I see my old house from a distance. There’s a soft orange glow in the high window where my bedroom used to be. I try to hurry but the ground is jagged and cratered. I jump from ruddy rock to dirt pile, dust flying all around. I stop short cliffside. I must descend crag and outcropping, then scale the opposite side by treacherous foothold before continuing on my way. No bypassing the escarpment, no escaping this dread.

My parents’ voices hush in the living room, me frozen in the shadowed oak hallway. My grandfather, the chemist, is dead. He and my grandmother were sipping martinis when he excused himself to make a quick work call. Went down to his home lab in the basement instead. Did my mother really say he swallowed cyanide? Somewhere, I heard it has a pleasing, almondy smell, that it kills almost instantly. Later, my mother will tell me he died from cardiac arrest.

I’m clutching a gold locket in my palm, heart-shaped with a carved lion’s head that my mother just gave me for my birthday, Valentine’s Day. I know it should be around my neck but it’s smooth and warm in my hand and I can feel the lion’s mane. The bright shine of the ruby in its mouth is how I like to imagine light from the red planet even though I know that’s iron oxide, not corundum. I set it down on the toilet tank just until I finish.

I’m walking to class in my purple dress with the violets, my hair in a French braid that my mother did for me this morning. The girls in the corridor are weeping, saying someone killed President Kennedy. They killed him. The boys look at their feet, hands dug into their pockets. He’s lost, says my science teacher, Miss Richards, as if he’s a precious thing someone carelessly misplaced. She holds us close, says we all have to stay strong. The air smells of spaghetti sauce and dishwater from the cafeteria and I feel like I have to vomit.

I hear my friends laughing and singing along with I Want to Hold Your Hand. Someone screams like those teenaged girls at Beatles concerts we saw on TV biting their fingers and fainting. I hear my friends’ parents’ voices too, giggly like mine get when they have a little too much burgundy wine. This is one of my favorite songs, so I flush, wash up quick, hurry back to the party. After everyone’s gone, I remember the locket, run upstairs, but see only cold white porcelain, no golden heart, no lion’s head, no sparkly Martian glint.

I’m glad my grandfather won’t know about JFK. He always called him a hero. Heard him speak once at a conference about his commitment to the sciences. I want to be a scientist one day, too. An astronomer. Of course I’m not glad grandpa died, even if he really did swallow poison. Why would someone do that while their wife was waiting for them in the other room, nibbling an olive from a tiny sword, about to check the chicken roasting with onions and parslied potatoes they’d sit down to eat as soon as they finished their cocktails. That heavenly aroma must have reached him even in his lab, made his mouth water. It must have been a heart attack. Red dust clogging his arteries. I must have misunderstood.