A Map of Days

(excerpt) PROLOGUE: It's strange, what the mind can digest and what it resists. I had just survived the most surreal summer imaginable--skipping back to bygone centuries, taming invisible monsters, falling in love with my grandfather's time-arrested ex-girlfriend--but only now, in the unexceptional present, in suburban Florida, in the house I'd grown up in, was I finding it hard to believe my eyes. Here was Enoch, splayed upon our beige sectional, sipping Coke from my dad's Tampa Bay Buccaneers tumbler; here was Olive, unstrapping her lead shoes to float ceilingward and ride circles on our fan; here were Horace and Hugh in our kitchen, Horace studying the photos on the fridge door while Hugh rustled for a snack; here was Claire, both mouths slack as she gazed at the great black monolith of our wall-mounted television; here was Millard, my mother's decor magazines rising from the coffee table and splitting in midair as he skimmed them, the shape of his bare feet imprinted into our c