When I returned to Evendale I discovered a catatonic shell in the shape of my father. He never spoke, scarcely ate, slept nearly eighteen hours a day. I insisted to Rita that a hospital was the only place for him; there he could receive not only medical attention but (perhaps even more importantly) psychiatric care. Rita, despite asking for my help, stubbornly refused to admit Dad, stating that this was a family problem and therefore could be fixed by the family. I suppose I should have protested more passionately, but I didn’t. It seems I also inherited the same caginess that Rita possessed. Perhaps it’s a symptom of growing up in a small town, but propriety and fear of scandal, however slight, always seems to automatically trump common sense.

Three weeks ago, Rita and I finally agreed that hospitalization could not be put off any longer. Dad had always been a strapping man, so his rapid mental dissolution was a sobering and painful wake-up call to my sister and me.

The night before we planned to drag Dad off to receive help, he snapped out of his depression. Late that night my sleep was broken by the clanging of pans and the thudding of cupboard doors. Rita’s bedroom door was shut when I walked past it to investigate.

I switched on the kitchen light and found my father preparing a goulash so redolent with spice I teared up the moment I entered the kitchen.

“Dad?” I’d said to him.

“Hungry?” was his reply.

I told him no, then watched as he left the ingredients to simmer on the range. He sat down at the kitchen table and asked me to switch off the light. I did, and together we sat in the lunar glow from the window, listening to the food hissing in its pot.

“Can’t sleep,” he admitted, answering a question I never posed.

“You’ve probably been sleeping too much.”

“Well, I’m awake now.”

Something in his choice of words unsettled me.

“Your sister told me that Sadie-Anne next door boarded up her house a couple of days ago.”

“Yes, I saw that. Any idea why?”

“Probably to become a pit-canary like the others.”

I swallowed what little moisture there was in my mouth. “Why are people running down there, Dad? What are they running to?”

His silhouette shrugged.

“I know about the glow down there, Dad. Rita told me. Is that what the pit-canaries are moving to the mine for? Are they looking for the light?”

If my father was fazed by my questions, he contained his emotions, just as he had always done with all things. Dad: even-keeled, stoic, strong, like a lake of still black water.

“I think maybe they’re after what’s on the other side of that light,” he answered at last.

“What’s beyond the light, Dad?” Worry and tears mangled my voice into something thin and reedy. “What did you see down there?”