Later, Isabelle lies in bed with her eyes closed, an ice pack across her nose, waiting for the pain in her head to subside. A tray with dinner and a glass of milk sits untouched on her bedside table. In the kitchen, her parents sit with Uncle Jimmy; she can hear the click of the cutlery and the distant hum of their voices. Periodically, one of them comes in to check on her, holding open her eyes to peer in at her pupils, which are still not big and black enough to mean concussion. She doesn’t think they’ll get that big; the pain has diminished enough that she imagines that if she could see it, it would be quite beautiful, her brain like one of those clear globes slivered through with pink electricity. She is sure that this image would not have occurred to her earlier, when it was all she could do to sit down at the kitchen table before her legs buckled beneath her, the noisy coursing of blood like little subway cars thundering through her head.

Though not as noisy as the sound of her own voice crying out Fuck! and before that Dad! She opens her eyes. Two hundred ninety-nine days of silence broken just like that, and nothing had happened. When she thinks about it now, she’s not sure what she’d been expecting, what exactly she’d been afraid of; in this case, all that had happened was exactly what she wanted to happen: her father heard her, and he turned around. She frowns; what she could not achieve through force of will, she achieved through speech. She hadn’t meant to speak, but out the words had come, and now that she has spoken, she has no excuse not to speak again. She knows now that she can. And her parents know it, too. What’s puzzling to her is that while Dad and fuck had been accidental exclamations, it was she, Isabelle, and not panic that had caused her next utterance: You’re cooking dinner? Those words had come so easily, as if Dad and fuck had punctured the balloon of her silence, had broken some kind of spell.