WHEN MY SISTER WAS A BABY, MY MOTHER WOULD LIFT her from the high chair and sing, “Shake, shake, shake. Shake out the devil.” We lived at 213 Seachase Lane, Loyalty Island, Washington. The living room was lit by brass fixtures that hung from the ceiling on four links of chain, low enough that—if I stretched—I could swing them with the tips of my fingers. Those evenings, my mother turned the dimmers up and held my sister to the window facing Greene Harbor, as if to press her through the glass. Years have passed, but I can still hear the melody. I can still see my mother holding Em stiffly, swaying at the waist. Beyond their half-reflected faces, I can still see the darkness broken by the soft lights in other windows, and by the lights on the trawlers below, swaying as if they too heard music.

One evening I asked my mother, “Did you sing that same song to me?”

“No, Cal.” She fit Em in her swing.

I followed her into the kitchen. “Why not?”

This was the spring of 1987. My mother had come back from California that winter with hair dyed the color of hot iron. She no longer played her records, and she seldom sang anything else.

“I just heard it somewhere,” she said. “It stuck to me. I guess sometimes that happens. Why?”

My sister had fallen back asleep. Wind blighted the window with rain. My mother waited for me to speak—to tell her I thought the song was a signal, her way of acknowledging what had occurred in our town and our home, to tell her things I couldn’t have said at fourteen and can barely say now at twenty-eight. It was the closest I ever came to admitting my part in what happened. I’ve felt the silence ever since like an ache in my jaw.