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father’s death, she did not return. The house belonged to Uncle Paul then—its foundation solid, its interior walls thin, the rooms furnished with cast-off pieces. Paul and Brenda had lined the bedroom floors with mattresses, so it became an indoor campground on the weekends, full of cousins. The boys slept on the floor of the living room, the bedrooms taken by the parents or the families with babies or the girls.
    In his memory: bleached sky, bleached air, bleached dreaming on the slanted oak floor, Patrick kicking in his sleep. In the night, he’d tiptoe over to the narrow windows on the side of the house to watch the sea, or to the unshuttered living room windows, picking his way past sleeping boys. As a teenager hewould be the last one up, outside on the concrete patio or down on the beach smoking a cigarette. In the late quiet nights he’d read his uncle’s war novels and local histories by flashlight. The place was full of sand: every day his aunt Brenda swept sand. For two weeks each season, gnats from the pond congregated wherever the wind lulled, moving as a cloud into the kitchen, or over the dining table, so small and fine you needed cloth to stop them. His aunt would sometimes turn on the fan and hope, though the gnats persisted until they’d run their course and dropped like seedpods to the floor.
    Drafts, always, the house porous. After the season, the families would have one last weekend. Cool, early October. They’d clean the place, shutter and board it up, and turn off the water until spring, emptying glass jars of tea and sugar and flour and oats. They’d cover furniture with sheets and the mattresses with plastic, recheck the roof. On those days he always wanted to linger and would leave the others for a last run on the beach. In the early years, his father, and later Patrick or Uncle Paul, would finally call and call his name, Jimmy , and when the irritation became pronounced, James . But the irritation was tempered by indulgence, because the family all knew, didn’t they? They didn’t want to leave this place either. At times a ragged surging seemed as much within James as beyond, a reverberation he could not articulate. He’d run as the autumn sky grew dense, the gray muscled clouds now edged in white, squeezing stretches of blue or breaking them into puzzle pieces, curiously curved, blue patches that became their own temporary alphabet. The sea still held the light and patterning of that alphabet.
    Then the wind reshaped the white clouds and the light went gold and faded; the sky flooded with pink and orange, the blue patches more indigo and quickly black. Too fast, the sky was a mottled onyx, starless, the wind pushing more clouds into a single sheet. The chill he might have felt all along was suddenly palpable, a kind of warning, and with it the recognition that yes, against his will the day had left him. He ought to be more sheltered. The day had left behind what seemed a universal loneliness: there would be clouds and wind but no stars; or if there were stars, even brilliant stars, the cold would sharpen. Still, one could listen to the sea—that music did not stop—and beyond the sea he might hear a voice, after a time his own name called, though sometimes the loneliness would wash through him until he felt empty of anything else. This was how years of final weekends ended, with his family calling his name, though often they knew just where he was, and often they would leave him alone until the cars were ready to go. Either a cousin would fetch him, or the landscape would close itself away from him so forcefully and with such ringing despair he’d answer Here to the voices and follow their trail to the waiting car. If it was an especially cold day, there’d be a thermos of tea or hot chocolate.
    It was more than an hour back to the city, and for the first few minutes no one in the car spoke. Once they’d rounded the harbor—which