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swinging shadows over both their bodies, airplane shadows over his chest and stomach and feet,like strange tattoos over her face, her breasts, circling her navel like an air base.
    “How many are there?” Sam asked.
    “I don’t know actually. I lost count at some point.” She raised one naked leg and pointed with her toes to a World War II Hellcat in the corner painted a sloppy mess of pinks and purples. “That one’s the first one. My dad built it. But I painted it.”
    “I guessed.”
    “I was a pacifist, but we lived on an island. It was hard to find model kits that weren’t warplanes. I’d build them then paint over their insignias in pastel hearts and flowers. I’d put little plastic puppies in the cockpits. I’d replace their machine guns with pretzel sticks.”
    “Why’d you start making them in the first place?”
    She shrugged. “Probably there was no reason why. Probably the reason was if they didn’t give me something focused to do, I tore around the studio and broke things. If you’re going to make pottery for a living, you have to find a way to corral your toddler.”
    “You longed to fly maybe? Escape?”
    “I think it was about achievement instead. You know, like, ‘Look what we can do—fly!’ And look what a kid can do too—take a big pile of wood and a bottle of glue and some paint and mess with it all afternoon until it makes an airplane. Maybe that’s what my parents wanted to give me—a sense that I could do anything.”
    “I wish I’d known you then,” said Sam.
    “Why?”
    “You must have been the smartest, sweetest, funniest little girl.”
    “Yeah, but it would have been creepy if you’d thought that when I was six.”
    “Not if I were six too. I could have helped you build planes.”
    “You still could.”
    “Where would we put them?” Sam asked.
    “That’s why I started hanging them from the ceiling. I ran out of room on the shelf. But on the ceiling is where they belonged all along. They’re airplanes—they should fly. And then at night I’d have flying dreams.”
    “Everyone has flying dreams,” said Sam.
    “Not like mine,” said Meredith.

ABSENT IS ABSENT
    W hat happened next happened because Sam couldn’t stand to see Meredith so unhappy. It happened because he was desperate to help. It happened because he was still in the trying-to-prove-his-love-and-win-her-heart phase. It happened because he was unemployed and had the time, and summer waned into fall, and the weather got wetter and colder and more discouraging. Mostly, it happened because he was just cocky enough to believe that it could. That and he had no idea where it would lead. None at all. How could he possibly?
    It happened too because Sam was stunned to find himself jealous, envious, of Meredith’s grandmother’s death. Not her dying—Sam didn’t want that, obviously—and not the loss of a loved one, of course; what Sam coveted were the memories. This took him a while to figure out. First he thought he just felt bad for Meredith. Then he thought he just felt sad because she was sad. For a bit, he thought it was that he never had the chance to meet Livvie. For a bit, he thought he was being a selfish asshole who just wanted his girlfriend to get over it already—old people die!—so that she could get back to being the nondepressed, nonmorose, nondejected woman he vaguely remembered. But no, it was none of that. Sam was missing his mom. And that was hard.
    That was hard because it’s hard to miss someone you’ve barely met. It’s hard to miss someone you can’t remember. Missing is remembering. They are the same act. They are part and parcel. But Sam didn’t have a single actual memory of his mother, so it was hard to, odd to, miss her. It was more like the other kind of missing—missing a bus rather than missing a loved one. He was aware that something huge had passed him by,but without memories to dwell on and pore over, it was hard to hang on to what it was.
    She died in a