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took a step back, too, and began to look contemplative but still furious.
    “I wonder how many of your neighbors know that you’re a murderer and an arsonist,” he said. “I wonder if your friends know. Your co-workers.”
    “Well …,” I said.
    “I bet you haven’t even told your family,” he said, and when he said this, the world suddenly became blurry and squiggly lined as though I were seeing it through extreme heat, and now I couldn’t recognize it, the world, and be sure that it was still mine.
    “I know you’re not sorry about killing my parents,” Thomas said. “But you will be.”
    And then he left: he turned, walked down my driveway, got into the black Jeep parked at the curb, and drove away. After he’d left, my heart slowed down a bit and my head cleared and I could hear the low roar of my neighbors’ mowers. I knew that no one had seen Thomas, or if they had, the neighbors wouldn’t have thought anything strange about his visit or even paid attention to it. The week before, my across-the-cul-de-sac neighbor’s estranged wife started banging on his door at three in the morning, screaming and threatening to cut off his vital parts with her grandfather’s Civil War saber, and he called the police on her and all in all they made a racket, but it was a distant, vague-sounding racket and we just thought someone had left their TV on too loud, until we read about it in the paper the next day. Our unspoken motto in Camelot was “Live and let live,” as long as you lived with your shirt on. Now that Thomas was gone it looked and sounded like a normal Saturday in Camelot. It was as though none of what had happened, had happened.
    But it had. The past comes back once and then it keeps coming back and coming back, not just one part of the past but all of it, the forgotten crowd of your life breaks out of the gallery and comes rushing at you, and there is no sense in hiding from the crowd, it will find you; it’s your crowd, you’re the only one it’s looking for.
    Anne Marie and the kids wouldn’t be back until three o’clock. It was two now. That would give me enough time to take a long walk and try to work up the nerve to tell my family the truth about my past. I knew that was what I finally had to do: tell the truth. And how did I know that?

3
    Because of my mother: she could tell a story, and the stories she told, once my father left us, were always about the Emily Dickinson House. For instance, there was the story she told me when I was eight, a story about a boy and a girl, always nice enough, never too much older or younger than I was. They held hands and raced on foot and yelled sarcastic, innuendo-ridden taunts at each other, things that they’d heard or seen at the movies or on television or from their friends, who’d heard them in the same places and who’d changed them and made them their own.
    They were good kids, this boy and girl: they went over to each other’s houses after school, on weekends and national holidays; they gave each other cards on birthdays and talked on the phone for hours. And one day when they walked past the Emily Dickinson House, the back door was open, which was unusual, and so they decided to check it out. As they crossed the threshold, as my mother told it, the door slammed behind them and the big house hummed like the warming up of an oversize garbage disposal. There were screams, faint but distinct, and when my mother finished the story I would let out a long, sour breath and whine, “But it’s so unfair.” And my mother would nod and say, “Emily Dickinson’s House is like the last hole of a miniature golf course. Like the ball on that final hole, the children go in and then the game waits for someone else.” Which was an unfortunate analogy, because my mother and I did a lot of miniature golfing together at this time.
    So my mother had her story (a story that never made either of us very happy, by the way), but now I was going to have mine, and it