When both of her boys were babies, the doctor talked about the Moro reflex, how infants’ arms go reaching and grasping at the air as if something invisible is there to pick them up. The doctor said that it probably went way back to the beginning of time, babies reaching for the comfort of their mothers, kind of like the way Harvey always booby-traps her when she reads his story, one hand on her arm so that as soon as she tries to slip away, he wakes. The Moro reflex is the only fear humans are born with, the doctor told her; everything else is learned. The Moro is like those jerks and shivers you can’t help and people say a rabbit ran over your grave, the kind of thing she would never say to Harvey these days, the way he is so scared of everything, especially ghosts, or the ghost he thinks lives in their yard and comes in their house.

With a cemetery practically across the street, it’s all even worse. It’s a pretty cemetery, some really old parts with great big trees, beautiful really, and Shelley has taken a lot of walks there since renting this house. It’s peaceful in the daylight, like when she stopped to watch the funeral, but as soon as the sun starts to go down, the cemetery has a different feel to it, and so she closes the curtains and locks the doors, turns on the night-lights in the hall and in the bathrooms. “It used to be one of the best parts of town,” a colleague at work had told her, not saying what was implied: But now it’s not. But compared to some other places Shelley has known, it had seemed fine, and the rent is reasonable, and there’s a big yard, and, no, it’s not as big as the house they used to live in with Brent, but that was another town, another life, and now, according to Google Maps, that house doesn’t look so hot either. This house will be okay once they feel settled. It takes time to feel settled, especially if you’re the only adult.