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My grandmother from Ireland used to live in a duplex in Richmond Hill. Her brother and his family lived in the other side of the house. The area's gone south now; you wouldn't want to walk there anymore. But back when I was a kid my sister and I used to spend weekends there once a month or so, and we grew so close to my two cousins, Oona and Deirdre. We were separated by a year: when my sister was 8, I was 7, Oona was 6, Deirdre was 5. Nearly every childhood memory I have includes those two; we paired up so well: Kathy and Oona, Deirdre and me. We matched temperamentally. We had each other's back, kept each other's secrets.

Grandma raised Oona and Deirdre; their mother, Maura, was never the nesting type, and she spent most of their youth working double shifts at a hospital in Queens, taking courses at City College. Then she moved to Saudia Arabia and worked as a nurse in King Faisal Hospital. She'd write my mother indecipherable letters on onion skin paper--the ink from one side obliterating the ink on the other. She wrote about men she'd met, or the gold tableware at the hospital (some of which made it to Dublin; by then Grandma had taken Oona and Deirdre and moved there.) She met her second husband there, and years later the two of them started her second family--launched it with twins, and a baby girl followed--and the five of them settled in a big house in Frederick, Maryland. I'd never have imagined Maura settling down among the cows and the corn. And yet, of course, that was what she'd come from as a girl in Ireland: that was home; land spells security. And it suited her at that age. She'd had her first girls too young. I think that must be the root of it all, somehow.

I don't remember why Grandma moved back to Ireland. Maybe Queens was heading south even then--maybe the family was concerned about her living in Queens alone with the two girls when Maura headed off to Riyadh. But I remember so clearly the day we took Grandma and my cousins to the pier and waved desperately as they floated away, and how we cried in the backseat on the drive home. We loved them like siblings; the parting was horrible. And it never stopped being horrible: we missed them until the day they came back, many years later, kicking and screaming because by then they were Irish teens, and they didn't want to live in backwater Frederick, where the boys wore workboots and big belt buckles. "Cultchies," they called them. Knackers.

They didn't think much of us, either. There was no ebullient hugging and shouting: they stood stiffly in front of us, quietly. Oona smiled. Deirdre looked at the ground, her face hidden behind her hair. It never got better than that.

Oona married and works as a public defender in the city, and I like and respect her, even if the connection is lost. She has two sweet girls, and we've tried a bit to match them up with Liam and Maisie, as if the past can be replayed. But our visits are awkward and infrequent--once a year or so.

Deirdre remained hidden behind her hair, and I came to feel that we'd done something horrible to her--something lost in the mists, something in our childhood that only she remembered. Eventually she fled to the other coast where she studied alternative healing. I don't know what she's doing now. Neither of them--Oona or Deirdre--has the rich memory of shared childhood that Kathy and I have. Neither of them remembers the holidays, the egg hunts, the water balloon fights, the pranks and the adventures and those wonderful monthly weekends together in Richmond Hill. At family functions in those early years after their return, we'd reminisce about a certain memory, and invariably they'd say they didn't remember and couldn't believe we did, only their sentiments came out as scoffing--not wonder.

"What happened? How could you not remember ten years of shared life? Did we do something wrong?" We'd ask them to their faces, and write them sad notes. They'd never reply. And so we stopped asking. But to this day it makes me sad, because they were such a part of my childhood, and their determined amnesia diminishes the value of my memories.

Which comes to mind now because today Liam and I are visiting my grandmother's grave; it's beautiful and breezy, and I want to. She's buried on a hill a few towns over. The stone is a beautiful, rough boulder--found by my uncle, who knows something about stones and how rare it is to find one like this. Because there's been some controversy about what to inscribe on the stone, there is nothing on it. Somehow that's just right: Grandma would like the simplicity.