For all of the Murphys, the house’s shifting manifestations would blur, stray details and perceptions surfacing without context, others forgotten. The last photos, some of which captured the house, had disappeared with the house itself, though older ones survived in James’s file box and in albums owned by the Murphy cousins—black-and-whites, square white-bordered snapshots in colors faded or skewed yellow. A few objects had survived with James or Theo: the clock that had belonged to James’s father, cereal bowls and mugs Nora had given to Theo; two of Nora’s small paintings and a handful of her sketches, which Theo had taken west.
Proportions would slip. For Sara and Delia, home had first and always meant the shoreline, the odd birdhouse silhouette, the wind, the radically altering sky, and at times their memories of the house seemed tied to language, to apprehending the world itself. Banister would first bring to mind the sealed wood along the stairs rising to the deck, and the polished, nicked one inside—the foundation of every other reference to banisters.
And too, Sara would remember the house at night, the way the dark transformed the spaces. Rooms melted into the air beyond windows, furniture into walls. In the deepest dark she rarely stumbled, her bare feet against the brushed carpet, the cool linoleum and smooth wood floors, the pinpricks of sand. Later, in other houses, she might close her eyes and walk barefoot across similar floors, and for an instant the night house might flicker.
In Katy’s memory the rooms seemed larger than their true dimensions, an expansiveness she could not explain; her later views of the house seemed plucked from summers when she first dated Tim. She tended to forget the tensions with her sisters, or the atmosphere toward the end of her parents’ marriage. Nor would she contemplate what becomes of an atmosphere held within a house—the precisely charged air—when the house is gone; if the atmosphere might remain at the houseless site; or move, intact, to an unrelated place; or dispel. Still, before the new owners built on the site, she too had returned, walked the perimeter, studied the seawall, the remaining foundation. There had been for her a flat emptiness. She too had searched without success for familiar objects, something tamped beneath clotted silt or wedged in the nearby rocks. Most of the debris had been swept out to sea or down the road toward the pond; the town and local contractors had combed the property. A tablespoon, a bracelet might have been swept into the murky pond, but it was easier to find a duplicate at a flea market. Yet what she wanted wasn’t the spoon; rather the house reconstructed around the spoon. A house reconstructed to match surviving keys. Still, after a year, when Katy and Tim moved into the redbrick, she fixed her attention on its interiors, which gradually supplanted Blue Rock’s.
When the Murphys were together, conversation about the house retained a surface lightness, as if it had always been a summer holiday retreat; or as if the winter storms had been comic adventures recounted over cocoa, the wind a character from a children’s book. Rarely did they mention the failing structure or deferred repairs, except to joke about Nora’s improvisations—the white fisherman’s rope along the outer stairs by which Sara and Delia identified their house to arriving visitors; a yellow bucket briefly hung from the leaking bedroom ceiling, like an art installation or a sloshing bell. Theo tended to talk about his running routes, which did not involve the house at all, or his shelves of books, most of which left with him, or moments with Sara and Delia when they were infants. Like Sara, he recalled in detail the art that Nora hung, and the photographs, the postcards taped to the refrigerator. If he dreamed of the house, he didn’t say; just as he rarely spoke of Newton or of any early memory of Cambridge, or of Italy. Perhaps California had supplanted them all; perhaps they were sealed into a geologically separate past.
For Nora the house remained nearly present; the feeling of the house returning to her often, like a scent, or the dreams of her dead parents and of Molly, images blown into the current moment like confetti. For her too, the house would shape-shift but never beyond recognition. Normal, now, to carry so vivid a sense of the place, she might travel there, if not for a weak prohibiting memory of its demise. More often the worlds she carried in her mind lacked physical analogs, or survived as artifacts. If she met old acquaintances or strangers who shared drifting bits of the past, she felt surprising kinship. With Meg or Somerville families who’d known her parents, she expected such moments. So too when she encountered a girlhood friend of Katy’s, or a host from a long-ago party, or a neighbor from Newton who’d known Molly: the past sparked brightly for an instant. She could not explain this fleeting return or the subsequent longing any more than the undeniable attritions. She missed the house and yet something persisted; she was relieved for the solitude of later apartments, preferred to walk beaches elsewhere. She imagined Blue Rock, or what Blue Rock implied, as a kind of true north as she traveled in other directions.
For James there was the memory-house of his uncle, and the house he and Nora renovated, though they often merged: in the cousins’ sleeping room, light fell through the white sheers Nora hung years later. Some details slid and some remained static: the blue sofa was always backed by windows to a cerulean sea, a clear midday sky, the unchanging weather of vacation photos. He imagined meals with Sara and Delia not at the oak table he and Nora bought, but at Aunt Brenda’s, topped in white-and-black enamel. Neighbors from Newton sometimes showed up as neighbors from Blue Rock before finding their proper place.
When he was working, stray images arose during his commute, as they had earlier in his life; later, when his heart trouble began and he stayed home to rest, he missed the house, summoned views from the deck and from the windows. At times his reading concentration waned; he grew impatient with his sluggishness, stunned by the ways his body had betrayed him. As if his body were for the first time separate from his conscious mind and his will, and now defying him. But you waited while the body languished or healed, accepted small pleasures—a pear, returning daffodils, radio jazz. Old images surfaced, collected shortcomings exposed, as if one room in the mind after another had flung its doors open. Perhaps a summer moment with Molly at Blue Rock, her blankets and stuffed toys a pale pink smear beneath a bright window, or a window beyond which the sky had turned indigo and Molly herself stood drinking water from a cup. Though he could also conjure Sara dragging a pink blanket, a tiny Delia standing at a window.
Always the house in its earliest forms remained clearest to him, along with the varying skies: pink dawn reflected on the bay, dense clustered stars or the thick cloud cover and bracing wind. Difficult, but not impossible to push away the most troubled notes: the saddest Blue Rock might still revert to a distant point in a larger landscape, the size of a freckle, a leaf bud, a wren’s surveying eye.