“You’d be so easy to kill, Shell,” Brent had told her early in their time together. “You do the exact same thing every day. Same place. Same time.” They were in Atlanta then, and they’d laughed when he said this, and he’d pulled her in close. It was one of those days when she was aware of happiness; the sun was shining, the kind of golden light that makes even ugly things look good. He was teasing her, but it was true: the way she got up at the same time, made the coffee in the same way, used the same mug, parked in the same spot at work, parked in the same spot at home, sat in the same chair to watch the local news, and then circled back at ten to watch it again, to see if anything had happened or changed. He said that some nights when he came home from work, he could look in the window and see her there staring at the television, whatever was supposed to be for supper boiling or burning on the stove—teasing again.

Brent worked hard. He knew all about cars; he could fix them, and he sold them. When they first met, he even took Jason for rides in an old Mustang he had fixed up. He was someone with dreams about wanting his own dealership, and so Shelley made up some dreams, too, like she said she wanted to go to college and study plants and trees—“Botany,” he told her—but the truth was, she felt like she was at the beginning of her dream when he welcomed them in. He got irritable sometimes—that vein in his forehead and flared nostrils were a sign—but he never touched her in a hurtful way.

“I’ll knock you into next week,” her father used to say. “I’ll knock the daylights out of you.” There were times when getting knocked into next week had sounded good to Shelley, one slap that maybe would be the last one, sending you way up into the sky and landing in another time and another place. When she met Brent, she felt safe.

But now, she has trouble sleeping and, yes, she hears things, too. Now that Harvey has talked about it all so much, she has started listening and she also is hearing the sounds, though sometimes it’s hard to know if it is real or part of a dream. There is so much to think about and worry about that of course she might toss and turn, so she tries to relax, to think of peaceful things, like the ocean—she sells seashells by the seashore—or the way Brent sometimes sat and strummed a guitar, not really playing anything in particular but doing what he called “playing with playing.”