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we talked about before? Margaret had done all the talking. Now there was nothing to say. We were the wallflowers left behind when Margaret waltzed away.
    Finally, I said, “You know what Violet told me? At graduation, the picture they used was Margaret’s yearbook photo. You know the one.” I bugged my eyes. “Margaret despised it. She told me that the photographer had gotten the kids to focus by saying, ‘Look at my hand!’ and every portrait caught the person at the moment of noticing that the guy was missing two fingers.”
    My parents pretended that Margaret hadn’t told us the story. Because that was what we did then. We talked about Margaret as if all the old family stories were news. It made us feel as if our connection with her was ongoing, as if our knowledge of her was susceptible to revision. Every so often, I almost slipped and said something that might have led to the subject of Aaron. Then Margaret’s face floated before me, silencing me with a fierce look that I was already forgetting.
    Dad said, “Daisy, remember the time we took her to church and she pretended to be sick so we’d have to leave, and all the way home she did that perfect little-kid imitation of the minister preaching ‘God is not a BMW’?”
    Mom said, “What made you think of that?” It was a trick question. Poor Dad. The minister was the same one who’d spoken at Margaret’s service.
    My mother speared a green bean and stared at it as if she’d never seen a bean or a fork. I focused on the impaled bean. I hated seeing them cry.
    She said, “I can’t stop thinking about the last argument she and I had. It started about smoking and escalated. We both said things we didn’t mean, and I never got to take it back. Isn’t that the worst horror? That your child could die like that before you got to make up?”
    My father walked behind her chair and held her by the shoulders. He said, “You loved each other. How could you have a teenage daughter and not have a little fight now and then? She’d been on permanent eye-roll with you for the last five years.”
    “It wasn’t a fight,” Mom said. “And it certainly wasn’t a little fight.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Dad. “I—”
    I said, “She was smoking that day in the boat. I told her she shouldn’t. She got mad, that’s when she dove in. I should have let her have the cigarette—”
    I caught myself in mid-sentence. I never told on my sister. But you couldn’t tell on the dead, you couldn’t get them in trouble.
    “You told her not to smoke,” said Mom. “You wanted her to live.”
    One thing I would never tell them was that Margaret’s last words were, “Smoke this.” That was her special present for me, the hair shirt she’d left me to wear until time and age and forgetfulness laundered it into something softer.
    Somehow, I managed to get to my feet and walk around the table. The three of us clumped together. My father squeezed us so hard that Mom’s shoulders rattled against my chest. My tears kept dripping into her hair, which presented a logical puzzle until I realized that somehow, at some point, I’d grown as tall as my mother.

Three
     
    E VERY NIGHT , I D REAMED ABOUT M ARGARET . S HE WAS ALWAYS alive and well. I had one of those recurring dreams that trick you into thinking you’re awake, then plunge you into another dream, more brutal than the first because the fake awakening makes the second dream seem more real. I dreamed I heard my sister’s voice and followed it to the kitchen, where she was sitting with Aaron at our red enamel table. She was eating Cheerios from the box and blowing smoke rings. I thought, Mom and Dad will kill her!
    She and Aaron were talking and laughing. But when I walked in, they fell silent. Aaron gave me a funny look. Why had I told him that Margaret was dead when she so obviously wasn’t? I shrugged. I must have gotten it wrong. She hadn’t dived into the water, or maybe they’d found her and saved her. Margaret