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was still alive, the local restaurants and pubs open, year-round houses lit from within—the shore’s hold would loosen, and in those first years his father would say his name again, this time as if ushering James through a door, and begin to talk; later his uncle would turn on the radio and thecar would fill with bits of news and football scores about which James might speculate with his cousins. The gray awareness of school would gather weight as the car neared the city, and after his father’s death, the leaden substance of his home life would reassert itself in spite of the time at the shore (the sea, the orange clouds), finally eclipsing it as the car reached his street, and he approached the door of the South Boston flat.

ROME
    Maddalena penitente
    Domenico Fetti (early 17th century)
    GALLERIA DORIA PAMPHILJ
    Here in Rome, a painting of a woman—young, a girl really—her eyelids lowered, her face half in light and half in shadow. She’s seated, her right elbow propped on a pale gold book, head leaning against her right hand. A blue scarf drapes her head and shoulders, the blues picked up in her white sleeve, gold stitching echoing the book, the book’s edges soft, fluidly painted. In her left hand—rose-copper thumb, rose-copper fingers—a coffee-colored human skull, the rose copper again picked up in her cheeks. Look just above and behind her head: her halo almost melts into air, three-quarters of a copper ring, like the thin spill of light from an eclipse. She’s illuminated from the right—an unseen window?
    Maddalena penitente , yet her state seems like a meditative grief. In solitude: she pays no attention to the viewer. She is beautiful, this girl, the artist’s model. Say that she did contemplate death while she sat for the painting. Perhaps she allowedherself to forget Fetti, forget the contents of the book, forget even the symbolic skull—confronted, that day, by more private loss.

FUNERAL DAY
    Molly, a girl in a box, a wax doll—starched pink dress, full skirt, long sleeves, high neck, so that to Katy the casket seemed more dress than girl, the face an imitation of Molly’s. The casket was propped at the front of the chapel; and when Aunt Meg ushered Katy to a car, it seemed possible that this boxed-up Molly might stay at the chapel. But the casket reappeared, closed, at the cemetery, and you were supposed to believe that Molly was in it, now a girl in a box in the ground.
    That day Theo and Katy were nudged and led about like kindergarteners, like babies, in and out of cars, from Blue Rock to the chapel to the cemetery to Rose Murphy’s house in Arlington, crowded with sweating adults and tables of food. Pearled-pink and cherry polish on the women’s nails; broad link watches circling the men’s wrists, cigarettes between their fingers, the talk a viscous cooing. On a message pad decorated with yellow daisies, Katy and Theo played tic-tac-toe and hangman.
    Finally the rooms began to clear out, and Aunt Meg patted Katy’s shoulder. “Okay, hon?” she said, and “Theo, sweetie?” and let them wait out in the car. Then Uncle Louis drovethem to the South Shore, with the windows open and the road breeze coming in, Theo and their father in the front seat, and Aunt Meg and Katy and her mother in the backseat, Katy close against her mother, who smelled of talcum powder and hair spray and sweaty dirt. Once they pulled over so Theo could throw up, and her mother and Meg studied her, as if she might throw up too, though it was her mother who gulped air at the open window. Near Blue Rock you could smell the sea again, and the densest heat lifted. Sun glinted off the harbor and sailboats dotted the bay, too bright, all of it too bright. When they arrived at the house, Katy wanted to run inside, but her mother hesitated on the deck, and then her father nudged them in. They took off their shoes and sat on the couches in their