The trail divided the mountain into two townships: Tredyffrin, where Sage lived, and Schuylkill, our side. Sage’s side of the mountain seemed more affluent—houses were bigger and better kept. Schuylkill’s main town was Phoenixville, an old ironworks and steel-mill town at the bottom of the mountain. While we were growing up, steel mills were downsizing, laying people off, closing. Phoenixville suffered. Marie said the town was caught in a time warp: the 1980s had started, but Phoenixville was stuck in the ’60s, and there weren’t many prospects there for young people. On the mountain, Schuylkill kids went to Phoenixville High School and those on the Tredyffrin side to Conestoga, one of the best public schools in the state. We didn’t go to either. We went to Catholic schools closer to Philadelphia.

I spent most of my time on the mountain in the woods or walking down to Washington’s Headquarters. Thomas and I had tried fishing in the Schuylkill River, which ran alongside it. He said we could try for catfish or perch. We never caught anything, and the riverbank smelled like sludge, with hubcaps, old toasters, and other garbage visible in the shallows. On the mountain, off-trail, there were traces of old quarries in the woods, and at the bottom of my road, about a quarter of a mile in, was a deep ravine that used to be a quartzite quarry. They would mine the quartzite ore and bring it away to be crushed into sand. Quartz was everywhere on the mountain—giant glimmering rocks sitting on the surface of the earth and flashing edges jutting up from the ground, as if it were growing there. Dad had told me that in prehistoric Ireland, quartz was sacred and was buried with the bones of the dead.

After we left Ellen on the road, we drove up the mountain in silence. I watched the car’s headlights hit the trees as we turned the corners. Each time the car downshifted and slowed, I hoped my mother might be changing her mind, that she would turn around, drive back, and take Ellen off the road, that none of us would be angry anymore because we would be so thankful to have her safe in the car again. But we drove on. Lying in the wayback, Beatrice was the only one to speak.

“There’s no streetlights. How will she see the way home?”

Nobody said anything.