She blinks. That was a year ago. What in the next three months had happened? What had gone wrong? What had steered them so drastically off course that they are where they are now? Ruth frowns. That picnic was the last time they’d been to the Marsh Marigolds, she thinks, and she wonders what other things they have allowed silence to let them neglect. She has tried to have them go on with their lives as normally as possible, given the circumstances, but that has been mostly in regard to larger things, like Wilson’s birthday dinner, for instance, or celebrating the Fourth of July. She has neglected the little things, she sees now, things like the Marsh Marigolds and homemade macaroni and cheese and trips to the ice cream store or the zoo, things that seem pointless if they are done without joy. In the face of Isabelle’s silence, these things came to seem small and insignificant. Who last spring wanted to go to the Marsh Marigolds when as a family they were so crippled by this new silence? Who wanted to go to the zoo? Instead, they have withdrawn into their separate quarters, waiting for things to get back to normal, each of them staring outward from him-or herself and into the vast silence between them. Last spring, instead of a trip to the Marsh Marigolds, a typical Sunday would have involved Ruth out weeding, Wilson tucked away behind the Sunday Times, Isabelle upstairs in her bedroom or else drawing in the corner of the living room, each of them as guilty of silence, really, as the next.

Ruth steers the car around the sharp bend in the road just before their driveway, surprised to find herself already almost home. It seems to happen to her more and more these days that she isn’t aware of getting from point A to point B—she has no recollection of stopping at the stop sign before turning onto their road, or of changing gears to make it up the hill—but she knows she must have done these things to get to where she is. She slows down in front of Mr. Sullivan’s old house, where she sees in the yard a man and boy rolling snow into the approximation of a man. The man has bent down to hoist a very large midsection up off the ground, but when he settles it down on the snowman’s base, it shatters into clumps of snow. The boy throws his hands into the air and then rests them on top of his head before letting himself fall backward into the snow. Ruth blurs her eyes; the two of them could be Isabelle and Wilson, those two whom she left sitting silently by the fire.