“The groceries,” Ruth says. “Isabelle, would you get the door, please?”

Isabelle’s eyes shift back and forth between her mother and her uncle, uncertain.

“Please?” Ruth asks.

Isabelle hurries to the door, leaving Jimmy and Ruth alone in the kitchen.

“How long have you been here?” Ruth asks her brother.

“Hour,” he says. His eyebrows lift and sink, lift and sink, as if he is trying to clear his eyes of a nasty vision.

“And how long are you in town for?”

“Just the weekend. Monday’s Christmas.” He loudly clears his throat of phlegm.

“It is.” Ruth takes Jimmy’s mug from the table. “More coffee?” she asks.

He nods.

“If you’ve been here for an hour,” Ruth says, pouring the last of the coffee into Jimmy’s mug, “you’ve probably gathered that Isabelle isn’t speaking these days.”

“Course not.” His tone of voice is almost scornful, as if silence were a phase every child went through, like puberty. Ruth looks at him questioningly. He clears his throat and leans toward her. “She’s a mystic,” he says.

“A—” But she stops short as Isabelle enters the room, bent over double beneath the weight of the grocery bags she’s slung over her back.

The buildings across the park jut jaggedly into the horizon like a jawful of crooked teeth, it seems, the sky itself, then, the gaping hole of a throat open wide to the world, so wide it’s nearly inside out. Like Isabelle’s lion, Wilson thinks. He sighs: Isabelle’s lion. They’d grabbed that one by the coattails, all right; Ruth is right, he sees that now. But who can blame them? It was nice to have coattails to cling to at all; now it’s just the three of them, free-falling.

All day the sky has been clear; with nightfall it seems that the air itself is clear—though air always is, he thinks—but it seems tonight that he can see farther, that things are in better focus. He imagines he can even see figures in the windows of those distant toothlike buildings, vacuuming or cooking or putting things away. One year, Isabelle charted the season’s progress by keeping record of where on this horizon the sun set each day; with the approach of winter, he remembers, it moved farther and farther to the left until it seemed the sun was nearly setting in the south. He wonders where the sun is setting now, behind which two buildings over there, and he realizes that yesterday was the solstice, and so the sun has begun its journey back to the right and days will slowly start to swell with light until they all are nearly drunk with it, everyone outside late and marveling that a day could go on for so long. Though winter has only just begun, Wilson finds comfort in the thought of the sun, at least, starting to make its way toward the spring.