Molly and her half brother Kenny are obsessed with a Niagara folktale about an Indian girl who is sacrificed in the Falls. Then Kenny plunges to his death on the night of their high school graduation, and Molly, in despair, marries Kenny?s best friend and flees to arid Southern California. Molly becomes a drunk, while her husband flourishes as a San Bernardino car salesman. Forced to return home for her father?s funeral, she begins to uncover a different version of her troubled past, one full of family secrets and frustrated love. She begins to believe that Kenny is not really dead, and that her mother and her husband never loved her. Molly longs to swim away into oblivion, and in the gripping conclusion to Niagara, she has to decide if she will become the heroine of her childhood fantasies.