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give you a more personal feeling than the church records.”
sadie is uncharacteristically moved, and grateful. when she gets home she sets the book on her bedside table, and that night she thumbs through the entries—all of them spare and focused on chores and company—until she reaches one about Mary’s daughter:
    Jan. 8, 1764. First wore my new Cloth riding hood.
    9. My Daughter Polly first confined with the quinsy. Took a vomit.
10. Nabby Cloutman watch’d with her.
11. Very ill. Molly Molton watched.
12. Zilla Symonds watched.
13. My Dear Polly Died. Sister Prissy came.
14. Buried.
    Craig climbs into bed, the frame groaning under his weight. In the past, they’ve laughed at the bed, an antique threatening collapse, but tonight the noise fills her with despair.
    “what’s that you’re reading?” he asks. He fluffs his pillows, leans on his arm to look at the book’s spine. “An old one.”
sadie closes the diary quickly. “boring,” she says.
when Craig reaches to take her in his arms she sighs. she expects he will initiate the conversation they always have of “we’ll try again,” but this time he does not. He rubs her shoulder instead and, with his mouth a grim little line, settles away from her on his own side of the bed.
she tries to imagine the sleeping forms of her children, the way the house protects them from the wind that picks up in the trees, but she cannot avoid imagining lily in her crib in the room that still awaits her, the owl nightlight on the dresser, the birds she pasted to the pale walls caught in midflight or perched on a branch. The image of the baby in the crib is so real that sadie must restrain herself from going to the room to check. For hours she is left lying awake, listening, waiting, feeling the small aches of her body, the strange noise of her heart in her chest.
    The next day she drives with Harriet to the cemetery. They leave Harriet’s saturn parked along the road’s shoulder and trek up through the woods with their steno pads, their ballpoint pens. There was once a road leading here, Harriet explains, but eventually trees grew through, and the creeper and fern filled it in, and then everyone forgot about it.
    “The housing developments were built around it,” Harriet says.
The woods have changed, the paths sadie remembers from childhood are gone, but they reach the little clearing and the clusters of graves. The stones are slanted, or toppled over, or crumbling one into the next so that portions are just a patch of rubble. All the leaves settle around them, and their brilliant color shifts overhead like a living ceiling. she knows if she continues past the cemetery, up the rise of pasture to the line of trees, she will see down into Hamlet Hill, the neighborhood where she grew up. she tells none of this to Harriet.
As she moves through the cemetery she has to brush the debris from the stones to read them, and she walks among them until she comes to one, still upright: Emely Filley, wife of
    Abijah, died November 10, 1748, age 15 years. she remembers the ghost story of emely Filley from her childhood. It was beth Filley, ray’s sister, who told it to her one summer afternoon when they were little. sadie’s mother and Patsy Filley were friends, and sadie would often be taken to the house with her mother as a playmate for beth. They would be told to go up to beth’s room—a large, carpeted space with wide windows, shelves of dolls in costumes of foreign countries, and a brightly painted carousel horse in the corner. beth never participated in anything the neighborhood kids organized. since laura loomis’s disappearance she would stand at a distance or clop by on her horse, as if they didn’t exist, as if her mother had told her not to play with them. sadie assumed she had her own friends from private school and they did things only with each other, in places sadie didn’t know about.
    still, beth never complained about having to entertain her. she was clever