Already the snow whirling outside is climbing up the windows. Campus has been closed due to the blizzard, classes canceled; and I am marooned here in the house, with nowhere to go, with the rest of the world slowly dissolving beyond the white and the white and the endless white building up around the house. Campus is a distant blur. Shadydale is erased. Even the roads are gone, buried, and the cars in the driveway, so encrusted with tumorous growths of ice, will not budge. Don goes out again and again to take a hammer to the sheet of ice that has grown over his windshield, and I wince with each blow, thinking he will crack straight through the glass. A bucket of hot water melts the worst of it, but the tires will need to be dug out; they are glued to the frozen gravel. We are trapped in a house filled with ghosts.

Little Liz and little Sam scamper through the house, appearing and disappearing as ephemerally as steam from a teakettle. In the library, I look for a book to read and find instead my mother sitting in that old blue armchair with a half-empty bottle of wine—no, it isn’t now-Agnes but another Agnes, and she cannot see me, though I do not think she can see anything, as she stares blankly into the distance. Perhaps she can see my father hanging himself again and again, somewhere deep in her mind. And then I find her, again, this time in her reading room, with a watered-down highball, and I can smell the memory of bourbon as she shuffles her cards methodically. And I find her, again, in the dining room, snapping at little Liz to go to bed, to put Sam to bed, and it is midnight on the mantel as she goes to pour herself another. And I find her, again, sitting beside the cold ashes of the vacant fireplace, sipping on a glass of red. I pause to contemplate this memory, all these sad memories, wondering if the house is trying to tell me something, if only I could decipher its code.

At last, my mother looks up at me and says, “Are you just going to stand there and stare?”

“Oh,” I say with a jolt. “I thought you were …”

She does not ask me to finish. Instead, she holds up the bottle of wine at her feet, and I nod and go to find myself a glass, thinking that when I return I should really tell her to get a fire going, for the room is gloomy and chill without it on this darkening afternoon.

When I step into the hallway, though, I hear the ghostly echo of someone calling my sister’s name from somewhere else in the house. His voice rings out hollowly and dies away as I turn the corner, nearly running into Elizabeth herself.

She hisses at me as I open my mouth and pulls me into the next room, standing near the door to listen.