“Isabelle.” Her mother is hissing now, her voice sharp and quick. “I’m sorry,” she says to the exterminator, and Isabelle can hear her footsteps coming across the tiles. She shuts her eyes, tight, withdrawing into herself. She feels her mother’s grip firm on her arm, trying to make her stand up; she clings even more tightly to her knees. “Isabelle.” Her mother’s voice seems distant now, belonging to a world different from the one Isabelle has entered into. She can feel the tiles sliding beneath her and her mother’s hands firm beneath her arms, and then she feels the tiles give way to carpet and then wood, and it splinters her bottom, but she does not yield. She does not uncurl herself, and she does not open her eyes, she will not open her eyes to see the world seeing her reduced to this, this cruel, silent rock of a child dragged across a floor.

II

The phone rings four times before it’s answered; Wilson can hear a dog barking and the shriek of a teapot beginning to whistle, the unmistakable sounds of his mother’s house, before his mother finally speaks. “Hello?” she says. The familiarity of her voice always strikes him; every time they speak, it is as if he had forgotten what she sounds like, and to hear her is like remembering a good forgotten memory.

“Mother,” he says. “It’s Wilson.”

“Wilson!” she says. “I was just making tea. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Wilson says. “How are you?”

“Oh, well, it’s frightfully cold, and poor Teddy cut his paw on the ice and the salt on the driveway hurts him dreadfully—can you hear him?—and I’ve got some French cousins coming this afternoon, and some of them might stay the weekend, but I never know what anyone’s doing.”

“How is the horsewoman working out, what’s her name?”

“Oh!” Wilson can hear the clink of a spoon against china. “Sharon! She didn’t understand the horses. I don’t know what a person like that is thinking!”

“You got rid of her?”

“She was dreadful.”

“She was there for all of a week, Mother. She came highly recommended.”

“Well, I don’t know by whom. I certainly don’t recommend her.”

Wilson sighs. “So now no one’s there to help?”

“Sue comes by. It’s fine.”

Wilson lifts his pen and makes a note to call his brother; his mother is too old, he thinks, to be walking an icy driveway twice a day with buckets full of feed.

“How is Isabelle?”

Wilson sits forward in his chair to doodle, circle after circle. “The same,” he says.

“Still not speaking, then.”

“No.”

“Hmm. And Ruth?”

“Ruth is fine, I think,” Wilson says. “Considering. Maggie’s not, though. The vet called this morning. The biopsy was bad. She may need more treatment.”

“She ought to see Dr. Marks when you come up. No more of this city veterinarian nonsense.”