But Isabelle is awake still. Sleep tonight seems impossible. She lies on her side in bed, facing the clock, watching the colon blink between the numbers that stand for hours and those that stand for minutes. She hears her father call for the dog, and then she hears the rattle of Maggie’s collar and the clumsy sound of her paws against the carpet as she scrabbles down the hall, always eager to go out in snow—only eager to go out in snow. She hears the elevator groan in its shaft as it ascends to their floor, and then she hears its doors thud shut with a sound that seems to Isabelle somehow final. She shudders and rolls onto her back, takes a breath, and then gets out of bed. She crosses through the unlit room into the bathroom and sits down on the lowered toilet lid. The bathroom tiles are cold beneath her feet, and so she pulls her knees to her chest inside her nightgown. The room is cast in a tinny glow from the streetlamps outside, and the blurry shadows of the topmost branches of the huge oaks that line the park waver on the ceiling. A garbage truck squeals to a stop outside; she listens to the hiss and steam of its iron arms as they close in around garbage bags piled on the curb, the rumble of the garbage tumbling into the truck.

She looks at the mirror above the cabinet in front of her. She is too low to see her own reflection, but she can see the wall behind her, and a drawing hanging there that her father did in pencil years ago. She squints at the drawing in the mirror; she has not looked closely at it for some time. It is of their apple tree, and it is perfect. It is fading and a little bit water stained, and she thinks that tomorrow she should take it down and put it somewhere safe, since now the apple tree is dying. She lowers her eyes from the mirror to the cabinet, behind which she keeps all her old sketchbooks. She loves to go through this cabinet, but she will not do it often; to go through the cabinet is a special treat, a special activity that if done too much will lose its magic. Right now she knows too well what is inside: old bath toys, shells that she collected from Hilton Head, a box of rocks she collected at her grandmother’s house after she died, a mustard-colored basin her parents bathed her in when she was a baby, an old set of curlers, a sewing kit, a box of bobby pins and barrettes, sample perfume vials. She wants to forget about these things, so that in a few months, some day when she is at home alone, she can rediscover them all.