Isabelle nods, but she is beginning to see double through her tears.

“Hey,” her father says. “It’s okay,” he says. “There’s nothing to be scared of.” He pulls her toward him.

He is glad that she lets him. She had been angry at him, he knows, for making her clear the dishes, and then for sending her to bed before it was her bedtime. Jimmy had seduced her, and she didn’t want to go to bed, but Wilson wanted to spare her the chaos that the look in Jimmy’s eyes promised, whatever form the chaos ended up taking. He hadn’t been surprised when later Jimmy broke the porcelain dish their great-aunt had left to Ruth, and then launched into his sister for leaving heirlooms out like that to be broken, and for hoarding the heirlooms, like the silver and all the other goods he knows she’s stashed away in some vault—Wilson is used to these tirades. But not to the violence; Jimmy has laid a hand on him only once before, and that was years ago, when he’d first come back from New Guinea. And though he’d tried, Wilson had been unable to spare Isabelle the violence. He pictures her standing in the living room doorway as he felt the branches of the Christmas tree against his back. The memory makes him hot. He tightens his grip around his daughter as if to reassure her of his strength, and she doesn’t pull away.

CHAPTER TEN

TEN

Saturday

New England is infinitely more dreary than New York this time of year. The sky seems lower. Everything looks thinner than it should—the trees, the posts of highway signs, the metal of the cars around them. The passengers in every car they pass are bundled up as if it were as cold inside their cars as it is outside.

Ruth pulls her own sleeves up and snaps the heat off. She sits back and returns her gaze to the scenery, but she can feel Wilson glancing at her, once, then again. She clears her throat as if of the irritation she cannot hide.

“What,” he finally says.

Ruth turns to her husband. “What?” she asks.

“What’s wrong?”

Ruth raises her eyebrows. “Nothing,” she says, but she cannot quite control the edge to her voice. “Why do you ask?” She blinks and looks out the windshield at the lines passing beneath their car. She sees Wilson shrug out of the corner of her eye.

“You could have stayed, you know.”

She rolls her eyes toward him. “Wilson.”

Wilson shrugs.

“What bothers me,” Ruth says after a minute, “is that he just shows up, and then he makes it out as if I’ve specifically asked him.”

“Well, you did, didn’t you?”

Ruth shifts in her seat. “I offered,” she says. “I said some weekend. I didn’t say this weekend. I would never suggest Christmas weekend. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve!”

Wilson sniffs.

“And of course I get made out as the villain in all this. Of course everything is my fault.”