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hair fal ing over his forehead, writing furiously in his notebook, fil ing it with his stories. He’d used the room as an escape from the rest of the family, his teenage years making him crave privacy.
    “Let’s go upstairs now,” Jan said.
    I fol owed her back through the lobby and up the wide, dark wood stairway that was covered with a wine-colored carpet runner.
    “You’l noticethetapestryonthelandinghere,” Jan said, pausing, one hand resting on a carved woodglobethatformedthetopofthebanister.Her otherhandpointedtoasilkwal -hangingincolors of gray and salmon. She described how the tapestry had been hand-woven in Italy, how the artist had visited the Markers. But I had quit listening.

    I had returned to a moment that had lain buried until now. I saw my mother standing at the bottom of those stairs, dressed in a powder-blue suit, her feet in high heels I’d never seen before. She moved to the front door and opened it. She spoke to someone, their voices hushed, one voice much deeper than the other. A hand was on her blue shoulder. A large man’s hand. A ring on his finger. The soft sounds of crying. Then my mother swayed, nearly fel .
    I had watched this scene, I realized, from the landing where I now stood. I’d been dressed in my favorite pair of jeans and the shirt with the sunflower on the front, my face peering around the post at the top of the landing.
    “Are you al right?”
    I focused on Jan’s face, her eyes wary. “Sure, sure. I’m fine.” I looked back down the staircase again, but the vision was gone.
    “Wel , come on up this way. I’l show you the bedrooms.”
    I fol owed Jan again, surprised at the sudden, vividflashofmymother.IthadbeenagessinceI’d real y remembered her in any detail. There were the vague recol ections, like how she ran every night, even if it was raining, sometimes coming in thehousewithherlonghairdrippinginsheets,her chest heaving as if she’d been chased and not out for a leisurely jog, and later the feel of that hair sweepingmycheekassheleanedoverme,kissing me good-night, the smel of lavender on her skin.
    “This bedroom belonged to Catherine, the Markers’ only daughter,” Jan said, leading me to the first bedroom at the top of the stairs.
    I remembered it wel . It used to be mine.
    The wal s were stil painted peach, the fireplace stil white, and a canopy bed stil stood in the corner. The bed, though, which was made of dark wood, its canopy designed with heavy velvet, was different from the one I loved so much. Mine was white with an eyelet covering. Seeing the bed and the room brought back another flood of memories: myself in the bed, quilt up to my neck, reading until my mother insisted that the lights be turned off; my friend, Patsy, and I playing in front of the fireplace that was never lit; Caroline helping me with my homework at the desk against the wal .
    Howodd,Ithought,thatsofewofthosememories included my dad. But maybe it wasn’t so strange, since he’d spent most of his weekdays working in Chicagoandmostoftheweeknightsathisapartment there.Andyet,mymemoriesafterWoodlandDunes are exclusively of my father and me. No one else.
    Jan showed me through three other bedrooms, two of which had been occupied twenty years ago by my siblings. She stopped in the hal way before the master bedroom and pointed out an intercom system that had been instal ed by the Markers in order to talk to their servants.
    “The intercom hasn’t worked in a long time,” Jan said. “At least not since the cultural center moved in here.”
    “And when was that?”
    “The early eighties.”
    “Real y?” The early eighties were when my family moved away from Woodland Dunes. “Why did the town want this specific house?”
    “Wel , I don’t know that they actual y wanted this particular home, but from what I heard, they got it at a great price. The people who’d lived here before couldn’t sel it.”
    “Why was that?”
    Jan made a show of looking around, even though there was