She takes Maggie’s leash and watches Isabelle work the laces, her bare fingers raw and red as they fumble numbly with a knot. No gloves and no hat, Ruth thinks, shaking her head. She laid them out for her, but Isabelle opted not to wear them; now, Ruth can tell from the color of her fingers and her red-rimmed ears, Isabelle is paying the price. Three times Ruth watches Isabelle drop the lace with one hand to sweep the unruly hair from her face, only to have to begin again the bow she is trying to tie; finally Ruth squats down to tie it for her. “Gloves, dear,” she says. “Gloves would help.”

They both stand when Ruth has finished, and before heading on, Ruth pauses to look at her daughter, her red face and that mop of hair. She has offered to take Isabelle to get it evened out, or shaped into some semblance of a haircut, but Isabelle has declined, and Ruth doesn’t have the energy to fight her. If that is the way Isabelle wants her hair, for whatever reason, then fine. And if she doesn’t want a Christmas dress this year, then that’s fine, too. Ruth pictures Isabelle at any of the Christmas parties they usually go to each year, dressed among the suited guests in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, her hair wispy and electric with static. How will they explain this silent child at their side while in the other room the rest of the children have gathered to suck on their candy canes and watch Christmas movies? What on earth will they say? How much easier, she thinks, if this silence had a name, something technical and scientific that in a single word would sum up this enormous, amorphous, nameless thing!

“Come on,” she says, taking Isabelle’s hand, though she says it more to herself than to her daughter, a reminder to keep on going.

Isabelle follows, or, rather, she lets herself be led, taking in everything around her as if she hadn’t seen it all before. Steam curls from an open manhole in the middle of the avenue; men in hard hats stand around it, feeding some kind of hose down to the worker below, the top of whose hard hat Isabelle can just see jutting up from underground. Construction barricades block the area; drivers honk at the delay as the flow of traffic slows to maneuver its way around the site. The sidewalk is congested, too, with holiday vendors; at one table, a vendor sells art books wrapped in plastic, and at another table an Asian man with no hat or scarf himself, Isabelle notices, is selling the very things he lacks. He must be cold, she thinks; she is cold without a hat or a scarf. But part of her understands why the man might suffer the cold even with all the wares before him, as if by donning a hat or a scarf when he has started the day without he is somehow surrendering—though to what or whom, Isabelle isn’t sure. The cold, maybe, or the wife at home who advised him to dress more warmly, or to himself for giving in to the temptation of warmth the goods that he is selling provide.