I suddenly remember being about seven, riding beside him in the car, and asking him how grown-ups found their way to places. After all, I had never seen him pull out a map.

"I guess we just get used to taking the same turns," he said, but I wasn't satisfied.

"Then what about the first time you go somewhere?"

"Well," he said, "we get directions."

But what I want to know is who got them the very first time? What if no one's ever been where you're going? "Dad?" I ask, "is it true that you can use stars like a map?"

"Yeah, if you understand celestial navigation."

"Is it hard?" I'm thinking maybe I should learn. A backup plan, for all those times I feel like I'm just wandering in circles.

"It's pretty jazzy math—you have to measure the altitude of a star, figure out its position using a nautical almanac, figure out what you think the altitude should be and what direction the star should be in based on where you think you are, and compare the altitude you measured with the one you calculated. Then you plot this on a chart, as a line of position. You get several lines of position to cross, and that's where you go." My father takes one look at my face and smiles. "Exactly," he laughs. "Never leave home without your GPS.

I didn't want to see her because it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it's hard to remember who I am...

It's raining.

the kind of rain that comes down so heavy it sounds like the shower's running, even when you've turned it off. The kind of rain that makes you think of dams and flash floods, arks. The kind of rain that tells you to crawl back into bed, where the sheets haven't lost your body heat, to pretend that the clock is five minutes earlier than it really is.

Ask any kid who's made it past fourth grade and they can tell you: water never stops moving. Rain falls, and runs down a mountain into a river. The river finds it way to the ocean. It evaporates, like a soul, into the clouds. And then, like everything else, it starts all over again.

In the end, though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own.

Or at least this is what I tell myself.

Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven? I mean, if it's Heaven, you should be at your beauty-queen best, and I doubt that all the people who die of old age are wandering around toothless and bald. It opens up a whole additional realm of questions, too. If you hang yourself, do you walk around all gross and blue, with your tongue spitting out of your mouth? If you are killed in a war, do you spend eternity minus the leg that got blown up by a mine?

I figure that maybe you get a choice. You fill out the application form that asks you if you want a star view or a cloud view, if you like chicken or fish or manna for dinner, what age you'd like to be seen as by everyone else. Like me, for example, I might pick seventeen, in the hopes I grow boobs by then, and even if I'm a pruny centegenarian by the time I die, in Heaven, I'd be young and pretty.

Once at a dinner party I heard my father say that even though he was old old old, in his heart he was twenty-one. So maybe there is a place in your life you ear out like a rut, or even better, like the soft spot on the couch. And no matter what else happens to you, you come back to that.

The problem, I suppose, is that everyone's different. What happens in Heaven when all these people are trying to find each other after so many years spent apart? Say that you die and start looking around for your husband, who died five years ago. what if you're picturing him at seventy, but he hit his groove at sixteen and is wandering around suave as can be?

Or what if you're Kate, and you die at sixteen, but in Heaven you choose to look thirty-five, an age you never got to be here on Earth. How would anyone ever be able to find you?

I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store—ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's knees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family.

Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all.