His eyes wander from the drill to his father’s old toolbox to the trash can full of rags to the workbench he’d built from a kit but never used. Piled on this are loose screwdrivers, a level, a staple gun, a coiled hose and sprinkler, an emergency roadside kit, paddles for a canoe, which now is upside down and wholly buried under snow down by the swamp; winter came on so suddenly he’d forgotten to bring it in. He lowers his eyes, and he’s almost forgotten what he’s doing in here at all when he sees beneath the workbench, between a folded tarp and an ancient pair of ski boots, the chainsaw he’s been looking for.

The legs of the old piano bench are rickety. The piano is an upright, cherry wood. Half-moon ruts from fingernails scar the wood above the keys. A mug of cocoa steams on the lid. She is hot from shoveling, but her extremities are numb: her feet, her nose, her fingers. It is as if they are gone, as if her arms and legs both end in stumps. She has often heard that a chicken runs around even after its head has been cut off, that amputees can feel pain or itching in a missing limb, and she wants to know if, similarly, her fingers can play without her, or if she can play without her fingers, whichever it is.

Her mother is in the other room, but she doesn’t care. It is too much energy to care, to restrain herself from playing for no good reason she can remember. She wonders if there ever was a good reason, for any of it. Hearing her play will only make her mother happy. She can make her mother happy, wants to. And Maggie used to like to hear her play, would come and settle beside the bench, and if this is all she can do for her dog now, she will. Her father has explained to her that Maggie has a one-in-five chance, and though Isabelle has no use for probability, she takes comfort in these numbers, and the fact that they have nothing to do with her.

She looks at the keys, imagining where her fingers will go, and how the piece will sound, and then she holds her fingers just above them. They are red and swollen, her fingers, little sausages. She tells them to bend, and though she can’t feel them, or what she is sure must be creaking in her knuckles, they do. She looks at the cocoa atop the piano. The marshmallows will have melted already, and the bottom of the mug will have left a ring of fog on the wood.