It was not that she would not talk to them. After her long sleep and long walk the days patterned again to a resemblance of what had been but she fooled none of them, not even the boy. She was brisk, never brusque, blunt with her statements, directions, admonitions or corrections. There were no odd misplaced sighs drifting from her mouth mid-meal or mooning empty eyes glazed off into a distance only she might see. There was none of that and yet she was not quite there. As if she moved with an invisible glass of water balanced on her head, the water perhaps the liquid of all the cries, the withered shriek, the discharge of her soul, that she believed hidden from her family. Even when she raised her voice there was no emotion to it but simply a rote thing: the child spilled milk, command him to clean up after himself. Less walking through motions than some vacancy at the center of herself that all the outer layers could not completely shroud. This lack in her spread out to those around her, and the days tightened with the nut of anger drawn up a shaft of despair. The sisters fought bitterly over small things out of earshot of her and then subdued, worked with a frenzy visible to their father but not their mother to accomplish what must be done and even what might be done before she might notice it. As if their action might assuage her, ease her back, perhaps even just cause her to notice how deeply wrong things were. Jamie went through a rough patch, clinging and tearful, and his mother would take him up, hold a handkerchief to his nose, command him to blow, wash his face and utter her soothe, the same words that worked only months before, but she would now set him free and not see his eyes working over her, as he sought to find the mother he knew in the familiar form turned inside out. Or outside in. Sometimes Norman thought the boy knew better than all the rest of them what was wrong with her. More than once felt the impulse to draw the boy off, take him up to the sheep pasture with the hope someway that what the boy knew might come clear to him.

Norman with an anger swinging loose and wild and tamped down, all at once. What conversation he held with Leah he grew quickly to hate. There was nothing there but a perfunctory response. He felt played with. He felt it was not her doing the playing. But did not know who else it might be. His anger was selfish also; he felt too old for this. He was trammeled, bludgeoned, wrought to a fine spin. There was nothing he could do. He admired her skill. He blamed everything, most of all himself. For what exactly he did not know. She did not so much continue to refuse to speak of her travels as ignore his questioning. There was nothing to be said. The world was a short squat globe, tiny, that daily peeled away more and more of itself, as a vast endless onion of fine incalculable skins. Smart to the eye, right up through to the brain.