By mid-July the afternoons are impossible to bear. The doctor generally sets about drinking Scotch at three, then takes to talking about his ex-wife, Katherine, and how much he absolutely loathes her and how abysmal it is for a woman who never commandeered a boat to obtain, in their divorce settlement, the doctor’s yacht that he had christened his Little Baby before sailing it on the Caribbean four years ago; and isn’t Katherine such a mean-spirited bitch, to strike at him that way all over a little indiscretion, and isn’t it wrong, he’d always say, that it was done through letters, those prepared by her four attending lawyers, and really, isn’t Katherine such a homely little whore on top of everything else?

“Why,” he asks today as he and Natalia sit on the veranda, listening to the rain, “did I ever love that wretched woman?”

Natalia leans back and thinks again how conversations too often grow repetitive, the mind always circling over the past, to times that no longer exist. She stares out to the cobbled streets of Florence and takes in the aroma of bread that drifts from the bakery across from them, the old stone building with its windows always blank-looking, open to cool the heat from the ovens. In the people here there is a tiredness as old as the city, and in Natalia there is a growing tiredness, too. This life is not her life after all, nor could it ever be. This is not her home. She considers first her circumstances, which she dismisses in her mind as too painful to think about or discuss: her children back home in the States, left to Frank, his moods. In twenty years of marriage he hasn’t even managed to cook a decent meal; the children would be reduced to bones already, no doubt, probably living off pumpkin paste and canned tomatoes. When she thinks about Frank and the girls, she feels a heat rise within her and she grows irritated and finds all the doctor’s talk distressing; but when she sighs in an effort to indicate that he is being a colossal bore, and then sighs again when he stops his reverie but won’t look at her directly, he only asks her to pass the ice bucket—black, trimmed with silver. He adds three cubes to his glass, and that seems to settle whatever disagreement between them there is, if any.

“Silence between people,” she says after a while, listening to the rain hit the terra-cotta roof, “is its own story, isn’t it?”

The doctor says nothing. A maid mills into the room to refresh the ice, a young girl, no more than twenty with sleek black hair cut at the line of her jaw. Natalia notes her full, tender lips. When the girl takes the doctor’s drink to refresh it, he smiles, and Natalia nods as the maid leaves.

Finally, he says, “We’ll make this a good experience yet, my dear.” He tells her, “Take note of it,” reminding her that she is, after all, still his secretary. “It’s been difficult to forget,” he says, apologetically. “Especially about the boat.”

She makes no note at all. There has been rain in Florence for five days, and down the street the flowers set in buckets hang their heads, and the women hurry by blindly, their heads also hung. Watching them, Natalia remembers women in the camp, that time when she was only a child, and she can no longer say she is sure of her own footing. She inhales, feeling a familiar hunger, wanting to stuff her mouth with bread, wanting something in her complicated heart to take hold and rise.

She chastises herself for her whimsy and childish belief in starting fresh again, one that moved her to forsake everything. How foolish, she thinks now, to believe that I could leave things behind. At first, when they arrived in Florence, there was a steady succession of activity: trips to the market for vegetables and bread, bright smells that bloomed in the air. There were decorators who furnished the space the doctor had rented— a finely woven rug was laid, fused with gold and black thread that fringed on the edges; pillows were placed on a leather seat in the main room, the seat squat and boxy, with its ends curved, like cupped hands. There were daily walks through the city, a newness to everything that made Natalia forgetful. She and the doctor discussed the architecture produced in the Renaissance, the dome of the Church of San Spirito, the pre-Baroque style of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, the voussoirs of the Palazzo Strozzi. He was versed in all this, articulate in a way Frank never was. He’d chat happily as they walked narrow streets and meandered between the buildings, thrilled to be released from his practice. Natalia admitted that she, too, was happy to be away, that she had always held an irrational fear of hospitals, but that she’d ended up working for him anyway because, of the twelve applications she’d completed—the doctor’s done in desperation—he had been the only one kind enough to offer Natalia a job at all. Still, she told him, every time she entered the building, she would cross herself and kiss her fingers.

After a few months in Florence, though, Natalia found she no longer listened to the doctor’s musings and banter. Instead she listened to the voices of people lifting from the streets, language that was fluid and unknowable as it drifted by her. She remembered reading once of two brothers who spoke the same dying dialect—the brothers were the only ones left in the world who shared the language, the only ones left of their kind—but they hadn’t spoken after fighting over the same woman. Their language went dead within them and was lost entirely. To her surprise, she often thought of Frank then. She thought of the girls, too. She’d expected that after she settled in with the doctor she would bring the girls to her, but that hadn’t happened. She wrote to them once and, at a loss for words, told them only about simple things: the trips to the market, the crumbling buildings, the fading sunsets.

Her efforts to enjoy the time dwindled. A certain incompatibility grew then between her and the doctor. Petty disagreements arose between them. Natalia didn’t like the arrangement of the living room and didn’t see the practicality of a white leather sofa that she could never sit on; he didn’t like a dress on her and thought it the wrong color, unpleasing to his precise eye. “Gray,” he told her, “makes you look foppish and, if I might add, slightly malignant.”

At night, too, Natalia began having nightmares that startled her from sleep, the subversive maneuverings of the mind, the firing synapses of the brain sneaking up on her like silent soldiers. Some of the dreams had a quality of old habit: She and Frank were young again, childless, and they drove down a stretch of abandoned road to a region of coal, to a town that had an underground fire burning in the mines. How eerie that town was to Natalia with all the empty houses, the windows boarded, businesses closed up, bicycles abandoned, the residents having fled quickly, and yet the houses and buildings still marked the traces of those very same people. In her dream, the sky was unnatural like sea glass and there was a tranquillity that Natalia sensed was easily broken. Up the road it turned dark, and a crack of thunder sounded like a shotgun. Rain pelted down on the windshield, but Frank stubbornly refused to turn on the wipers. She looked over and told him, “We need to go back.” He turned his head and calmly said, “You’re on fire, Natalia.” And she looked down at her blouse; it peeled from her skin and broke apart, floating around the car.

She’d wake with a start. Although she seldom thought to seek comfort in others, she would turn to the doctor and nudge his mottled back. She would begin to speak, but he’d shift and settle into his own dreams without argument or care. Natalia would lie awake for hours, breathless, waiting for light to bobble through the window slats.

After the rain, there are four gorgeous days when the sky stretches, uninterrupted, and Natalia decides to leave. Seven months, she thinks, is too long to be away from family. She packs only a few items: a green silk blouse the doctor bought for her, two pairs of pants the color of cream, a clingy red V-neck, a few shirts. It’s a trick she’s learned in life. A light packing, one glance behind her as she walks away, but only one—and in that glance the old story is certainly proven false: We do not turn to salt, and no God proves us inexplicably wrong.

There are so few things we can actually hold on to. Love, maybe. The remnants of it, our memories, the scraps of ourselves we hold on to, despite our journeying.

She wonders if her home with Frank and the girls will feel the same now, after she’s been gone from it. She has no idea when things changed, when Frank became more distant, opting to spend days out under the car, which Natalia took to mean that he was somehow avoiding her. She could blame work, she supposed, the long hours, his need for quiet, but it still made her feel inconsequential and inept, left to the girls and the house all day. At times she wonders if it is only her own flaw: to never quite feel at home anywhere, to always be on the periphery of things, just enough to feel a nagging sense of displacement that exists on the edge of inclusion, on the fringes of love, to realize nothing is entirely familiar.

Natalia has always been traveling. Her first trip to America was by boat. After the barking German shepherds (how their bared teeth frightened her, their alert ears, the saliva that dripped from one of the kutya’s mouths), and after the fences and barbed wire and the two headlights illuminated in the dark woods, the old German, Clara, a woman already in her early fifties, scrubbed Natalia’s face and body clean and put her to bed as if Natalia were a plaything. “I don’t mind that you’re a Gyp,” she said as she pulled up the covers. “I always wanted a little girl, a little girl just like you.” Although Natalia’s parents and her brother were dead, and although in one moment her life had changed for the worse, and then in another moment, changed for the better, she dismissed everything the second her face pressed against the pillow. She moaned with pleasure. She had survived. She was the moth that had flown over the barbed wire, unnoticed, suddenly freed. If she was cursed, that must have marked the moment the accusations were hurtled from graves: the second she drifted off to sleep, the second she forgot those left behind and abandoned herself to the care of strangers—without burden, without thought to their histories and rooms.

Within months of that night, she made the journey to America. It was a terribly clear day. As they embarked from the port in Germany Natalia smelled salt water and fish. Her new father, a former messenger in the army (how he feared the occupation), was a man with a smooth face and gray eyes and legs that were swift, made for running. Clara, who was much heavier, less demonstrative with affection but competent with meeting basic needs—the bed, the fresh linens, the roasted pork and peppers on the table—looked back at her homeland for a long while and then whispered, suddenly, “Deutschland Erwache!” After they fled, it was Clara who always held fast to her reimaginings of history. She often spoke of her belief that the Jews and the Gyps had lied, spoke of her denial that people were turned into soap and ashes, their blanched hair sold at markets. Even if Natalia protested, even if she spoke of the stench that hung in the sky, Clara would hear none of it. After Clara’s beloved Dresden was bombed, she spent considerable time penning letters to Churchill, ones she’d send once a month, from a mailing address belonging to someone else.

On the boat it was Natalia’s new father who held her closely so that she could see over the rails to the turbulent water below, and, in the process, he pinched her skinny sides and caused her doll’s head to press into her rib cage, up under bone. He danced with her while her new mother leaned over the railing and vomited with great regularity. Clara glanced over to them, her hand holding her stomach, her face yellow. She pleaded with the fates to give her a reprieve from motion. She hated it all. She hated having to sell her silver and rings, to barter for passage. She hated having to give up her servants and the house. In America, when they took up residence in their small house, she hated having to give up her language, a language Natalia had always thought too harsh, too guttural—a language of spit.

Natalia didn’t hate America. She embraced it as best she could, with an always cautious distance. She told herself she was lucky enough to have a life, even if Clara did fret too much over her, afraid perhaps that what had been stolen might be stolen back. Years later, during their last phone call, she told Natalia that she prided herself on her care, on keeping Natalia safe and close, on teaching her to read. “I never took my eyes off you,” she said, and Natalia responded, “I know, that was the problem.”

A young Natalia found comfort in the daily rituals: school, the predictability of afternoon chores—hanging out laundry on pleasant days, folding the crisp towels and sheets afterward—the need to please both of her new parents even as she quietly snatched provisions from the cupboard to store under her mattress, just in case. Her father would come home from work as a night watchman and let Natalia pick through his coat pockets for candy or change. “Gypsy thief,” he’d say, smiling, touching her under her chin. “My little Gypsy girl.” In school, she learned the language with the help of a well-meaning English teacher who tutored her over lunch until her accent gradually lessened, and then mostly disappeared. She later met Frank and married. After their boy died and Clara suggested the child suffered from weak blood, Natalia would stop talking to her parents altogether, even her father, whom she always missed.

Now Natalia makes the second trip to America by plane, her ticket paid for with the doctor’s weekly allowance. She looks out the double-paned glass and tries to ignore the man next to her, whose fleshy sides spill into her seat. However tired she is, she can’t sleep. Below, the ocean stretches for miles and hours, under clouds too thin to hold anything. Eighty percent of the earth is made of water, she remembers from school. Also, eighty percent of a persons body A tear is salt water. A tear is an ocean. Once she heard that if you press deeply into a person’s stomach, you can unleash a flood of tears. Natalia always wonders if that is the place in our bodies where our histories and memories and hopes are stored. What in a person’s mind and heart and body holds on to what went before? What clings to the nagging ghosts—the memories of others, calling their shrill, ecstatic songs that speak of belonging and making everywhere a home? What parts of her brother and her mother and father, what parts of those people never known still passed through her, their blood coursing in her veins? What parts of Sissy and Eva? She tried to ask the doctor this once, but he shrugged and said, “According to science, very little.”

Just as she teases herself into thinking the entire world is made of water, she spots umber and chartreuse and citrine-colored patches of land that stretch out like a grid below her, the tops of verdant trees and smooth mountain ridges, and then, as the plane descends, the roofs of houses, the bright blue pools and roads that scrape in every direction. America, a land that, unlike Florence, is always content to reimagine itself, a Gypsy nation.

She leans back, her lips slightly parted, emitting the soundless words she might say to Frank: I’m sorry. It was a mistake, she will say, simply. I’ve missed you. And as she says it, she realizes it’s true. She has missed Frank. She has missed him perhaps more than anyone. He was, after all, the only one who knew her, the only one who knew the secret of the crease at her neck. He was the one who shared her history. She will say, The time away from you, the time away from anyone or anything loved is always a mistake. They are difficult things, families. It’s hard not to feel incidental. It’s hard not to feel forgotten about, eventually; I’m sorry, she mouths. It was a mistake.

By two in the afternoon there is a tiredness Natalia attributes to jet lag, to the hours spent with her legs crammed against the seat in front of her, the conversation with the man beside her about weather and food, and the subsequent wait for the luggage and taxi. When they drive by the house, Natalia hesitates, struck by the stark clarity of the white paneling, the burnt-looking grass. “In the back,” she instructs the cab-driver. “In the back, please.”

The cabdriver nods. He takes her money, makes change. He offers to help with her bag, but she declines politely, not wanting to draw attention. Even on a Tuesday and even at this time of day, there will be at least a few neighbors out walking their dogs, or chatting in front of the mailbox, or shredding up weeds with their gloved hands. She can’t bear the thought of announcing her return so publicly, that Milly Morris might know she is home before Frank, before her children, and that seeing her, a woman like that might march over with a disapproving look and demand an explanation, demand pay for extra hours of sitting. If that happened, Natalia would feel caged. She would simply slump and scream.

Thank goodness the back door is unlocked. The knob turns without hesitation. Natalia puts her suitcase down by the kitchen table. Out of old habit, she sorts through mail that has been left to pile up on the counter all week: a water bill, a phone bill, an advertisement from Orr’s for the summer basement sale. She notices a new can opener fastened under the cabinet and notices, too, that the framed needlepoint she made years ago—a lavender-colored house with thin hearts stitched under it—no longer hangs on the wall next to the basement door. Frank, she supposes. He probably threw it into the trash.

If the girls heard her enter or saw the taxicab in the alley as it drove off, they still haven’t come downstairs. There is no patter of feet, no onrush of questions. She walks down the hallway, cautiously, past her and Frank ‘s bedroom. In the living room, she pauses by the steps and places her hand on the cool metal railing, realizing (as if she hasn’t felt it a thousand times over twenty years) that the metal isn’t smooth but coarse and grainy. Unsettled suddenly, she listens, still unsure if she should call out. Her younger child, and certainly of her two the more open, would come rushing down the stairs like a tolerable breeze if Natalia did call. She would be easier, Natalia believes, if not a bit persistent, interrogating, probing in a way that would eventually exasperate even the Buddha. No doubt, too, Sissy would eventually become quiet and hypervigilant, burning a hole through Natalia’s back with her gaze, as if a sigh or a sneeze or a raised voice might be an indication of disaster, every minute gesture significant. Still, Natalia could withstand that. Eva would be harder, Eva who holds grudges like her father—relentlessly, with words that fall like glass. There has always been something about Eva, an unsettling assertiveness that has left Natalia on the verge of—dare she say it?— jealousy. Eva will lash out, as she often does when she feels wounded or angry. Eva will cast immediate judgment: cruel pretension, sharp disdain. Is it these traits she envies in her daughter, in addition to fearing them? Or does she simply envy Eva, her youth, her defiance that draws such attention, that moves so many eyes? Regardless, Natalia already feels that her nerves today are stretched to the point of elasticity.

She listens anxiously and hears a hushed conversation upstairs, a murmur, then laughter from Eva’s room. Always on the phone. Across the hall from Eva, the television whirls with the rise and fall of cartoon voices. Natalia remembers the argument she had once with Frank, how she warned him that Sissy would spend all her days locked in her bedroom if she were given the old black-and-white. Frank relinquished to Sissy’s pleading, though, the television a compromise since Natalia didn’t want a dog. It all seems distant now, spent. Still, she misses those petty arguments and snubs. She misses her family.

There is no other movement, no opening of doors. They do not know she is here, listening. They haven’t sensed her at all.

She doesn’t call. She tells herself, Not yet. Just a moment, she thinks, to orient herself to the house again. Every house has its own vibrations, its own smells emanating from the kitchen, its own secrets hidden about, its own stories told at the table. She looks around, as if she expects everything might be changed, shifted out from under her. The living room rug shows the girls’ constant traffic. She can see the dirt, the dust on the edges of the throw rugs, the cobwebs in the corners, the smudges on the bay window and front door. The colonial blue walls appear less vibrant than she remembers, the wallpaper beginning to curl at the corner behind Frank’s chair. Discarded newspapers lie on the floor. The marble statue by the fireplace, a naïve-looking woman and man held together in an embrace, stands where it has for years. National Geographics are on the coffee table in disarray. A photograph of a tiger stares at her, angrily.

At her bedroom, she breathes and closes the door behind her, gently, so that the girls do not hear. She takes in the room, the paneled walls and dim light, the painting hung above the bed of a boat on an ocean. She takes the ashtray from Frank’s nightstand, opens the window, and dumps the charred remains into the row of hostas below. She looks over to Mrs. Stone’s house, to the rosebushes planted years ago, a tangle of thorny blooms.

Her hands shake, and it’s like a test, a foolish test that a child might think of as a game of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not. She debates, rubbing her thumb over the slight indentation on her ring finger: bare, smooth. She opens her jewelry box and rummages through cheap pearl necklaces and clip-on earrings and pins, until she finds the plain gold band. She doesn’t put it on.

Under the bed, Natalia gathers Frank ‘s Playboys and Hustlers. They make her feel so outdated and worn, made invisible by time. She places them in Frank’s underwear drawer, under his boxers. Still unsure, still feeling as if she’s misplaced something, something beyond the room, something deep in herself, she sits on the bed and hears a familiar squeak from the springs as they sag, the same worn sound she always worried about when they made love—the walls in the house are so wafer-thin. Sex needed to be quick, silent. She lies down and turns her head onto Frank’s pillow. It would be within his right, she supposes, if, in her absence, he’d had other women in this bed, if Frank’s chest hair, ample and wavy, had pressed against another woman’s breasts.

The pain caused by this thought hits her bluntly. She tries to dismiss it and tells herself she can rest peacefully for one moment without worry. She feels strange and heavy. There is something so tantalizing about being undiscovered. She closes her eyes. Just a moment to herself, a last moment before she takes to the children. Then she will call to them and persuade them and answer whatever questions they might proffer. She will hear about the months she has missed. Eva’s prom was surely successful. She could have had any number of dates, far more than Natalia might have had at the same age. Sissy probably still struggled with science and would never have a head for concrete facts. She probably also still refused to shower after gym class, even though she’d been told a hundred times she must. Natalia closes her eyes. She sleeps.

To find someone suddenly gone, to see them one day and not know that this will be the last day you see them, to not have the moment register until hours, days later, or years, is never easy. How we catch ourselves as life moves forward, thinking about that last moment and about what we might have done differently, if only we’d known.

For Sissy it is admittedly painful to remember a friend bicycling off, down to the park—to see her again, in the mind’s eye, standing on the bike pedals, bragging, as she always did. The new Desert Rose—bright gold with a blaze of red flowers curling down the frame—was startling against the houses and sidewalk as Vicki whizzed by, larger than everything. Sissy might have stopped her, after all. She might have kept anything painful from happening. It is difficult for her to remember that she silently leveled an accusation against Vicki, that she held her responsible for the destruction of Precious, yet again, that she blamed her for the subsequent chastisements, the yelling of the mothers, the confinement to her room, as if Sissy were wrong, as if Sissy deserved to be punished, when in Sissy’s mind she had been taunted to action. It infuriates her. Even now, after all these months, in the haze of guilt, she is reluctant to admit that as she saw Vicki disappear over the hill, her thoughts weren’t Come back (as she now amends) but Good riddance. She refuses to admit she fantasized a hundred times about Vicki suddenly being gone, about Vicki being dead (what is dead?). Sissy had a goldfish once, the only pet her mother ever allowed, one that, over time, Sissy often forgot to tend to properly. She came home one day from school to find it gone, and her mother told her that she saw it grow wings, breathe air, and fly out the window and into a tree. “It perched there for hours,” Natalia explained. “Puckering its fish-bird lips.” Only Eva told her that their mother had flushed the fish down the toilet after finding it belly-up in its bowl, an egg smear of white over its upturned eye. Still, after that, and perhaps only to assuage her guilt, Sissy imagined death as a grand transformation—the body shifting to another shape entirely changed but certainly not gone forever.

All of this is difficult for Sissy to reconcile. But in the harsh reality of the day, in a house that only knows stubborn realities, to see her mother sleeping exactly where she should be sleeping—in her bedroom, on the right side of the bed—to know that she, Sissy, has passed this door a hundred times and a hundred times has turned the knob, each time hoping against hope and seeing nothing, and then finally to see her mother—right here! corporeal!— is nothing short of overwhelming. Yet here she is, in linen pants and heels, her mass of hair, salt-and-pepper gray, pressed against a pillow.

Sissy blinks hard, feeling suddenly that she cannot breathe. To breathe, she thinks, would destroy the moment, making her mother disappear. She inches forward, releasing the door without realizing. It drifts to the wall and bumps against it, a hollow sound. Her mother awakes abruptly—she has only been here a moment, only taken a five-minute nap—and sits up, collects herself. She says, dumbly, “Baba,” the name her real mother often called her as a child. “Hello.”

Sissy says nothing. Disbelieving, she bows her head slightly and bites her fingernail. She turns and runs upstairs. There is a trample of footsteps, the ascent, a call for help, a frantic call not for her mother but for Eva instead. “Eva! Eva!” she yells.

“Fucking Christ, Sissy, what?” Eva pokes her head out of her bedroom door, ready to holler more, but immediately she sees Sissy’s dismay: her pallor and excitement, the thin wash of worry falling over her face. Sissy shakes her head, unable to speak. She grabs Eva’s arm and pulls it violently.

“What?” Eva asks again. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Sissy mouths, “Mom.”

Eva rights herself. “You’re lying.”

Still bewildered, Sissy shakes her head. She crosses her heart, but privately she doubts what she has seen, as if she might have imagined it all, as if she dare not call upon the confidence to validate things, not if she wants them to be real. Perhaps it was her mind playing games, wishing things into existence and then placing them where the mind and heart expect. She has no time to doubt, really, no time to find an answer for Eva. Eva storms downstairs, and then there is a reality Sissy can hold on to: Eva’s shrieking—persistent, high-pitched rancor filled with obscenities. She listens a moment, tentatively, until she hears her mother’s voice rise to match her sister’s. She scurries back downstairs. Eva stands in the hallway, angry tears running down her blotched cheeks. “You have no right,” Eva is screaming. “You think we need you now? You think you can just come and go?”

Eva lunges forward, then, in a way that an animal might—angrily unpredictably—but Natalia holds her back, firmly, by the shoulder. She tries to soothe Eva, an action that produces in Sissy an inexplicable confusion: her mother’s new reserve, her attempt then, when Eva’s words fail her, when Eva is left to angry sobs, to reach for her older daughter and embrace her. “It’s okay,” Natalia says, composing herself as well. “You’re angry.”

Eva steps back and frowns before another insolent look comes over her. If she could know what to do or say, she might stay there in the hallway and let the reality of the moment settle in. She might explain how missing someone can produce not more love but resentment and hate. Instead, she can only think to mumble “Bitch” under her breath before storming off again. She slams her bedroom door in a defiant way with such force that Sissy can almost feel a breezy current travel down the steps.

“Well,” Natalia says, too loudly. She places a hand on Sissy’s shoulder, cupping it, but she does not attempt this time to draw her child near. “That went well, didn’t it?”

Sissy nods, still not moving closer. “I guess.”

“I missed you,” she says. “I missed all of you.”

“Okay.” Sissy doesn’t know why she suddenly feels reduced in this moment. Nor does she understand the hesitation in her that this utterance causes, the newly formed doubts.

Natalia eyes her in a questioning way. “Do you think I should go upstairs and talk to your sister?”

“I wouldn’t,” Sissy says quietly. She slips her arm around her mother’s waist, the feel of her at once familiar and strange. “If I were you,” Sissy says, “I’d stay right here instead.”

When Natalia feels out of sorts, when she feels nervous, she tends to want to order things, to cull satisfaction and comfort from the knowledge that everything is in its proper place, that a cosmic sense of order pervades not only the universe but the immensely complicated world of one kitchen. There is a benign satisfaction that comes from scrubbing the stove, from performing a task that requires only her hands. Later, when she finishes the stove, she washes out the Brillo pad and wipes her hands on her jeans and work shirt. She moves to the refrigerator next, throwing out an old container of sour cream layered with mold, wiping away milk rings. She throws out a wilted head of cabbage. She would give anything to make tóltótt káposzta now, to bury her hands in meat and rice and garlic, to press the meat into balls, roll them in the steamed cabbage leaves, and submerge them in tomato broth and vinegar.

“You’re burning that hole through me,” Natalia says, feeling rattled again. She can sense Sissy behind her but focuses her attention on the empty lunch-meat tray instead.

“Eva says she won’t come down as long as you’re here.”

“She seems different,” Natalia says. “Does she seem that way to you?”

“I don’t know,” Sissy says.

Natalia hears the hesitation in her voice, the obvious lie. If she turns now, she will likely find Sissy’s lip slightly raised, an involuntary action she performs whenever she engages in untruths. “Are you hungry?”

“No.” Another lie. Sissy shuffles into a chair, draws her knees up to her chin, thinking.

“Good,” Natalia tells her. “Because there’s nothing to eat anyway. We’ll have to go shopping.” She removes all the jarred items: the pickles and relish and marmalade, as well as the cans of Coca-Cola, and places them on the countertop in a neat row.

“I have a question,” Sissy says.

Natalia turns her head slightly, just enough to see Sissy’s stern, unhappy look. “Yes?”

“I want to know why you left.”

Natalia searches for an explanation that will soothe her daughter, but she knows of none. Her heart stills for a moment as she thinks. She pulls out the vegetable drawer and submerges it in sudsy water. She takes a dishcloth and wipes the surface, her free hand gripping the metal lip too tightly. She rinses it with scalding water that reddens and burns her skin. When she turns again, Sissy is still watching her intently, rolling the plastic place mat, and then unrolling it.

“It was a mistake to leave,” Natalia says.

“But then why did you leave? You didn’t say goodbye. I spent all day with Mrs. Morris and her dumb stuffed cat.”

Natalia shakes her head slightly.

She takes a towel embroidered with a pineapple the size of her thumb and dries the drawer. Upstairs, her daughter has locked herself away in her room in an angry, silent protest at her presence and at having left, having—Natalia shapes the word for the first time— abandoned her. She knows of no mother who would do such a thing—certainly not her real mother, who, although once threatening to sell her, later clawed at a soldier’s face to keep Natalia from being taken away. Even Clara wouldn’t have left Natalia alone as a child. And now here, in her kitchen, her younger daughter burns holes through her for such carelessness, her daughter gifted with an evil eye. Outside, the day is crisp and bright and birds sing. She thinks of that day in December when she snuck out of the house like a negligent thief, her body slumped over her suitcase. “I was self-centered,” she says, finally.

Sissy says nothing. She lowers her legs and kicks at the chair adjacent to her until it moves.

“Sometimes you just don’t know why you do the things you do. You just aren’t thinking at all, I suppose.”

“That’s not a good answer,” Sissy says, her tone suddenly brooding.

“There aren’t good answers for things like this.”

“Why weren’t you thinking of us?”

“I was thinking of myself. I was thinking of what I wanted.”

“Well that’s just great,” Sissy says smugly. She folds her arms and kicks the chair again.

Natalia sits down at the table. “Once,” she says, “a long time ago, there was an irresponsible girl who wandered away from her family, all of them, in the woods. The girl slept on a bed of moss that was as soft as fur but comfortless. At night she climbed the trees and tried to touch the empty moon, not realizing how high it was, how far away. You see? Then one night the woods caught on fire and the fire swept over the trees, burning everything. The girl ran and ran. After a time she wandered out of the forest and through a city where people busied themselves on the streets, selling bread and cursing at one another over pennies. No one spoke her language—they were all strangers to her. And it was then that she realized she missed those known to her—her family.”

“So,” Sissy asks, frowning, “what happened to her?”

“She searched for those she remembered. She decided home was a place you choose, not a place you have to be. She found a home again.”

“We’re not strangers,” Sissy says.

“No,” Natalia responds, feeling something in her throat catch. “You’re my family.”

“I’m not going to Mrs. Morris’s house anymore.”

“Fine. That’s fair.” Natalia brushes crumbs from the table and into her waiting hand. “Who cleans here?”

“Everyone.”

“I see.” She gets up, opens the cabinet, and takes out vinegar and paper towels. She wipes the window above the sink, scrubbing it until it squeaks. She removes the small vase with dried flowers. She brushes the dust from the bachelor’s buttons, wipes down the sill. “When I was young,” she says, “I buried bachelor’s buttons in the ground, to find true love. And then I met your father.”

“You did that for Dad? I doubt it.”

“Ah,” Natalia says, eyeing her. “It’s hard to imagine that your father and I were ever that young, right? That we were ever different.”

“How different?”

“We laughed more.”

“Do you still love him?”

“That isn’t the question. The question is, does your father still love me, or will he look at me like a stranger?”

Sissy’s face clouds over. “Mrs. Anderson comes over,” she says, tentatively.

“Oh,” Natalia says. “I see.” She concentrates on the window, which reflects back a face she does not wish to see at all.

“I don’t like her, though. I don’t like her at all. Vicki Anderson,” Sissy says finally. “She got lost in the woods, too, at the park when her mother was drinking. Eva says she was probably sloshed.”

Natalia stops cleaning. “What do you mean?”

“A month ago Vicki Anderson disappeared. I think she ran away. Eva thinks she’s dead.”

Natalia listens as Sissy relays what details she knows, mostly things overheard, the events that shaped the month, the abandoned bike, the policemen who for weeks patrolled the neighborhood, the sniffing dogs. She lapses into events, fusing in details as they come to her, in a random sort of order: the unfilled pool, the Desert Rose and investigations, the searches the children conducted and clues they found that went largely unrecognized by uncaring adults. The summer comes out in a flood of stories, each intricately mixed with the next—Eva’s terrible speculations, the signs posted on telephone poles, the found shoe. She prattles on, telling her mother about water holes and carousels, and as she listens, Natalia sorts through what is real and what can only be imagined, sieving the information as one might flour.

“Eva thinks she was raped.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Natalia says sternly. “Don’t listen to your sister.”

“Do you think she’ll come back?”

Not knowing what to say, Natalia takes to the window again. She can only imagine what Ginny must be going through, what toll this must be taking. She thinks of her mother, how when the soldier clutched Natalia’s neck as though she were a duck ready to be slaughtered, her mother screamed and spat at the ground. Still, even children can go through horrible events and survive. Anything can change—if for the worse, then also for the better. In a moment, a new story might unfold—the girl found, Ginny’s house restored to harmonious order. “Anything in the entire world is possible,” she says to Sissy. “Forget what Eva says. What story do you tell yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Sissy says. “But the one thing I do know is that if Vicki would have had a dog with her, on that day, I bet nothing would have happened to her. The other thing I know is that we’re going to need to cut an onion, too, for Dad, so he won’t yell at you so much when he finds out you’re back.”