A few months ago, before Elizabeth showed up in the rain, when the house was still quiet with only Agnes and me tiptoeing around it, I saw little Liz and little Sam playing house in the nursery; the same room that so frightened my father when he woke up that night years ago to find, in his eternal silence, a baby crying in a mysterious crib. We never spent much time in there as kids, but it must have seemed the right spot to play house that day, with muted sunlight streaming in through the window onto the tacky yellow wallpaper.

Little Liz and little Sam were playing house. The elder wore a ratty old apron several sizes too large for her, and carried a rolling pin she’d found in the kitchen. She was the mother. She was nine.

Little Sam didn’t have any props but the picture book she carried in with her, and she was made to sit on the floor. She was the baby. She was seven.

When Liz noticed the book, she said, “Babies don’t read,” and took it away.

“Hey!”

“Babies don’t talk, either.”

Playing along, Sam simulated a baby crying and reached out for the book, which Elizabeth held just out of her grasp.

“You can have it when you’re older.”

“When will that be?”

“Quiet, Sam! You’re a baby!”

Sam crawled around on the floor while Liz pretended to cook in an imaginary kitchen, moving the rolling pin back and forth over the air and humming to herself. “The cookies are almost done,” she said. “Do you want some cookies, Sam?”

Sam nodded, for she could not speak. She was only a baby.

Liz handed her the imaginary cookies. “I’m going to be the best mom ever.” She was too young to notice the irony of the statement as she pretended to give cookies to a pretend infant, but I notice it when I watch the scene, and it makes me laugh.

Breaking her role, Sam pouted, “But Mom is the best mom ever.”

The look Liz gave her little sister was too old, too wise, a look noticed only when revisiting the memory many years later, when you start to see someone for who they really are and not who you perceive them to be. “Eat your cookie, Sam.”

Sam pretended to eat her cookie, looking a little disappointed that it wasn’t a real cookie, but not complaining, at least, because it was easier to play her role than it was to set off Lizzie’s temper, and it would be better for everyone if she just acquiesced so that Lizzie would like her and want her around.

And that’s when the crying started.

At first, Liz and Sam were delighted by the disembodied echo of a baby crying, because it was the nursery and they were playing house and why shouldn’t there be some realistic sound effects? Elizabeth clapped her hands and looked around, but it was only the sound of it, no baby to be seen. For a time they danced around the room looking for the baby, calling come out, come out, little baby, but nothing happened, and the crying rose to a wail, and an adult watching this scene might start to wonder what baby they were hearing, what time period it was coming from, who would neglect the child so completely as to leave it crying, crying, crying.