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of—the impending performance run, which as Mr. Bing had confirmed was now hers. She felt happy; it had been a perfect day after a perfect night, and she did not want to be greedy. She considered the manuscript on her lap and absently contemplated the spinning galaxy of light—from the buildings and storefronts, the surrounding cars—splayed out across her in the backseat of the slowly moving cab.

5
The Marble Index
    PITTSBURGH, 1960. On September 13, two days after her birth in a hospital near Warren, Pennsylvania, an infant girl was brought home to Castle Shannon, a small town built on a former strip mine southwest of the city. The Sheehans lived in a split-level ranch on Hamish Road, which—like so many streets in Pittsburgh—began and ended at no particular point but could be found on the curve of a steep climb before quickly disappearing over the hill or winding into a ravine. John parked the car in the driveway to let Gina out so she could go in the front door instead of through the garage. Like her husband, Gina was on the short side, and despite years of trying to lose weight would never be described as thin. As much as sheregretted that, she was thankful for her long lashes and large, expressive eyes, which she had liked to think of as “doleful” ever since her seventh-grade boyfriend had learned the word in a poem. She was also proud of her mane of black hair—inherited from her Italian father—which was tied up in a white silk ribbon she had worn for the occasion because it matched the buttons of her powder blue dress.
    She had met John at the same industrial-supply company where they still worked. John, after starting out in the warehouse, had recently been promoted “upstairs” into purchasing, while Gina was in accounts receivable. They had been married for almost three years with no luck getting pregnant—and not, as John was quick to point out, for lack of trying—before consulting doctors and, with all the tests inconclusive, deciding that adoption was the best option. Their priest had put them in touch with an order of Dominicans located about halfway to Erie, and just a week earlier they had finally received the call. Everything inside was already done, from the crib to the border of little yellow ducks John had stenciled over the pale green walls. “John, did you ever cut these back?” Gina called down to her husband as she walked up the sidewalk with the baby cradled in her arms. Though it was a small thing, she had dreamed about this day for a long time, and not once did her fantasy include a straggly yew blocking her entrance to the house.
    Her mother, Bérénice—or Bea, since nobody could say anything but Bernice, which she hated—pushed open the screen door with one of her toothpick arms and beckoned with the other. “Quit harping, Gina—
allez-y
—get in here!” Bea was originally from Bruges—where she had grown up speaking French before immigrating to the United States—and in the course of things had ended up in Pittsburgh with her husband, an Italian steelworker who had died a few years earlier. She had moved in with John and Gina to help with the baby (though Gina was also scaling back to three days at the office)and because her old house in Baldwin—where Gina and her brothers were raised—had too many ghosts and memories for one woman to withstand.
    Gina and Bea sat down on the couch to admire the new baby. John came in with diapers, extra blankets, and formula, which he put on the coffee table in order to marvel at the baby’s tiny fingers, which he held gently with his own. “So … Maria?” he asked as he moved his palm over her fuzzy head—she already had more hair than he did, he joked—and looked at his wife with eager eyes. Gina had become infatuated with the name Maria at the dentist’s a few months earlier—not long after they started the adoption process—when she’d seen an old
Time
magazine with “Soprano Callas” on the cover, and she had