I had always done likewise, taking nothing into that room but light and loveliness, all of us sworn to tempt my father back into the life he’d had before. The life we’d had before he’d been hurt.

But I brought him something different on the day when Quiet was born.

Sun slanted through the window by the bed to light his thin, still face.

I watched him breathing.

And then I dumped the pitcher of cold water on his head and chest and waited for him to revive, as Quiet had.

“Mother!” Esther shrieked from the doorway, dropping her book and rushing to the bed.

My mother flew in behind her.

Saw me with the empty pitcher hanging from my hand.

Saw my father drenched, the wet bedclothes glued to his bones.

“Ellie!” she cried. “What’s the matter with you?”

She rushed to the bed and pulled my father into her arms, warming him against her chest, while Esther tugged away the wet bedding behind him . . .

. . . and I stood frozen in place, riveted by the sight of my father’s right hand.

It was twitching, just slightly.

Chapter Eight

“They aren’t the same,” my mother said when my father was once again dry and the room once again a place apart. “The puppy . . . what happened just now . . . they’re not the same.”

“But why not? I saw his hand twitch. The water woke him up a little!”

I knew how tired my mother was. I knew how much she wanted my father back. And I knew that it vexed her if anyone shook what she tried so hard to make calm. But I was sick and tired of calm. “He moved, Mother. For the first time since he got hurt.”

I wanted her to be hopeful. To say, at least, “Maybe. It’s possible.” But instead she took me by the shoulders and said, “A body does things with or without our say-so, Ellie. Your father’s hand twitched because you made it cold. That’s all.”

But I wasn’t convinced.

“What if he’s trapped in there and we could give him a way out?”

She looked half sad, half impatient. “We do that every day,” she said. “Every day.”

She meant by speaking softly and reading to him. The feel of his small son tucked up against him. My hand in his.

“All we give him are lullabies,” I said, though I didn’t want to make things worse. “Why would he wake up for those?”

She took her hands from my shoulders and stepped back. “Go apologize to him,” she said.

Which made no sense. If he was too deeply asleep for cold water to slap him awake, how could he hear me say I was sorry?

And that, right there, was the first time I understood how complicated hope could be.