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It had only erased Taylor.

“Please, call me Linnea.” She wrestled a calm smile toward Penelope and said, “You don’t have to hug me. I’m a complete stranger.”

Penelope passed an anxious glance to her mom, then to Taylor. She stiffly hugged Linnea. It took all the self-restraint of her cancer-eaten muscles, invigorated by the smell and touch of her grandchild, not to squeeze Penelope and never let go. She gently patted Penelope’s hair and said in a crumpled voice, “Would you like to see pictures of your mom and dad? They were Homecoming king and queen.”

Penelope’s eyes widened. “Really?”

Linnea nodded to the stack of photos on the coffee table next to a book on 1960s art from MoMA and a set of never-used candles. With eager eyes, Penelope snatched the pictures. Analise appeared apprehensive, hovering back, not looking at them, and Taylor wandered to the large bay windows overlooking the lake. He put his hands into his pockets and masked his conflicted eyes.

Penelope gaped at the first photograph, constricting her gaze, and shuffled through the rest in amazement. She shoved a picture in Analise’s face. “Mamma. That looks just like your wedding dress!”

Taylor turned around.

Analise’s face contorted when she took the picture and studied it. She touched her lips, handed the picture back, and excused herself to the bathroom.

He watched her go.

Penelope gawked her way through the stack again. “I don’t understand,” she whispered to each one. “How could my mom not remember any of this?” She directed her next question to Taylor. “You said you’d be able to explain it?”

Taylor nodded with a sad smile. “Give me a sec,” he said and went to the drawer in the kitchen where Linnea kept loose scrap paper and pens.

He returned and sat on the sofa next to his daughter. “Ready?”

Penelope’s eyes alighted onto his.

Taylor drew a rudimentary brain and neatly labeled the sections. “Memory isn’t confined to one part of the brain,” he said, “but your short-term memory is. Right here in the hippocampus.” He raised his head to Penelope. “If I give you five objects to remember, chances are you won’t recall—unless there’s a way you incorporate them every day into your life.” Taylor paused. “What happened to your mom . . . when she fell . . . ” His voice failed. He stopped. Linnea recognized the small shake of his head, the controlled breaths. She glanced at Analise padding silently into the room, and her son looked at her and said weakly, “The location and force of the fall probably sheared some of the fibers connecting your short-term memory. You had something called anterograde amnesia.”

Analise stepped closer to him as his voice recovered. “You would meet doctors and therapists repeatedly and not remember their names. It’s why you couldn’t finish school, why you probably couldn’t remember your way around Mora for the first year, even though there’s only one main road.”

Analise nodded, transfixed with watery eyes. “That’s exactly what happened,” she whispered. “But it got better.”

“You started healing,” he said.

Penelope spoke to Taylor, “That doesn’t explain how she lost all the other memories.”

Taylor bent close to the diagram, drawing more arrows as he answered, “It wasn’t only anterograde amnesia, but retrograde—retro meaning back in time. For some reason the memories made most recently in the span of a few months didn’t get encoded into the longer-term memory storage. Like not backing up photographs on your phone. Everything—was lost.”

Linnea watched Analise, whose eyes swept back and forth between Penelope and Taylor. “Not everything.”

Analise stayed behind with Linnea when Taylor and Penelope went into the backyard to kick the soccer ball. Next to one another, the two women watched from the window. Linnea drank in the sight and listened to their muted laughter. It rejuvenated her frail body. Shaking her head in disbelief, she begged God, the universe, someone, to allow her just one memory—this one—to keep inside her grave.

“I always wondered where she got her coordination.” Analise paused for a long moment. “He never played in college, not like he’d dreamed of.”

“He tried, but—” Linnea forced away her cry and then looked at Analise. “Wait, he told you?”

Analise’s face took on a conflicted, faraway look, as if she didn’t know how to answer.

“Then he must have told you what happened to him—” Linnea couldn’t. It wasn’t her place to divulge the extent of Taylor’s undoing. The alcohol poisoning on his eighteenth birthday. With that crisis, Linnea’s voice had finally solidified into that mythical, tigerish one supposedly instinctive to mothers, demanding the physician order a psychiatric hold once her son was detoxed. Taylor denied it was a suicide attempt, but she knew better. Now, instead of drinking to death, he was working to death.

When Analise touched her shoulder, Linnea saw it in her eyes. Somehow, she knew everything. “Why don’t you rest?”

There was a knock on the front door, and then it opened. “Hello? Linney?”

Everett? She and Analise exchanged curious glances, and Linnea walked to the door, hiding her wincing steps. He stood in the foyer in his buttoned dress coat. The breeze had tousled his silver-flecked, blonde hair. His astonished eyes held hope.

“What are you doing here?” Linnea asked.

“Lin?” he breathed, “we have a granddaughter?”