Her daughter says nothing, though Ruth didn’t expect an answer. Isabelle hasn’t spoken for nine months now. She has been to countless doctors and psychiatrists, but nothing seems to help, to penetrate the silence. Ruth is sure that she is somehow responsible. There are images that haunt and tease: Isabelle at two, sitting alone on the edge of the sandbox in the same blue overalls every day, watching as the other children play; Isabelle at four, sitting small among her preschool classmates, glancing often at Ruth with her book in the corner to make sure she hasn’t left her there alone; Isabelle in tears on her first day of kindergarten when finally Ruth arrived to pick her up, ten minutes late. Isabelle had taken literally her teacher’s joking threat to turn the stragglers into chicken soup, and she had nightmares for months. Of all days, on that day, Ruth should have been on time. And maybe she shouldn’t have stayed with her daughter at preschool, the only parent, until April, when Isabelle was finally ready to let her go. Maybe she should have gotten into the sandbox with her daughter and helped her to make friends instead of allowing her to sit as a spectator until she was comfortable. She’s read countless books on parenting, trying to figure out just where she went wrong, and how she can make it right. Each book tells her something different: she should discipline, she should tolerate, she should encourage independence, she should allow for dependence—and each book points to a mistake. Where she should have tolerated, she disciplined instead; where she should have disciplined, she didn’t.

She lifts the cutting knife and begins to chop the second onion. She hears the back door whine open and waits to hear it close; it doesn’t. “Shut the door!” she yells. “You’re letting out the heat!”

Wilson appears in the kitchen door with a bundle of firewood in his arms. “What are you making?” he asks.

“Split pea. Could you please close the door behind you when you come inside?”

“My arms are full. And I’m going right back out,” he says, passing through the kitchen into the family room. “I’m going to bring another load in.”

“Yes, well, in the meantime I can already feel the draft.”

Ruth sets her knife down and goes to shut the door herself. When she comes back into the kitchen, she sees Wilson crouched at the hearth, building a fire. “It’s fire season, Belle,” he’s saying. “I thought you might like a fire. Doesn’t that sound good?”

Isabelle doesn’t look up from her drawing. Ruth watches as Wilson balls up newspaper to set beneath the logs. “Don’t forget to open the flue,” she says.

Wilson says nothing. When the wood catches flame and a steady fire is going, he stands up and takes a step backward.