Wilson pauses at his dresser, his hand on the light switch. The bottom of his nightshirt wavers in the draft from the window, and she can see where his leg hairs end at his sock line. She pictures him crouched with Isabelle on the lobby floor, the helpless look on his face as he held their daughter, who could hardly catch her breath through her tears, and it makes her want to run and hold them both again.

Wilson turns off the dresser light. He is a dark figure making his way to bed. “Now what?” he says.

She feels the mattress sink under his weight. “What do you mean?” she says, although she knows what he means. He means, what will they do next? He means, what will happen tomorrow? He means, yes, their daughter said Dad, and fuck, and you’re cooking dinner?—but will she speak again? “I know what you mean,” she says.

There was a time when she imagined that any word coming from Isabelle’s mouth would be a burst of light, a sunrise, the beginning of a new day on which they’d embark full force, leaving the silent night behind them; she feels instead as if they are beginning a march through a minefield, where any misstep might be the end of them.

“I think,” she says finally, “we just have to take each day as it comes.”

Wilson nods.

“We don’t know what will happen,” she says.

“What about school?”

“First, tomorrow,” she says. “Tomorrow first.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THIRTEEN

Christmas Day

I

They stand, the three of them, shin deep in snow, their eyes slits against sun that seems to come at them from all directions, the morning an explosion of light. A bird cries out somewhere in the woods behind them. A branch cracks. A gust of wind blows a shimmering cloud of snow from the needles of an evergreen.

“Well,” Wilson says.

The apple tree lies horizontal before them, snapped at the trunk. Jagged splinters rise from the stump.

“Firewood,” he says, shrugging.

Ruth turns to him. “Don’t joke.”

Isabelle lifts the shovel from where she’s stood it upright in the snow. She looks at the path she’s shoveled to get them here, a perfect line from house to tree through an unbroken field of snow. She turns and sets off shoveling toward the swing set.

Ruth follows the path back to the house.

Wilson stands where he is. A bird lands on a branch of the fallen tree and stops to preen beneath its wing. Wilson thinks at first it is a robin, but it is only December, Christmas Day. The hook for the hammock juts up from the tree’s trunk, the silver glinting in the sunlight. The bird looks up at Wilson, puffs itself, and flies away.