She gets up from her chair and wanders to the fridge, pausing when the phone rings as if to answer it—but she catches herself as she reaches for the receiver, looking at her outstretched hand as if it were something separate from herself. She hasn’t answered the phone in such a long time, she thinks, long enough that she’s surprised that the impulse to answer when it rings still exists somewhere inside of her. It is because she was distracted, she thinks; she was thinking too much of her cocoa to remember her silence. What would have happened, she wonders, if she had picked up before she realized what she was doing? Would sound have made its way from her throat just as her hand had made its way to the phone before she could stop it? She blinks at the phone and finally lets her hand drop back to her side. If she had spoken now, that would have been 289 days of silence.

She swallows and opens the refrigerator door, scanning the shelves as she tries to remind herself of what she’d been looking for: orange juice, hummus, cold cuts, carrots, salsa, grapes, pizza left over from Sunday, Chinese left over from who knows when, a jug of milk. She pulls the milk from the fridge and pours just a small amount with cocoa into a mug, her stomach yearning now, and she has just put the mug into the microwave when she hears a knock at the back door.

Isabelle leaves her cocoa still cold in the microwave to hurry to the den for her mother. She knocks on the door only after she has already opened it so as to get her mother’s attention; her mother is on the phone, but she looks up at the sound of the knock and places her hand lightly over the mouthpiece.

“Back door?” she asks.

Isabelle nods.

“Jimmy,” she says into the phone. “Listen, I’ve got to run…. No…. I will, Jimmy…. Listen, I’ve got the exterminator at the door and he’s not going to wait around…. I don’t know if we have a bug problem, Jimmy…. No…. Good-bye.” She hangs up the phone. “My brother,” she says, getting up from her desk. “I swear to God.”