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funeral clothes, and Meg lowered the shades, so that the living room seemed a separate, hidden sphere. Katy fell asleep on the sofa, and when she awoke, Theo was sleeping beside her. Her mother had moved to the floor next to the side sofa, where her father sat, bent, their faces tilted down, together, at his knees. One of her mother’s hands held one of her father’s. The other one twitched. A kind of huffing came from her father. After a few minutes the huffing stopped. Katy waited for it to start again, and when it did not, she tiptoed across the living room and through the kitchen—the table covered by wrapped plates from Rose Murphy and by pastel sympathy cards—then continued in her stocking feet out to the deck and down the stairs to the beach. The exposed midtide sand was studded with small and larger multicolored stones, which bit through stockings but which you could hurl at the sea for hours, if you wanted to: there were thousands of stones you could hurl at the sea.

BLUE ROCK
    A few nights after the funeral Nora and James finally slept together alone, sharing neither a room nor a bed with Katy or Theo or both. A cooling night, the sea breeze carrying the scent of salt and kelp and smoke from a campfire on the beach, black air interrupted only by the night-light in the corner. Half-naked and weeping, they fell into avid, drowning sex, the grief emerging as a raging insistence; as if each might obliterate or immerse the self in the other, alternately banishing the self and shoring it up with the other’s body, avidity somehow evidence that they were alive and also willing to vanish, and in this flux might bring her back as they once brought her. They were thin, both of them, their skin warm in the chill air, his movements abrupt and ungentle. Even as Nora made love to James her muscles seized, and in her belly an animal sickness blurred into the pleasure: it seemed if she kept moving she might move past the pain into a mindless release, or a kind of coma. The tension seemed at once unbearable and insufficient, and the only way beyond was to drive further and further into it, into James, around James. Both of them weeping unaware until they climaxed and the weeping did not subside. They woke again around three and he enteredher again and for a while they drifted, dozed with him inside her. For a few nights it was like this, the mixed-up striving for solidity, oblivion, a welling violence streaked with tenderness, and during the day, a blankness.

    For two weeks, they stayed at the house on Shore Road. Daylight sleepwalkers, awakening without thought, thought remaining absent beyond basic routine. For Nora the initial relief in arriving and the safe haven of the house leveled out. She could speak to Theo and Katy and James, but she could not read or answer the telephone; occasionally she observed herself taking it off the hook. She did not call Lydia; elsewhere there had been a friend named Lydia, but Nora was not elsewhere, and here her mind had become a razed field. The days stretched, her body increasingly detached from herself, as if it were a hollow stem or a blade of autumn beachgrass, without will except in her efforts to conceal a recurring breathlessness. There was the steadying presence of the sea, which seemed to both acknowledge and contain all that roiled within her, so she could move through the day without her mind.
    One thing made sense to Nora: to stay in Blue Rock. Even though they had planned to live closer to the city, even though James’s daily commute would leach hours. She’d seen a snapshot of a house James had toured in Wellesley, a large suburban house in a very small photograph. The house could disappear in her hand.

    August. The Murphys so closely resembled a vacationing family that at a glance you would have suspected nothing. Even with a second look—because the scene was orderly, their clothes clean. You’d have had to pay more attention to the body