He shuts the door behind him and goes to the staircase. He looks down the stairs; the light from the kitchen just illuminates the foyer. His mother’s dog lies on his bed in the corner. Wilson coughs once, and the dog opens an eye. He is uninterested. Wilson then looks up the stairs to the third floor, where the hall light has been glowing for Isabelle all night. This floor was the children’s floor; it is where Wilson and his brothers slept, where they played in the large nursery playroom. In a closet off the nursery are all his old things, his model airplanes and stuffed animals and building blocks and an old-fashioned bingo machine. Some of this stuff, he thinks, might interest Isabelle.

His footsteps are muffled by the staircase carpet. It has been treaded thin in the middle and faded over the years into a color Wilson can’t name. It used to be green—or it may have been more of a golden color, he can’t quite remember now. In the hallway, he passes his oldest brother’s room on the right, another older brother’s on the left, then his youngest brother’s, and then Samuel’s, who died the same year as their father, which was the year Isabelle was born. His own room is the last before the nursery. There are stickers on the door still: a Red Sox sticker, a Nixon-Lodge sticker, a sticker with his own name, handwritten. Inside, the walls are still pasted with the fire engine wallpaper he chose at age six, the bed the same he slept in, the little red dresser in the corner the one he kept his clothes in. Aside from being emptied of many of their things, all the Carter boys’ rooms are the same as they have been for more than forty years, but hollow, dusty, barren, and cold, like some abandoned village. If he were Isabelle, he would never have chosen to sleep up here alone, but the fact that she is here, just on the other side of his door, is comforting. Her presence up here makes it seem more like a place than a memory.