It was still in his tool drawer. I stared at the boy who would become my father and who would kill himself in the end. How far back did it go?

I had held on to the picture as I dialed Jake’s number in Wisconsin. His work was just beginning to garner attention. He was in the midst of applying for a Guggenheim to travel abroad. He had only recently left the temporary faculty housing we’d shared and was renting a house outside Madison-the carriage house of a mansion on a lake.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

“I can’t.”

I had managed to blurt out the words, not yet able to use the more exact word of “suicide.” So Jake described the water on the lake. How the back door of his house opened onto a short flight of concrete stairs that led directly to the water; how, depending on the season, the water came to within inches of his door.

“Where are the girls?” he asked.

“With Natalie,” I said. “I’m in the kitchen. Mom’s upstairs.”

I clutched the cord of the phone so tightly that my nails turned white.

“Say anything,” Jake said. “Just talk.”

I moved over to stand in front of the window. I could see my father’s workshop and the Levertons’ backyard.

“Mrs. Leverton’s grandson was outside, weeding the flagstones,” I said. “It was Mrs. Leverton who called the police.”

I felt the clutch in my throat but strangled the sob. I was blindingly angry and confused. I hated everyone.

“I thought of him this morning, once, just a half thought really. I was driving the girls to the Y. Emily got her Flying Fish Badge yesterday, and I heard music coming from the car behind me when I stopped at the light. It was Vivaldi, the sort of overdramatic stuff that could make my father smile. Mr. Forrest would know the exact piece.”

I dragged the red step stool away from the wall and put it in the middle of the kitchen. I could sit there and look out through the dining room and across the street.

“He used my grandfather’s old pistol,” I said.

I could hear, if I let myself, a momentary crackle on the line or the hum of Jake’s breath-the baffled noise of the distance between us. I told him everything I knew, how my father had looked when I’d come in the door; how my mother had seemed almost erased, I had such difficulty focusing on her; how the police and the neighbors had been so decorous, so kind, and all I’d wanted to do was rip off each face and throw it, fleshy and wet, onto the floor where my father lay.

Finally, when I had talked for a very long time, Jake spoke. “I know he loved you.”

My mouth hung open. I thought of the vodka in my freezer at home. I wondered what medications-sedatives and pain-killers-might lurk upstairs in the bathroom cabinets and the dresser drawers.

“How is this proof of love?” I asked.

Jake had no answer for me.

I thought of the Catholic minister. My father told me that the minister had never gotten his name right. “He called my father David instead of Daniel when he saw him tending the sheep.”

“Helen?” It was Tanner. He was close to me.

I heard commotion at the back of the classroom. Painfully, I sat up from my bending position on the chair.

“Here,” he said, “put this on.”

He draped the papery hospital gown over me. “There are men here to see you,” he said.

“Men?”

“Police, Helen.”

Over Tanner’s shoulder, I saw into the back of the room. Standing just inside the door, and trying not to look in any one direction for all the drawings of my nude body they might see, were two men in uniform. Beside them, just as ramrod straight but in a sport coat and slacks, was another man. He had thick white hair and a mustache. He looked once around the room, his eyes coming to rest on me.

“Class,” Tanner announced, “we’ll end early and pick up next time.”

The easels jostled while sketch pads were collected and charcoal was put down. Knapsacks were opened and cell phones were turned on, emitting songs and beeps and whistles to let the students know that yes, just as they’d thought, something more exciting had been going on while they’d been locked inside the classroom.

I thought of a handmade felt Christmas ornament my mother had sent me in Wisconsin one year in the middle of July. It was meticulous in every detail, from the sewn-on beads in the shapes of ornaments, no two alike, to the loop at the top, which had been braided from silk floss. The card, tucked inside the box, had said, “I made this. Don’t waste your life.”

As the students filtered out, the man in the sport jacket came up to the platform. “Helen Knightly,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Robert Broumas, Phoenixville police.” His hand hung in the air, and I motioned toward my own hands, which were clasping the gown in front of me.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’m afraid we have some disturbing news.”

“Yes?” I thought about how to prepare for it, what to say. The surprise party without the surprise was coming, and I had no idea how to behave.

“A neighbor of your mother’s found her this morning,” he said.

I stared at him and then at Tanner.

“I don’t understand.”

“She’s dead, Mrs. Knightly. We have a few questions to ask.”

I could not form an expression of any kind. He watched me intently, and I could do nothing but look back at him. To rise or leave the platform felt cowardly to me, an admission of my guilt.

If I could only have willed myself to faint, that small slice of oblivion would have been welcome, but I could not. I had wanted to faint upon seeing my father, but instead I had heard my mother’s voice. “She’ll help me clean up,” she’d said to the police officer nearest her, and not knowing what else to do, I had gone straight to the kitchen, filled his old hospital sick bowl with water, and returned to the hallway to find my mother standing barefoot in my father’s blood.

“He finally did it,” she said. “I never thought he would.”

I had wanted to hit her, but I was aware of the officers watching us, and in my hands I held the bowl.

TWELVE

When I was twelve, I found a photograph of my father in the small metal drawer beneath his workbench. He was a young man in the picture and stood outside an old brick row house. He was posed on the stairs, which were imposing and made from poured cement. On either side were brick-and-mortar pilasters. He wore a crumpled white shirt and pleated trousers, a thin brown belt holding them up. Next to the stairs where my father stood was the corner of a large square Dumpster in the scrappy patch of yard. Table legs and what looked like a chair poked up above the rim.

By twelve I had already begun to listen for when my father spoke about the place he came from. It was called Lambeth, and on the new maps, it no longer existed except as the name of a dam along the Delaware.

My mother called it the Dirty City because after they’d closed down the town and evicted the people-“relocated,” a nice word for what they’d done-they had built a dam that redirected the river and was supposed to result in the obsolescence of the town.

Instead, despite the careful calculations of the engineers and draftsmen, what roared through town was a wall of mud that grew chunky with floating mowers and brittle with the skeletons of animals from backyard graves. After six months, it receded and left the upper parts of the town merely drenched in mud and ruined by water.

The official flood had happened shortly before he met my mother at the John Wanamaker shoot. “It’s why I went into water,” he would explain to people. The flooding had coincided with the buildup of surrounding towns, including Phoenixville. “Lambeth paid for the Holy Ghost Social Center,” my father would point out when we drove by the squat brick-and-silver building.

On my thirteenth birthday, he had decided I was old enough to go with him to the drowned town where he’d grown up. He packed a picnic basket for the two of us and kissed my mother lightly on the forehead. “Be well, beautiful,” he said.