A woman recalls her Aunt Lauryn, a young midwesterner only four years her elder who traveled to Europe to study languages. While Lauryn is in Madrid, she meets and falls in love with a French actor, but when she becomes pregnant, the actor stops responding to her. Lauryn overdoses on pills to kill the baby, but is saved from death herself by a friend. After the French actor, Lauryn meets a race car driver named Macario in Portugal. Macario thinks Lauryn's Illinois accent is exotic, and the two get married. Macario rents a house in Estoril facing the sea and stops racing. Lauryn hopes that her marriage to Macario will keep him from returning to the dangerous sport. When Lauryn becomes pregnant with their son James, she goes home to seek help from her mother. Back in America, Macario is no longer the exciting man she thought him to be and Lauryn is just another Midwesterner. Lauryn stops taking her medication for depression while she is pregnant with James and does not resume the medication after he is born. When James is two years old, Lauryn dies by suicide in a hotel. At James's tenth birthday party, Macario tells Lauryn's niece about the police-taped phone call Lauryn had after she took the pills that killed her. On the tape, Lauryn has a conversation with her mother Hillis in which she makes sure James is fast asleep and safe. Lauryn begins to babble, and Hillis tells her to get some rest. Macario, after Lauryn's death, places the tape in a bank vault. Lauryn's niece visits Hillis. They do not talk about Lauryn but discuss mundane things such as the niece's editorial job. At a party one day, the niece sees the French actor whom her Aunt Lauryn had dated. When she tells the actor that her name is Lauryn, the man seems to have no recollection of her aunt. The niece wants to tell her Aunt Lauryn about this encounter. She envisions recording it on a cassette tape and having Macario put it in the vault with Lauryn's tape.