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been the victim of a particularly horrible magic trick. Eleanor had no kids; her executor was her family lawyer, who sent Art his sister’s ashes in a plain brown paper–wrapped package.
    Second last was John. Art and John stopped even sending Christmas cards after Ellie’s death. Art had never seen the point in the first place, and with John, it was as if hearing about Eleanor’s ashes ending up with Art was the last straw.
    â€œYou’re not the oldest,” John protested in one last distant and tinny-sounding, bitter phone call. “You’re not even the oldest one left.”
    At that moment, Art suddenly found himself wanting to remind John that, when they had shared a room during the family’s summers in Maine, John had always been the one who was frightened by the big summer thunderstorms rolling up the Reach. So scared, in fact, that one night, in the middle of a heavy storm rolling almost directly overhead, Art had woken up to find that John had climbed into his bed, so that, rolling over, Art could see the whites of John’s wide-open eyes with every flare of lightning.
    Reminding John of that over the phone had seemed like the best response, but at the same time it was something held out of bounds by unwritten family rules. There were things they all knew but just never said.
    Like the fact that their brother Dave had been, for the briefest of periods, a bedwetter — just long enough for everyone in the family to have one or more memories of their mother hauling great bundles of sheets and blankets out of Dave’s room in the middle of the night, an event that always seemed overlarge and overwrought by the rush and the fact it always occurred around two or three in the morning. Dave, as always, managing to be the centre of attention again.
    John had dodged all of the big threats. Cancer and heart disease and stroke had all kept their distance, islands of cholesterol had no doubt floated benignly through his veins without ever successfully blocking anything, but in his seventies John had stepped on the upturned tines of a rock rake while gardening. He became living — and eventually dying — proof of the difficulty of cleansing deep puncture wounds and had died of blood poisoning after a full week in hospital.
    John had kids, three of them, but only two were in the country to sit next to his bed as the infection grew, making his foot enormous and multicoloured, draining horribly, and then growing massive again. He moved in and out of consciousness. The two adult children made careful and quiet funeral plans at his bedside while the third, a son, wrestled airline schedules and business commitments and just managed to get back before John slipped into a final coma. John’s first and last words to his travelling son? “You’ve put on a bit of weight.”
    Ellie had no children. Anne and Dave had two, Heather one, Ian and John both three.
    Art had two as well, a boy and a girl. In total, he calculated, everyone’s children came out to one short of the total number of parents — a family destined to be in slow decline.
    Maybe it’s pneumonia, Art thought, feeling the gentle rattle in his chest every time he breathed. The default killer of scores of the elderly, up there with congestive heart failure on a scorecard of the most likely excuses. His brother Ian had soldiered on through multiple sclerosis and skin cancer and the loss of both a kidney and a lung — with his shirt off, the scars looked as though he had been inexpertly repaired by amateurs — but it was pneumonia that had finally won the battle.
    It could have been anything: by that time, Ian had become a fiery wraith of himself, a leathery leftover puppet strung together with sinew and tendons that looked more and more like fat braided rope as everything else melted away. Art had gone to visit him, the last time with Ian bending up towards him urgently from his hospital bed as