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said he doesn’t drive?” In the photo, Graham leaned against the passenger door of a shiny black sedan, a cornfield in the background. His hair was a slightly muddier white. He had given me the photo for just this purpose, to show my mother, but I remember thinking that it took a certain kind of man to give a girl a photo that was so obviously taken by another woman. Instead of saying this outright, my mother added that he seemed mighty self-assured, which in her book was a mixed bag.
    Spoons. We’d been sorting my mother’s collection of antique spoons.
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    LIDIA TAUGHT ME TO DRIVE the Zodiac that same night, after another several inches of wine for us both. I was nervous leaving Frankie alone, even while he slept. I locked the Lullaby ’s sliding doors and goaded Lidia into leaning over the hedges and asking her neighbor, Zola Genovese, who was sitting on her own back deck, to keep an eye on the Lullaby until we returned. Zola said it was her pleasure, then made a point to reassure me that she, too, had driven herself mad with worry when her kids were young.
    The moonshine off the water had the soft blue glow of a night-light in a dark room. I reminded Lidia that we needed to hurry, but she just shushed me and gestured for me to follow her to the far end of the pier, where the Zodiac rested. She stepped aboard. “There’s nothing to it,” she said, handing me a key attached to a bright yellow float.
    She showed me how to check the fuel level and lower the engine and prime the choke. The engine roared into the night and Lidia shushed again, then laughed. She’s fun , I thought. She told me to throw the stern and bow lines into the well, and I dropped down onto the boat’s gunwale as we pulled away. We swapped places and she barked instructions over the engine noise: how to ease forward on the throttle, how to shift into neutral and reverse. We headed toward the bay. I reminded her again that I didn’t want to go too far, but she just kept issuing instructions. We practiced turning around and slowing and reversing, and then suddenly we were at the start of the canal, where it opens to spit out the bay, and while Lidia explained the channel markers—the Zodiac had very little draw, she said, so I would have to really load it down to run aground—I marveled at the canopy of star-salted night, the dark open water spotted by whitecaps, the indistinct indigo horizon. Then Lidia leaned against the boat’s two-seater bench and refused to answer any more questions. It was up to me to navigate back up the canal, leaving the bay at our backs. I eased up to the pier and cut the engine, and the still, silent darkness pooled around us. Over the hedges, Zola Genovese waved good night and went into her house.
    Inside the Lullaby , Frankie slept with one arm flung over the side of the bunk, his face open to the room, lips as bright as bougainvillea blossoms. The bedsheet was twisted around his legs as if he’d tossed and turned. I had the thought—it skipped through my mind and dissolved—that I couldn’t believe I had left Miami in the first place.

3
    GRAHAM’S ILLNESS ANNOUNCED ITSELF THE summer he was eleven years old. One night after his family arrived home to the cottage after a long day at the state fair, Graham and his sister, who was nine, bathed and got into bed, and their mother looked in on them and encouraged each child to share a favorite moment from the trip. His sister’s—he could hear her voice through the wall between their rooms—was the crayon-colored Ferris wheel, which had stalled when they’d reached the top and swayed a little in the high winds, giving them all a thrill. Graham told his mother that his favorite had been the rifle range, where he’d won a giant lollipop.
    In actuality, though, his favorite had been the haunted house. His father had taken him against his mother’s wishes, while she and Lauren were