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When Dad comes home that night, Mom sends Melissa and me to our rooms. We meet up in Melissa’s.

“I feel like I’m ten years old, getting grounded for talking back,” I say.

“Same,”

Melissa says.

“Since when did you ever talk back?”

“When I turned ten,”

Melissa says. “You missed the spicy stuff.”

“A likely story. You were always the good girl. I don’t even know how to die right.”

I pause. “I even ruined your birthday party.”

“What birthday party?”

“Your spy party, remember?”

The party was notable because usually Missy didn’t want to celebrate her birthday like that. Mom would always offer to host friends or pay for a bunch of kids to go ice-skating or trampolining, all that regular stuff. But Missy declined, preferring a quiet family dinner with us and Aunt Pauline. But the year she was turning ten, she wanted to have an actual party. She spent ages working on assumed identities for all of us. She had plans to decorate each room differently. And then on the night of the party, we were going to spy on each other to try to figure out who was who. It made no sense to any of us except for Missy who’d worked out all the details.

The guest list was pretty much the same people—our family, Aunt Pauline, and also Calvin. When she showed me Calvin’s hand-drawn invitation with his assigned character, I’d scoffed, “This is why you don’t have any actual friends to come to your party.”

Thinking about it now, I’m disgusted with myself. Why was I such a bitch to her? Also, maybe it’s the new perspective that comes with being dead for seven years, but a spy party sounds sort of cool.

“What day is it today?” I ask.

“April 28,”

Melissa says.

“You’re turning seventeen soon!”

She smiles ruefully. “In a few days.”

“Do you have exciting plans?”

“Not really,”

she says, but the pink dots in her cheeks tell another story, and I wonder if my sister has a boyfriend.

“Let me rephrase: Did you have exciting plans before I reappeared?”

Her cheeks are tomatoes now. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Turning seventeen is very much a big deal. And I should know, I’ve done it. I can’t speak for eighteen, though.”

Melissa rolls her eyes. “Death turned you into a comedian.”

“I believe it’s called gallows humor.”

“You are living in a fantasy world!”

Mom’s voice booms through the house.

Melissa and I stop talking and put our ears to the door, though it’s hardly necessary.

“No, I’m living in a miracle world,”

Dad shouts back, his voice equally loud but jubilant. “None of what mattered before matters now.”

“It does, Brian. Life goes on for everyone else. Remember, we learned that after passed and people got tired of dealing with us, dealing with you.”

“Why are you stirring that up? That’s all in the past. In a different life. Nothing that existed before applies. We’re living in a post-miracle world.”

“Will you listen to yourself!”

Mom screams.

“Will you listen to yourself!”

Dad shoots back.

Melissa opens her door. “If you shout any louder, everyone in the neighborhood will listen to you,”

she calls. “I’m not sure why you sent us to our rooms if you’re going to scream.”

Mom’s sigh is so gusty you can practically feel it tunnel down the hall.

“Come on out, girls,”

Dad calls.

I look at Melissa, who nods, and I follow her, as if she were the older sister.

Dad opens his arms to hug us both. “There are my miracles.”

He turns to Mom, who is sitting ramrod straight on a chair. “You used to call them that, Gloria.”

“That was different. All children are miracles.”

“I don’t know. I’ve babysat some kids who were definitely borderline non-miracles,”

Melissa jokes.

“Did you really tell Father Mercer I’m back?”

I ask Dad. Unlike Mom, I’m not upset. Maybe he’s right and Father Mercer is the exact person to talk to. Even if he can’t convince Mom I’m real or whatever, maybe he could help me understand. And then I could help Calvin see I’m back, that I’m not some demon, and this would make him whole again, which would make me whole again. We could get married like we always said we would. Father Mercer could officiate.

“No. He wouldn’t have believed me,”

Dad replies. “But I told him a miracle of the ages has happened in our household and that he needs to come over to witness it for himself.”

“When is he coming?”

Melissa asks.

“Never!”

Mom replies.

“He said he’d come by Sunday after church,” Dad says.

“No!”

Mom shouts. “You have to cancel.”

“Now, that would look suspicious,” Dad says.

“Then put him off. Tell him the miracle is that you believe in God now. If that is what’s happening.”

Dad beams at me. “I believe in . How can I not?”

He turns to Mom and in a softer voice asks: “How can you not?”

Mom jumps up from her chair and, shaking her head in dismay, says, “Go to hell.”

Dad watches her leave and then turns back to us, his smile a little brighter, a little faker than it was. “Don’t worry, girls. She’ll come around.”

To me he adds, “Your death was particularly hard on her.” He says this as if he sailed through it, as if he didn’t accuse my boyfriend of murdering me and then go crazy trying to prove his theory.

I’ve been waiting all afternoon to ask Dad about Calvin, but suddenly, it seems less important to rehash the past than to figure out the present. And present-tense Dad is happy. I want that for him. I want that for both him and Mom, for me and Calvin. So I let it go.

“I’m going to make upside-down dinner!”

Dad announces. “Blueberry pancakes, bacon, home fries, the works.” And with that, he bustles off to the kitchen.

I look back down the darkened corridor. Their bedroom, now Mom’s bedroom, is at the end of the hall, the door shut, the Do Not Disturb sign hanging ominously. “Is there something we can do to help Mom?”

I ask Melissa. “Like where’s Aunt Pauline? Why isn’t she here?”

“I think she’s in New Zealand still.”

“When is she coming back?”

Aunt Pauline was always traveling, working for years as a flight attendant, and later, when she realized she wanted to be able to really see the places she flew to, quitting that job to temp for my dad’s company. She’d work, save up, go off for a few months until she ran out of funds, come back, lather, rinse, repeat.

“She lives there now.”

“Really?”

No matter how far Pauline wandered, she always promised to come back. She said we were her base. “But New Zealand’s so far away!”

Melissa stares at her hands. “I think that’s the point.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mom and Pauline, they don’t really speak anymore.”

This is even more shocking than Mom and Dad’s separation. Mom practically raised Pauline. They needed each other. Losing her would be like losing a child. And Mom had already lost one of those.