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she’s staring at me as if I’m a stranger.

    It rains the entire trip back from Baltimore, and it’s still raining when we pull up to the house. Alice and I run to the porchstep, illuminated by the glare of headlights. Mitch waits until Alice unlocks the door and we move inside, and then pulls away.
    "Does he do that a lot?" I ask.
    "He likes to drive when he’s upset."
    "Oh." Alice goes through the house, turning on lights. I follow her into the kitchen.
    "Don’t worry, he’ll be all right." She opens the refrigerator door and crouches down. "He just doesn’t know what to do with you."
    "He wants to put me in the camp, then."
    "Oh, not that. He just never had a daughter who talked back to him before." She carries a Tupperware cake holder to the table. "I made carrot cake. Can you get down the plates?"
    She’s such a small woman. Face to face, she comes up only to my chin. The hair on the top of her head is thin, made thinner by the rain, and her scalp is pink.
    "I’m not Therese. I never will be Therese."
    "Oh I know," she says, half sighing. And she does know it; I can see it in her face. "It’s just that you look so much like her."
    I laugh. "I can dye my hair. Maybe get a nose job."
    "It wouldn’t work, I’d still recognize you." She pops the lid and sets it aside. The cake is a wheel with icing that looks half an inch thick. Miniature candy carrots line the edge.
    "Wow, you made that before we left? Why?"
    Alice shrugs, and cuts into it. She turns the knife on its side and uses the blade to lever a huge triangular wedge onto my plate. "I thought we might need it, one way or another."
    She places the plate in front of me, and touches me lightly on the arm. "I know you want to move out. I know you may never want to come back."
    "It’s not that I—"
    "We’re not going to stop you. But wherever you go, you’ll still be my daughter, whether you like it or not. You don’t get to decide who loves you."
    "Alice ... "
    "Shssh. Eat your cake."

Unpossible
    T wo in the morning and he’s stumbling around in the attic, lost in horizontal archaeology: the further he goes, the older the artifacts become. The stuttering flashlight guides him past boxes of Christmas decorations and half-dead appliances, past garbage bags of old blankets and outgrown clothing stacked and bulging like black snowmen, over and around the twenty-year-old rubble of his son’s treasures: Tonka trucks and science fair projects, soccer trophies and summer camp pottery.
    His shoulder brushes against the upright rail of a disassembled crib, sends it sliding, and somewhere in the dark a mirror or storm window smashes. The noise doesn’t matter. There’s no one in the house below him to disturb.
    Twenty feet from the far wall his way is blocked by a heap of wicker lawn furniture. He pulls apart the barricade piece by piece to make a narrow passage and scrapes through, straws tugging at his shirt. On the other side he crawls up and onto the back of a tilting oak desk immovable as a ship run aground.
    The territory ahead is littered with the remains of his youth, the evidence of his life before he brought his wife and son to this house. Stacks of hardcover books, boxes of dusty-framed elementary school pictures—and toys. So many toys. Once upon a time he was the boy who didn’t like to go outside, the boy who never wanted to leave his room. The Boy Who Always Said No.
    Against the far wall, beside a rickety shelf of dried-out paint cans and rusting hardware, a drop cloth covers a suggestive shape. He picks his way through the crowded space. When he pulls aside the cloth, he grunts as if he’s been elbowed in the stomach—relief and dread and wrenching sadness competing for the same throat.
    Dust coats the Wonder Bike’s red fenders, rust freckles its handlebars. The white-walled tires are flat, and stuffing sprouts from cracks in the leather saddle. But it’s still here, still safe. And the two accessories he most needs, the things he’d