Next she sees her mother hurrying through the lobby, not checking to see that the door has closed behind her before dropping Maggie’s leash, and then dropping her pocketbook, and then shrugging her coat from her shoulders, shedding these things as she nears Isabelle as if in shedding them she will get there faster, leaving them all in her wake, finally kneeling also before her daughter and saying, Jesus Christ, do we need a doctor?

And then Brian is there, and he is holding her mother’s pocketbook, her mother’s coat, and he has gathered up Isabelle’s books, and Maggie is yipping at the end of her leash at the commotion, circling them, and then all of them are in the back elevator, because Wilson has jammed the door of the front elevator, and the back elevator smells of mildew, and they can see the bricks of the shaft passing as they rise in the cagelike enclosure, can feel the thunkthunk, thunkthunk of the ancient wheel turning high in the shaft above them, hoisting them up, up, and up. Isabelle puts a hand to her nose, and that slightest touch zaps back through her head like jagged lightning, blooming and branching in a sudden, shocking way that forces Isabelle to shut her eyes. Blood thunders through her brain.

When she opens her eyes they are all crowded at the back door by the garbage and recycling bins, Brian rattling through his giant ring of keys, but before he has found the key that will open their back door, the door opens in what seems a flash, seems to simply disappear, and hulking there in the doorway, a silhouette against the kitchen’s stark fluorescent light, is Jimmy, a large cutting knife in his hand.

“Fuck!” Isabelle cries, her heart pounding in fear, her head pounding in a matching pain. “Fuck!” and with that, it is as if she is released from whatever distant place she has gone, she is slingshotted into the now: Christmas Eve, their kitchen in the city, everything suddenly in precise and startling detail.

The smell of garlic is thick enough to taste. Water runs in the kitchen sink, giving rise to a cloud of steam that fogs the window above. A marbled rack of lamb sits on the table in a pooling sauce of wine and rosemary, the rib bones skinny fingers, clawing the air. On the stovetop, oven-ready, is a tray of new potatoes, the white flesh beneath the pink of their skins exposed where they have been cut in two. A spillage of flour dusts the countertop near the fridge, where an egg carton holds empty shells. Relief and disbelief at once surge through Isabelle’s limbs, which feel heavy and hot. Her head pounds, and she can taste the blood from her nose when she licks her lips. She blinks up at her uncle. “You’re cooking dinner?” she says.

II