PAGE AND THE DOGS are nowhere to be seen or heard. I hope they don’t return from the groomer anytime soon, and my attention continues to land on the sports equipment rather sloppily tucked in the corner to the left of the door.

I see the fishing pole, and the baseball bat is wooden not metal. The baseball mitt is leather, and it, like wood and dry skin, is a good insulation against electricity. I also notice the empty hooks where Sock and Tesla’s leashes hang, and it prompts me to send a text to Page:

DO NOT return home until U hear from me.

Carrie wouldn’t hesitate to hurt anything we care about, including Page, including our pets.

“I’m going to show you,” Carrie is saying to Desi as I continue to monitor the backyard with the cameras.

I watch the spinning drone hovering over my sister’s head, and Carrie touches the display of the flight controller. The drone makes a vertical assent, and at the same time I see the conductors lowering, four of them so fine they’re barely visible, like thin gray pencil lines with something round and dark weighting each at the end.

Eerily the conductors vanish from view on and off. All I see are the round weights floating in space like tiny dark planets, and I think of the round burn on the back of Briggs’s neck.

“I’m going to show you something cool,” Carrie says to Desi, returning the flight controller to his unwilling hands. “But first you need to do something for me. An experiment. See the bottle of water on the table? Go pour it on Granny Dorothy’s head.”

“No.”

“Do it.”

“No.”

I pick up the fishing pole.

“You need to learn how to be brave. What’s wrong with you? It looks like I’m going to have to toughen you up.” Carrie’s face is transformed by anger. “See what happens when you’re raised by inferiors? Well that’s all about to change, Desi.”

I’ve been fishing a few times in my life, mostly with Marino, who went to great lengths teaching me how to cast. I’m pretty good with my hands, and I flip back the bail on the spinning reel as I walk out the back door. There’s a chance the spinning blades will cut the leader and the line but I also know that even helicopters avoid monofilament. Lucy is careful flying low over beaches because of kites and helium balloons attached to hundreds of feet of fishing line.