Still, in the summer, the Connecticut house had been merry and golden. Gwen’s mother would bring the children to stay in the country for a full two months while Gwen’s father came in from Manhattan on the weekends or sometimes more frequently. Gwen’s grandparents would fly up for a few weeks to join them. When they were sitting on the lawn, an acre of rolling green with steps leading down to the sea, as the sun caressed the tops of their heads, it was hard to believe that anything bad had ever happened, or could ever happen, there.

On Labor Day, guests came to eat fresh shellfish and drink spritzers on the grass, as the birds chirped above and the sea purred below. The crowd was made up of fifteen or so people—relatives, some old friends of her grandparents, and a couple of friends of her parents. The couple brought a baby, upon whom Gwen doted, and a terrible nine-year-old son, who decided to educate Gwen and her brother, Teddy, in the story of their aunt Alice, bugging out his eyes while imitating Alice’s final, twisting moments.

“I don’t believe you,” Gwen had cried. She hoped that maybe Teddy, age seven, would punch him, but Teddy didn’t do those sorts of things. (He was so sensitive, she heard adults sigh sometimes.) So she grabbed her brother’s hand and pulled him off to find their parents.

Their mother was standing at the food table, dishing potato salad onto a plate for her brother, Gwen’s uncle Steve. (Her mother never seemed to fill up her own plate at these sorts of gatherings. “Aren’t you hungry?” Gwen had asked her once, and Gwen’s mother had said, “Oh, no, darling! I’m saving my calories for special treats.” Gwen’s mother was full of knowledge on how to save calories. The first three bites of any sweet were the best, so there was no need to have anything more. You should chew each mouthful of a meal twenty-five times before allowing yourself to take another.) Uncle Steve had come to the Labor Day gathering with his arm around the waist of a new lady, not Gwen’s funny, loud aunt Jill, but a petite woman who stared at everyone with wide, scared eyes. Uncle Steve was a few beers in and correspondingly loose-lipped. “Jill had really let herself go,” he was saying to Gwen’s mother as she served him up some string beans. “You saw it happen. You understand.”

“Mmm,” Gwen’s mother said. “It’s a shame.”

(Years later, as Gwen watched Joanna’s deterioration over the course of her time in playgroup, the phrase “let herself go” kept ringing in her ears.)

“We hadn’t been intimate in so long—” Uncle Steve began as Gwen tugged at her mother’s sleeve, and Gwen’s mother startled.

“Oh, darlings!” she said. “What’s the matter?”

“We’re having some grown-up talk,” Uncle Steve said. “Run along now.”

Gwen’s mother pursed her lips, then smoothed Gwen’s hair. “Do you need me, or could you talk to Daddy instead?”

So Teddy and Gwen went to find their father. They knew exactly where he would be—at the bar.

Alcohol was her father’s most-cherished hobby. Her young, devoted mother was always an eager passenger on the drinking train for as long as she could manage to ride it—the “special treats” for which she saved her calories tended to be glasses of champagne—but her father was the engine that propelled it along. He was a solid man in his mid-forties who had played football in prep school, yet when he was crushing ice, shaving orange peels into delicate garnishes, and pouring out the perfect amount of whiskey into a glass, he became somehow lighter, almost a dancer.

While he had a sizable liquor cabinet in their town house in New York, the Connecticut house was where he truly indulged. He had hired men to block off a rectangular part of the basement and turn it into a wine cellar, complete with temperature control to keep the air cool. Beside the kitchen, in an area that had once been the breakfast nook, he had installed a wall of burnished, glass-fronted cabinets that held a collection of bottles. Gwen liked to put her nose to the glass, studying how the liquids changed in the shifting light, from sparkling gold to deep, deep brown. Near the cabinets, there was a freestanding mahogany bar, about four feet long, with little wells in it for ice buckets and the like.

Her father stood there in a light purple polo shirt, considering an empty glass, and the sight of him filled Gwen with the sort of relief that finally allowed her to burst into the tears she’d been biting back.

“Daddy,” she said, the words spilling out as Teddy stood beside her, his eyes also welling up like deep blue lakes. “Daddy, Peter was telling us about Aunt Alice, and . . . and . . . it can’t be true—it can’t, can it? That it happened like that, in the playroom?”

Her father’s lips tightened, and he shook his head. Then he put the glass down on the bar, knelt down, and opened his arms for them to run into. “I wouldn’t trust Peter,” he said into her hair, holding them tight. “He’s a little weasel.” He drew back and contorted his handsome face into a silly, rodentlike mask. Gwen managed a smile.

Teddy wiped his nose with his hand. “But what if she’s a ghost?” he said. “And she haunts the house and comes to suck out our souls?”

“I don’t happen to believe in ghosts,” their father said. “However, if Alice were a ghost, she would be a nice, fun one. She’d bring you cookies from the kitchen as a gift in the middle of the night and help you play pranks on your mother and me. All right?” He straightened up and looked at his two sniffling children. “So, no more tears, eh?”

“I’ll try,” Gwen whimpered as two more teardrops slid down Teddy’s cheek.

Her father glanced around the room to make sure they were alone. “Brave children,” he whispered, “can get a very special treat.”

Brother and sister looked at each other and swallowed their tears. “We’re brave,” Gwen said.

Their father appraised them and nodded. “So you are,” he said. “Now, don’t tell your mother.” He took two small glasses from a cabinet and filled them with ice cubes. Then he pulled a bottle of a clear liquid off the shelf. There was a drawing of a man all in red on the front of the bottle. Gwen thought he looked noble, like a character from one of the princess movies she liked so much.

“Guess what this man is called,” her father said, pointing at the picture.

“What?” she asked.

“A beefeater! Isn’t that funny?” He splashed the smallest amount of liquid into each glass, barely enough to cover their dimpled bases, and handed one to each child. Then he poured a heftier splash into his own glass and held it out. Teddy stayed back, but Gwen stepped up. “Cheers,” their father said, clinking with her. She took a sip, expecting the liquid to taste like water. The bitter bite of it made her recoil. Her father laughed at her body’s shudder, at her prune face. “Sourpuss!” he said. So she took another sip, masking her disgust, forcing the rest of it down. It made a fiery trail into her stomach. Little sparkles lit up her limbs.