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Holland, more real than dreaming. I could see them.” Geneva looks at me with eyes syrupy from the heat. “They walked into my room and they seemed so regular, just like in their pictures. They were all wearing jeans. Kevin had on a green windbreaker. John said, ‘Wake up, Neeve,’ which is strange, now that I think about it, because nobody calls me that. Except for it seemed normal.” She pauses. “Then Elizabeth said, ‘You’re in my dreams, too, Neeve.’”
    “And?” I try not to sound too interested, but my inner eye becomes fixed on this image. I watch their shadows jag across Geneva’s wall. Their faces flicker in the glow of Geneva’s night light. The shells of their jackets are damp with salt water. I can smell the spearmint crackle of their chewing gum, see the spritz of freckles on Kevin’s nose. “Wake up,” John whispers. I shudder. For a moment it is as if my sister’s dream has dissolved into my own consciousness.
    “And nothing. That was the end.”
    I turn off the water and sit down on the closed toilet seat. “Dreams are easy to explain,” I begin in a ponderous voice like a PBS narrator. “A dream is like a garbage disposal of things that happen in your day, which get mashed up and pushed through your sleeping mind. The nights Brett comes over are kind of upsetting because he makes us think about Elizabeth and the boys, and how they can’t be with us.”
    “I guess,” she says, nodding. Her wet hair pastes to her shoulders like flattened threads of brown cotton. Surrounded by bubbles and light, she looks more sweet and agreeable than she did a few minutes ago. “It’s been a while since I wanted to see them.”
    “Aha. See what you said? You want to see them, so your mind makes up a story.”
    “But you don’t?”
    “Don’t what?”
    “Want to see them?”
    “Of course I do,” I answer, “but it’s an impossible wish. I mean, I’ve never even seen the mayor, and half the neighborhood’s spotted him.”
    “That’s because you need me to show you where to look,” Geneva says. “My eyes work better than yours.”
    I ignore her remark, moving my seat to kneel on the bath mat, and I sink a washcloth into the warm water, spreading it over her curled, spiny back. “Come on, let’s wash you up so we can get back to bed.”
    “Everything would be different if they were here. Imagine if they had been sitting with us at the table tonight, helping Mom celebrate.”
    “If the other Shepards had been here tonight,” I say lightly, “there wouldn’t be room for us at the table.” Although she nods in agreement, Geneva’s arms tighten around her knees.
    “Holland, do you remember when we were little, how we made up that imaginary friend, Nonie, who lived under the dining room table?”
    “Sure I do.” She had been our secret friend for years. I had been upset when eventually I grew too big to squeeze under the table to play. “She liked to eat your vegetables, and once you got mad at Uncle Nelson for accidentally kicking her.”
    “See, that’s how it was tonight. Like visits from imaginary friends.” Geneva grabs around for the washcloth, dunks it, and presses it over her face. “Only they didn’t have to leave so quick,” she says, her voice not so muffled that I can’t hear the fierceness in it.
    “I think Annie made a good point this afternoon. I bet Kevin and Elizabeth and John would be unhappy to know that the only time we ever talk about them are in depressing conversations like this.”
    “Annie also said that Mom and Dad are lucky to have us.” Geneva’s washcloth mask drops to reveal her blotchy face as she stands up in the tub. I hold her hand as she wobbles, dripping, onto the bath mat, where I wrap her up like a burrito in a king-size towel. “Which proves Annie doesn’t know everything. I bet sometimes Mom and Dad wish we would go away. They only want to be with each other. We were a bad idea—they’re too old to have our-age kids in the