Until the day of the funeral, Marilyn has never thought about the last time she would see her daughter. She would have imagined a touching bedside scene, like in the movies: herself white-haired and elderly and content, in a satin bed jacket, ready to say her good-byes; Lydia a grown woman, confident and poised, holding her mother's hands in hers, a doctor by then, unfazed by the great cycle of life and death. And Lydia, though Marilyn does not admit it, is the face she would want to see last -- not Nath or Hannah or even James, but the daughter she thinks of first and always. Now her last glimpse of Lydia has already passed: James, to her bewilderment, has insisted on a closed-casket funeral. She will not even get to see her daughter's face one last time, and for the past three days, she has told James this over and over, sometimes furious, sometimes through tears. James, for his part, cannot find the words to tell her what he discovered on going to identify Lydia's body: there is only half a face left, barely preserved by the cold water of the lake; the other half had already been eaten away. He ignores his wife and keeps his eyes trained on the rearview mirror as he backs into the street.

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