“Oh Susannah,” I cried. “Hush now. Let us be friends again.”

Later—

I cannot sleep. Mother has just come in to bid Sue and me good night and left us shivering instead. She was frightened by something, and walked about our room agitated, not pausing to look at us, nor even to finish a sentence, but moving from window to mantel, to bookshelf, and then back again. Once she stooped transfixed above the tiny needlepoint rug between our two beds. “Mother,” Sue begged. “Come sit down.” And she patted the side of her bed. But Mother gave no notice she had heard, and continued her aimless pacing about our room. Then, she stopped suddenly, as if commanded by someone we could not hear. She nodded in agreement and then turned to us and smiled.

“Can you hear it, girls?”

“What, Mother?”

“Listen. There is a child crying.”

“Where?”

“Out there.” She put her hands over her mouth.

“Out in the woods?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, and threw up the window. The frigid air swept in with the buoy bell’s clang. I listened for such a sound between the scraping and sighing of the trees. The bed creaked as Susannah sat up. And Mother had turned her head, pressing her ear against the upper panes of glass, her hands on either side of the window frame, an awful midwife to a ghostly delivery.

And then I heard what might have been a tiny wail, as a sleeping child first calls for attention on waking. And then it grew louder and larger, as though the child walked forward toward us through the trees; still, it was just sound, a long wave of sound, until it built up one more notch and the word began; the word came clear to us finally through the window.

“Mama!” And again, “Mama!”

And then the cry was cut off.

In the silence that followed, Susannah moved again in her bed, and the sharp snap of the wooden bedstead gave me a start.

“Did you hear it?” Mother’s voice was low and insistent.

I nodded in the half dark, unable to trust myself to speak.

“No, Mother,” Sue said very gently. “It was only the wind in the trees.”

Mother closed the window and drew the curtains once more across the glass. Then she turned to Susannah.

“Why cannot you hear?” she asked in amazement.

Susannah shook her head, fingering the blanket up around her chest. For an instant, I thought she meant to speak, but a great sob shook her, and she suddenly buried her face in the blanket.

“Oh Mother!” she wept. “Mother!”

No child could cry as pitiably as Susannah did that night, such wrenching sorrow as I have never heard from my sister. And our mother stood transfixed by the sight, seemingly unable to step forward and comfort her, her firstborn, her best-loved.