t seen his face. She’d had only a vague thought: I wonder who farted on Grandfather’s family. But then her yo-yo had yo’d, and the question had vanished.

The day of the slide show, Joey had returned early from school to her father in the kitchen, reading a brief at the kitchen counter.

He’d said, “How was your day, baby?”

She’d whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me people murder us for being Jewish?”

And her father had held her and said it was a very long time ago, but that hadn’t made her feel better.

The images from the slide show had refused to leave Joey’s head. She’d asked her grandfather one night on his porch, “Will it happen again?”

“Absolutely not,” he’d said.

“But you can’t promise,” she’d said.

Her big, strong grandfather had just looked at his black leather shoes.

She’d gotten him.

Now Joey palmed her forehead of sweat. She was eleven, ostensibly grown up, somewhat assuaged by her solid Corfu surroundings but easily swayed back to that camp in a dark, distant Poland, some cruel commandant’s footsteps closing in. When her breathing slowed from its rapid heaves, Joey crept to the main room. She smelled the fumes of paint from a drying canvas. She heard voices on the terrace.

“Mom,” she called. “Dad.” She reached for the curtains. Shadows. Cicadas. Laughter. She slid open the screen door, on the verge of calling for her parents again, and then she felt hands atop her shoulders.

All she remembered was lying back in bed with her ratty stuffed bear Nacho Chip, whose nose she’d long since chewed off. Her father’s face hung over her. He said, “It’s okay, baby.”

She wasn’t speaking. It was excruciating—having a scream inside you couldn’t get out.

He said, “Let’s get these nightmares out of you, okay?”

Yes. She wanted the nightmares out. All of them.

He said, “Let’s count some sheep.” Joey closed her eyes and counted the sheep her father described. The fluffy one. The scrawny one. The fat one. The one with lots of fleas. They counted millions of sheep, it seemed. She felt her eyelids flutter.

Her father said, “Now I want you to imagine a field of sunflowers, okay? Remember, like we saw last summer on the way to Kassiopi?”

Joey remembered. She’d run alongside a row of them, and her father had taken her picture and framed it for his desk.