Now, of course, I don’t have just Elizabeth to worry about, but Don, too, and how he will react if something should happen to his child. In another few days, the weather will turn, and it will seem as if Don has always lived here. Already he has made himself quite at home, busybodying around the house, asking about the door on the third floor that he found stuck when he tried to wrench it open.

“Oh, that room is locked,” my mother told him nonchalantly.

“How come?”

“I don’t suppose I know,” she replied. “It always has been, and we don’t have the key.”

“I bet I could bust it down for you.”

“I bet you will not,” she warned him.

When he pressed for a reason, I asked why we should need to get into that spare room. Certainly Don does not need to insert his presence into every corner of the house. Let some secrets lie. “Is this place not large enough for you as it is?”

His face was wry and daring. “Actually, it is sensible to close off any rooms you don’t use, especially in big old houses like this one. It’ll conserve heat in the winter, and I hear we’re due for an unusually cold one this year. Even with four of us here, I bet you could shut up half of this house and still have more than enough space to get lost in.” He looked around, then, warily, as if he did not trust this rambling old mansion with its creaking floorboards and ancient, groaning pipes. He was right, of course; he shouldn’t trust it.

But he looked at it as if it were a beast to conquer and make his own. I didn’t like it.

Luckily, he was to find reason to leave the house soon enough when Elizabeth asked how he would work, if he was staying here—the commute would take hours if he went into the office. Don had been working from home several days a week when I was living with them; it seems one needs only the right sort of equipment for his work, creating medical databases or something of that nature—I’ve never really asked. It’s all ones and zeros to me.

“I can set up my rig in any of these rooms,” he replied.

“But there’s no internet.”

After my mother shot down the possibility of him calling the cable company to install wireless, he looked aghast. “Well,” he said at last, “I’m sure I can get something done if I bring my laptop somewhere with a connection. There’s got to be someplace in town I could work.”

Mother claimed she didn’t want to pay for internet service, but I know it was rather that she feared the intrusion of all that electrical energy from the outside world crackling invisibly through the air, bringing its charged, negative vibes into her domain. She would be able to feel it, she confided in me once, crawling along her skin like insects.