My brother Andrew was never more to me than a round face in a baseball cap smiling out of a photograph on our living room wall. It was the last picture ever taken of him; a month later he drowned. The wall was papered with faded flowers, but the roses behind the frame stayed fresh, and I used to think they kept Andrew partly alive. I would stand in front of the photograph and talk to him, ask him the questions no one would answer for me, about what he had been like and why he had died before I had a chance to meet him, what his favorite color was and whether he thought our mother Lydia was crazy like some people said.

We were different somehow, and not just because of Andrew. Neither of my parents worked, though both were forever busy. I was told that we "managed" on stocks left to us by my grandfather, which the family lawyer kept turning into money. My father was an inventor of gadgets that never quite worked, and Lydia was an opera singer who'd once had the voice of a nightingale, until Andrew died and she left the stage. She was the most beautiful mother I knew, but she never drove the carpool or went to PTA, hardly ever left the house at all, living in a silent, faraway world which neither my father nor I could enter.

"Is Lydia mad at us?" I once asked him, when I was no more than seven and Lydia had not come out of her room for two days.