So the house curled in on itself, a cowrie closed off to all others. The rooms unpeopled, the library, the drawing room, every corner and hallway and stair. At night Kevin haunted the empty rooms. He pulled Oscar into bed with him and slept beside the dog despite the sand, despite his breath, despite whatever he’d rolled in the day before. For what other comfort was there on a winter night alone in a big house by the sea? The moon stared in through every window, accompanied him into each room; entered casements and double panes, so that in each quarter, there it was painting a glass here, a vase there, a picture frame, a mirror. Any shiny surface welcomed it: the toaster, the pier glass in the hall. And who knew, on a winter night like this, beneath the waves, beneath the moon, the ocean continued its business under layers of foam and ice, the dark machinery churning with one eye on the planets, the other on the land; and in the littoral zones, directly in the bay, hadn’t he seen in summer days, the clear aquarium beneath the waves, a brilliant aqueous garden of seaweed and bladder wrack, and strands of orange hairs? The white hydrangea-leafed water plant that looked like bridal veils (like bridesmaids standing under the sea), the green velvet tubes called “dead man’s fingers”? Who knew on a slender night in February that life continued under there, silent and unseen by human eyes?