He continues to the nursery, though a large part of him wants to wake Isabelle and bring her with him to rummage through old things, just so he feels more certain that his rummaging is for her sake and not his own, so that what he finds are toys rather than relics, things not to reminisce over but to be put to use. But it is for her sake, he tells himself; he needn’t wake her so early to make it so. He thinks of the bingo machine, the old globe of a cage and the wooden numbered balls inside that roll out one by one with the turn of a handle. He imagines the three of them in front of the fire in the country, Isabelle cranking the handle and calling out numbers. Then he remembers his railroad set, the pieces of track he’d lay out across the nursery floor, around the life-size rocking horse in the corner, underneath the table where his sisters would sit with their puzzles. They could do this in the country, too, he thinks, excited now, pleased. These things will have new life; they’ve not been in retirement, but merely hibernation.

In the nursery, the wall of shelves still holds their childhood books, and the Oriental carpet lies thin as always and curled as always at the edges. A cuckoo clock hangs from a wall, across from the rocking horse. It reads 4:28. The hands aren’t moving, and Wilson wonders what hour it was when the cuckoo emerged from his home for the last time. The couch along the other wall is draped with a sheet, has been for years, but on the coffee table before it, usually bare, is some kind of magazine—an L.L. Bean Christmas catalog, Wilson sees when he picks it up, and from this year. He sets it back on the coffee table and gazes at the couch, imagining his mother sitting there, marking down pages: a bathrobe for Wilson, a pair of gloves for his sister. When Wilson and his mother speak on the phone, he pictures her downstairs in the library, the fire going, the TV on, the dog at her feet, clutter on the floor beside her armchair, or else he imagines her in the kitchen having tea. He wonders how many times when he has pictured her down there she has actually been up here, in this museum of the family’s past.