Sam put her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth and began to cry. “Make it stop,” she begged her sister, still believing that because Liz was two years older, she had some sort of power over these situations that Sam did not yet possess.

Lizzie did not seem as bothered, and as she watched Sam’s discomfort, she giggled.

When Sam had had enough, she got up off the floor to leave the room, but Liz slammed the door shut on her, blocking her way.

“I want to go,” said Sam. “Let me out!”

Liz pushed her back, telling her, “You can’t leave. We’re not done playing yet.”

To block out the awful, incessant wailing of the invisible baby, little Sam slapped her hands over her ears, hating the sound, hating how loud it was, the way it crawled under her skin. But little Liz grabbed her thin, fragile wrists and pulled her hands away from her ears, forcing her to listen.

“You’re a bad mother!” Sam shrieked, trying to wriggle free from her older sister’s grasp.

Frowning, Liz let go; Sam, still squirming, toppled onto her side on the floor.

“I’m going to be a good mother,” Liz said, her voice so low that Sam could hardly hear it over the crying. “Now sit down and eat your cookies, Sam.”

Tears snaking down her cheeks, Sam crossed her legs and dutifully pretended to eat imaginary cookies while the baby’s wails echoed around them.

I shudder when I revisit the memory, hearing the ghost of the crying baby in my mind, and I wonder what sort of parent has left this child alone—and I wonder whether the child will grow up and remember, in a subconscious part of the brain, this neglect.

The wounds of youth never really leave us, I suppose. There’s no leaving it all behind because, even as adults, we’re still playing. And we’re not done playing yet.

The Atlantic is closer in my dreams, lapping up all the land between here and the coast, licking at the edge of the swamp as if testing the water. And the water is cold and gray and churning with furious whitecaps that roll in and roll in on an endless loop. And somewhere out in the middle of that vast gray ocean, underneath a colorless winter sky circled by crows, floats a throne like a lone island, buffeted and beset by waves but unmoving, immovable. And on that throne is a man, plagued on all sides by the relentless madness of the sea. Gray himself, with his eyes reflecting the dull gray waters, he is both familiar and changed, like a broken reflection.

It is Don and Not-Don, and looking at him hurts my eyes, as if he is slowly dissolving into not darkness or shadow, not exactly, but nothing at all. A nothingness that has come leaking out, as my father said, leaking out from the cracks in the world and replicated in every mirror of the house.