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I wouldn’t be coming here tomorrow. I had a better idea, one that had been sitting quietly in the back of my mind for I wasn’t sure how long. Maybe always.

I would still do my six laps or something like it. Up at the lake, it would be harder to measure, but it would be better in so many ways.

It would be still and peaceful.

It would be Band-Aid-free.

It would be other things, too, but I wasn’t going to think about that now.

I wasn’t going to think about the empty streets and the broken buildings, the way they had turned themselves over to fish and weeds and who knows what else. It didn’t matter what was down there below me in the quiet dark. Everyone knew that swimming was about staying on the surface.

When I got home, Dad had a finger in someone’s eye and another in their ear.

I dropped my bag on the floor of the studio. “So, who is it this time?”

“Guess.”

I stared at the clay shape in front of him and shook my head. I never got it right. Then Dad got all offended, said it was a shame I couldn’t share his artistic vision and started jabbing disturbingly at the face with his sharp little tools.

The problem was, there didn’t seem to be anyone who shared Dad’s artistic vision, including the tourists he stopped on Main Street because they had such interesting heads.

When Dad presented them with their clay head, which always managed to look both like them but not — as if they were slightly out of focus or something — they nodded thoughtfully. They took a step back, sometimes two, and said things like
Oh, how interesting!
and
Well, you’ve certainly put a lot of work into it!
and
What’s that lumpy bit on the side there?
Then they checked their watches and muttered something about
Not much space in the car
and
Wouldn’t last two minutes around the kids
and
No, no, you keep it
and
Oh, please, I insist
.

Usually, the heads ended up in our backyard, their weird angles and smashed features staring out from bushes and long grass and the forks of gum trees, like some kind of creepy zombie museum.

I studied the misshapen lump of clay. Was it even a head yet? Maybe that bit in the middle was a nose? On the other hand, it could just be a blob Dad had left there by accident.

I grinned and shook my head.

Dad sat back on his stool and sighed. “I probably shouldn’t be doing this now, anyway.” He motioned at the mess of half-finished work piled around us, all the pots and plates and other touristy knickknacks he was supposed to be getting ready for the summer tourist season.

He had to finish the firing and the glazing. Then he had to get it all into town, packing it carefully so it wouldn’t shatter on the way or develop hairline cracks that would give the tourists who wandered into Country Crafts Gift Shop a reason to bargain down the price.

Dad clapped his clay-caked hands together and stood up slowly from his stool, wincing as his knees clicked in protest. “Nearly dinnertime. I’d better wash up.”

“Yeah.” I bent down to unzip my bag. My damp towel was balled up in there. I needed to hang it up before Mom came along to issue her gentle reminder.

Dad glanced at me. “How was your swim?”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “Seven.”

“Seven?”
He let out a low whistle. “Yuck.”

“Tell me about it.” I followed him out the door and down the hall.

In the kitchen, Mom was stirring a thick soup on the stove. “Did you do your six?”

I slid into my chair. “Yep.”

“Okay?”

“Yep.”

She turned. “Hang your towel?”

“Yep.”

“Good.” She smiled.

“Hey, Cass. Check this out.” Hannah was at the table, her work satchel hanging over the back of the chair.

Her laptop sat open in front of her, precariously balanced on a pile of papers.

She reached underneath it and pulled the top sheet from the pile. It was a newspaper article — faded and brittle-looking, as if it might flake into tiny pieces at any moment.

I glanced down at the date. It was old. Twelve years old, in fact.

There was a headline —“Welcome to New Lower Grange!”— and a grainy black-and-white photo: two people holding a bundle of something.

Two familiar people. Mom with a tired smile, Dad with a deer-in-the-headlights expression.

A bundle of me.

Hannah grinned. “I was just telling Mom.” She made air quotes with her fingers. “‘First baby born in New Lower Grange.’ You’re going to be in it, Cass.”

I stared at her. “Me?”

I didn’t need to look at Hannah’s laptop to know what she was working on. It was the centenary book. Everyone in town knew about it. In the first place, it was that kind of town — so small everyone couldn’t help but know everyone else’s business. In the second place, this was the biggest news to hit New Lower Grange in as long as I could remember. The centenary of the town. Both towns, really.

Twelve years here, our teacher Mrs. Barber said, and eighty-eight . . .
you know
. She waved a hand toward the window in the general direction of the lake.

They had realized kind of at the last minute — that twelve plus eighty-eight equals a hundred. That it equals a centenary and another opportunity for a bunch of ceremonial sausages and a really lame brass band. That they had only a few short months to get ready.

A few weeks ago, Mrs. Barber rushed into class with a panicked expression. She cleared her desk and wiped down the board. She told us to forget about Antarctica and penguins and global warming and the soap-making business we had been looking forward to all year, because Lower Grange was celebrating one hundred years of history, and we all had to do our part. We had to do handprints and mosaics. And eight-hundred-word essays entitled “My Lower Grange” with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end, which would be sealed into a time capsule and dug deep into the ground for future generations to laugh at.

“See?” Hannah interrupted my thoughts. “It’s going to be a kind of before-and-after. The growth of our town and all that. You’ll be here.” She scrolled with the mouse and pointed to a double-page spread that appeared on the screen.

“Cassie,” she had written, in short, hurried text. “First baby, etc.”

The middle. That’s where I’d be, drawing the line between before and after.

“There’s a lot of work to do.” Hannah sighed. “But Howard says it’s coming along nicely.”

I nodded. Howard was Howard Finkle, the mayor of Lower Grange for the last seventeen years and counting, the man who’d flipped the lever to drown the old place. Hannah worked for him down at the town hall, putting together brochures telling tourists about the “vibrant arts culture” and the “laid-back country lifestyle,” and writing press releases about all the fantastic things the town council was doing for our community.

Elijah always teased Hannah about her job. Spin, he called it. Finkle-spin. Making the town council look good. Making the mayor look good.

Finkle’s face was on all of Hannah’s papers, smiling out from the corner as if he was watching over the town and everything that went on here. He was that kind of guy — always smiling and joking and popping up anywhere, anytime, especially if there was the chance of a party or a ceremonial sausage or two. When we did Jump Rope for Heart at school, he came along and turned the rope for us. When we had Sports Day, he ran in the parents’ race, even though his kids had grown up and moved away years ago. It was funny to see him hurl himself down the track, panting, his tie flapping loosely around his neck like a flag gone mad in the wind.

I stared down at my grainy photo.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before. In fact, I had a copy of that exact photo stuffed into a box under my bed — the box Mom thought was tucked away,
out of sight, out of mind,
in the shed.

“Moira and Andrew Romano,” the caption read, “welcome Baby Romano. First New Lower Grange Baby! Sister to Hannah and Elijah.”

Baby Romano
. I rolled my eyes. That was my name back then. Mom and Dad said it was because I was so early, that they hadn’t had time to settle on anything, that they were giving it long and careful thought, trying to find the exact right one.

But I knew the truth. I had seen Hannah’s photo album — bright pink and tied in ribbon, full of elaborately displayed cards and photos and the letter Mom had written to
My dear Hannah
on fancy notepaper months before she was even born, her curly name just sitting there, waiting for her to arrive.

I’d seen Elijah’s as well — shiny and blue and bursting with school photos and colorful slips of paper where Mom had jotted down notes about his favorite stewed vegetables and his sleep times and random cute things he had said when he was two.

And a birth notice carefully pressed onto the opening page. “Brother to Hannah,” it read. “A perfect pair — the Romano family is now complete!”

My own so-called album was stuffed underneath them. It was one of those plastic display folders Mom used in her classroom, with a handful of school photos and a couple of old crayon drawings crammed in the front.

They were going to make me a proper album one day, she said. When they had time. When they could get their heads around the whole thing, the whole thing that was me.

Because it wasn’t just that I was early. I was unexpected, too. I was accidental.

By the time I came along, Mom and Dad were done having kids. Hannah was twelve, and Elijah was ten. Mom had gone back to teaching history at the junior high school, and Dad was expanding his pottery hobby into a business.

When I was born, they smiled tired smiles in the newspaper and named me
Rachael, no, Isobel, no, Sarah, no, Cassandra and maybe Cassie for short, yes, okay — well, I guess that’s that, then
.

Later they said things like
lovely surprise
and
happy accident
and
Oh, we just kept on trying until we finally got it right
.

But I knew.

That I was extra. I was tacked on the end.

That our real family happened before, that it was over now, underwater.

Mom leaned over my shoulder. “What a photo. I look exhausted!” She pressed one hand to her temple and rubbed an imaginary spot. “No wonder, I suppose. All those weeks in the hospital. That horrible incubator. Thank goodness that’s all behind us!”

I nodded. Yeah. All I had to deal with now was the endless struggle to breathe. The endless swimming. The endless Band-Aids.

“Hey!” Dad pushed his way through the door. “We going to eat or what? I’m starving.”

Mom waved the ladle at him, sending tiny specks of soup flying through the air. “Minestrone.”

“Great.” Dad rubbed his hands together.

Mom smiled. “How’s it all going?”

“Good.” Dad threw a look at me. It was a look I knew, one that said,
Don’t tell her about the head.

I wouldn’t have, anyway. People need secrets, I figure. People need things that are only for them.

In a quiet corner of my mind, the lake spread out, silent and still.

After dinner, in my room, I pulled the box out from under the bed, shuffling it slowly across the carpet. I eased the lid off and stared down at the pile.

It had been a while since I’d looked at all of this — the newspaper clippings, the photographs, the crooked hand-drawn maps.

Even my old Atlantis drawings were down at the bottom somewhere, buried under the layers.

I guess that was fitting, if you thought about it in a certain way.

I reached down into the pile. This had all been organized once. It had been sorted by date and place and category.

There had been a point to it back then.

It had kept me busy. It had kept me sitting happily in a corner of Mom’s history classes for a whole week one year when my school vacation didn’t overlap with hers.

She was teaching her seventh-graders about the flooding of Old Lower Grange — about the discussion and debate, the town meetings and the protests. She said history was important, that you couldn’t understand the present without thinking about the past. She stood at the front of the room and wrote on the whiteboard:
How can you know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been?