I cross the living room, toward the unpartitioned kitchen corner. Dimming light pours in through the sliding glass doors, as if there were some urgency to draining the light from the sky now that the sun was below the horizon. I never go out there. The light washes through the apartment in a golden glare that seems to darken and cloud the objects I see, as if it were smoke rather than light.

There is the short hallway, leading back to the bedroom; and there’s the bathroom door, the bookcase, and on the shelf, directly in front of my eyes just now, faded golden letters on a narrow black spine.

I pull the book down. It’s an old edition, dustjacket gone, frayed binding, pages smudged. I open to the first page.

The Purlieus

by Thomas Waveney

Grant Richards

London

1907

My own name is printed on the blank page opposite, in a child’s handwriting.

The book has some scant illustrations, all black and white sketches, mingled in with the writing. I let it fall open. Snowy Amworth is framed on the white page all squirming with black writing, rushing to her mother’s bedside—the book opens to it naturally, again and again. Even when I shut it, and try to put it back on the shelf, it seems to spring open to that page, obstinately returning to Snowy Amworth, who looked at the secret painting hidden in the wall, and whose neck snapped when she fell from a tree one golden afternoon, and whose likeness was stolen from her by the beast they had met together in the timeless glens behind a country house named The Purlieus. I close the book more firmly, pressing it shut with both hands, push it on to the shelf, but it slips from my fingers and drops to the floor. I don’t see where it went.

I get down on my knees to search for it, still in the gathering darkness and silence.