Beside her bed there was a blue book with gold lettering on its cover: the role of conchology in the study of mollusks. She lay down on the bed and flipped through it, looking at the images, remembering her mother's oak display case, from which magical sliding drawers of labeled sea shells emerged. The many drawings that Helen had made of the shells; her mother's stories about the lives of the animals that had inhabited them. Their entrancing names: Spondylus americanus (the spines, the colors of white through red), Conus episcopus, (a magnificent brown and white cone-shaped shell), the comb-like structure of the Pectinidae (the pink scallop shell that she had painted with watercolors).