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held even fewer remnants of him. A lacrosse stick from his years at Lawrenceville. A few sport jackets. Some Harvard memorabilia. A similar collection of yearbooks, high school novels, and a few CDs.
    Was this all she had to show for her life so far? Was this all he had left to show for his?
    Their bedrooms were like movie sets, she thought. His death had been like a movie set, too. The car a shiny silver Audi, a gift from her parents for getting into NYU Law, twisted and entangled with the shiny silver guardrail on the Merritt Parkway. Scott and his friend Danny twisted and entangled with the car, inside. Both drunk from partying too hard in Danny’s family’s private box at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Madison Square Garden. Both dead instantly, no one else involved—at least there was that to be thankful for. Maybe Scott had swerved to avoid a deer or raccoon or something. Or maybe he had simply fallen asleep at the wheel. Maybe they were just blasting the stereo too loud, still rocking out to The Boss. But Scott had been driving, he had been drinking, and he had killed himself and one of his best friends. Danny’s parents had been friends, too. Or at least they had mingled in the same circle. That didn’t last. Thankfully, as she’d heard her father say under his breath a few times, they didn’t bring a lawsuit. They were a big family of Irish Catholics, her mother had pointed out several times, as if this explained something. They had a couple of other sons, she’d said, as if this lessened their suffering. Or at least made it less intense than hers.
    Which maybe it did, Miranda thought. If only I had another brother. Or even better, a sister. A couple of sisters. Someone, anyone, to share this with. Someone to help me with all of this. Someone I didn’t have to pay to help me.
    Miranda turned away from her brother’s room and stood in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom. It was a space she was, always had been, reluctant to enter. Not sacred so much as taboo. The expansive bed with the matching bedside tables. Her mother’s robe hanging off the back of the door to the bathroom. She’d spent a lot of nights alone here, Miranda knew. Miranda’s father tended to stay at their apartment in the city during the week. He’d come back for a kid’s event or adult party, but otherwise complained about the commute, an hour on the best of days, often longer. He would tell his wife to come in for dinner and a show instead. Miranda recalled her mother getting dressed up from time to time for a trip to New York, and the relative novelty of getting to eat dinner in front of the TV with her brother and the babysitter. Then, several years ago, her father gave up the apartment. Looking back, it seemed sudden. For the first time Miranda wondered if her father had lovers—a mistress, a girlfriend. If that’s why her mother drank. Or if her father took a mistress because her mother drank. Or if they both just used each other’s bad habits as excuses to indulge their own.
    These kinds of thoughts, she noted, were new to her. Seeing her parents not just as parents but as people with complex, messy, inexplicable lives of their own, full of errors of judgment and will. She sighed. She realized her childhood was not only over but nowhere to be found.
    She moved to the study, a tidy space downstairs between the kitchen and living room, decorated in the masculine tropes of dark woods and leather furniture. There she found several boxes of mail. Mazie, the housekeeper, had kept up with the household bills. That had always been part of her job. She’d also often gone grocery shopping, picked up the dry cleaning, done other small errands. Miranda didn’t know why her mother never seemed to have time for these little chores herself, but years ago there had been committees and boards and volunteer work. Then it became habit. Why take on what Mazie did so well?
    Mazie had organized everything into four boxes. Magazines in one. Town