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can help.”
    “Responsibility might help.”
    The spoons went round and round in the cups until someone finally said, “. . . a sense of home.”
    “It would be home to her.”
    “Yes, it would.”
    “It would.”
    So it must have seemed like providence when a note arrived from Sylvie herself. It was written in a large, elegant hand on a piece of pulpy tablet paper, torn neatly down one side and across the bottom, perhaps to correct the disproportion between the paper and the message, for she said only:
Dear Mother, I may still be reached c/o Lost Hills Hotel, Billings, Montana. Write soon. I hope you are well. S
.
     
    Lily and Nona had composed a message to the effect that anyone knowing where Sylvia Fisher could be reached was asked to send the information to . . . and my grandmother’s address. All other versions of the message amounted to announcements of my grandmother’s death, and my aunts could not allow Sylvie to learn such a thing from the personal-ads section of a newspaper.They disliked newspapers, and were chagrined that anything touching themselves or their family should appear in them. It disturbed them enough that the actual obituary had already been bunched, no doubt, to cushion Christmas ornaments for storage, and spindled to start kitchen fires, though it was quite impressive and much admired. For my grandmother’s passing had brought to mind the disaster that had widowed her. The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town’s history, and as such was prized. Those who were in any way associated with it were somewhat revered. Therefore, my grandmother’s death occasioned a black-bordered page in the
Dispatch
, featuring photos of the train taken the day it was added to the line, and of workers hanging the bridge with crepe and wreaths, and of, in a row of gentlemen, a man identified as my grandfather. All the men in the photo wore high collars and hair combed flat across their brows. My grandfather had his lips a little parted and looked at the camera a little sidelong, and his expression seemed to be one of astonishment. There was no picture of my grandmother. For that matter, the time of the funeral was not mentioned. Nona and Lily speculated that if some vagary of wind should carry this black-bordered page under Sylvie’s eyes, she might not know that her own mother’s death had occasioned this opening of the town’s slender archives, though the page might itself seem portentous, like an opening of graves.
    Despite the omission of even essential information about my grandmother (“They wouldn’t want to mention Helen,” Lily speculated
sotto voce
, as she judgedsuch things), it was considered an impressive tribute to her and was expected to be a source of pride to us. I was simply alarmed. It suggested to me that the earth had opened. In fact, I dreamed that I was walking across the ice on the lake, which was breaking up as it does in the spring, softening and shifting and pulling itself apart. But in the dream the surface that I walked on proved to be knit up of hands and arms and upturned faces that shifted and quickened as I stepped, sinking only for a moment into lower relief under my weight. The dream and the obituary together created in my mind the conviction that my grandmother had entered into some other element upon which our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water. So she was borne to the depths, my grandmother, into the undifferentiated past, and her comb had no more of the warmth of a hand about it than Helen of Troy’s would have.
    Even before Sylvie’s note arrived, Lily and Nona had begun to compose a letter to inform her of her loss, and to invite her home to discuss the disposition and management of her mother’s estate. My grandmother’s will did not mention Sylvie. Her provisions for us did not include her in any way.