The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides moral man to evil . . .

But the words are meaningless on the page. Mother has set down her sewing and rocks in her chair, her arms tight around her own body. “My boy, my boy, my boy,” she says. “My own, my darling boy.”

The long night is unendurable. The women grow quiet. No one goes to bed. Asia wraps herself in a quilt and thinks again of the cocoon of snow, how it pinned her arms. She might have died if John hadn’t been there to pull her out. She would probably have died. People do die in the dangerous cold, only steps from their own front doors. She hates the cow he’s gone to buy. She hates the Parkers for offering her. She thinks that if something has happened to John, she will never get over it.

“I remember,” Rosalie says suddenly. “I remember when Henry died.”

“Stop that,” Mother tells her.

“I remember it perfectly.”

“Not another word. I warn you.”

It’s been years since anyone mentioned Henry’s name in Asia’s presence. She knows about these dead brothers and sisters, but the world they lived in is an imaginary one, the world before her. They don’t feel dead to her; they feel like something in a book or a dream.

“You can’t have him,” Rosalie says.

“What?” Asia asks, but Rosalie isn’t talking to her.

“I won’t listen to this.” Mother’s voice is shaky but shrill. She rises, staring at Rosalie. Then she leaves the room, her shoes scraping against the wood floor as if she can’t even lift her feet, as if she’s forgotten how to walk.

“You can’t have him,” Rosalie repeats, talking to the air, and Mother returns, wringing her hands together. She barely makes the doorway before she leaves again. Again returns. Asia can see that if John doesn’t come home, all three of them will go mad. They will die of starvation here, in the house that Father built, each one madder than the next.

—

In the morning, the snow is no longer falling. The sun rises and that pink and yellow is reflected on the clean, white page of the yard. Icicles hang like teeth from the window frames. Asia is leaden with exhaustion. She melts a bowl of snow on the parlor fire, takes it upstairs to wash the night from her face. When she brushes her hair, a knot of it remains in the bristles. She feels as listless and limp, as resigned and hopeless, as the possum they’d trapped. She tries to think of the very last thing she’d said to John, but it was too ordinary to be memorable. Nor can she remember what he’d said to her. What she remembers is how he’d once said that she’d marked him for a martyr’s death. Would this be that, frozen to death while trying to feed his family?