“Is he still up there?” Elizabeth asks me when the sounds die down. We listen for footsteps creaking down the stairs, for the whirr of a power drill—for his voice, shouting at shadows.

Reverting to the silence of sign language, I ask her if she would like me to go check. She throws me a quick negative.

Conversing like this, speaking without speaking, makes me feel like we are conspiring together. If we always spoke in sign, the house would be silent as the grave. My mother would surely approve. That way, we would never hear echoes of ourselves calling out, talking, laughing, bickering. How lovely it would be, to embrace the quiet without that fearful jolt that comes when a voice whispers just behind your ear or wakes you from your bed with a start. Here the air is infected with small, strange, unbelonging noises such that even the quiet is uncomfortably met, such that my sister has set her teeth on edge, wanting to remain quietly out of mind of her husband while abhorring the very quiet she must inhabit, the very quiet that characterized our childhood with my mother shutting off the radio whenever she ambled past, and snapping the strings off little Lizzie’s guitar, and grabbing her arm to stop her racing, stomping down the hallway after me.

I sign, Should I ask him to leave?

Elizabeth gives it a moment’s thought. He won’t go, she signs at last—clumsily, haltingly, returning to a half-forgotten language from her youth. Her hands are like question marks, asking me if these are the right shapes.

But you don’t want him here, I sign back, marveling at how quickly my fingers remember their old tongue.

Elizabeth shrugs dismissively.

You don’t want him around your son, I try again. She frowns, trying to decipher my code, then purses her lips together. He is a bad influence, my fingers draw in the air. He is a bad influence on J-U-L-I-A-N. We haven’t made a sign for his name, so I have to spell it out.

Then maybe we should just stay away from him, I sign at last, when it is clear that Elizabeth will not respond to my assessment. It is a big house.

My sister shrugs again, an acquiescent or indifferent shrug. Then she says, out loud, perhaps having tired of going two minutes without hearing her own voice, tired of the ambiguity of an unspoken conversation, or perhaps because she wants me to hear it said: “You’re worrying too much again. Stop that.”

Does Elizabeth ever worry? Of course she does; don’t be silly. She simply doesn’t let it control her, I think. She doesn’t hunch her back protectively against the side-eye given her by the Shadydalers in town; she doesn’t perform small rituals like checking the locks three times before bed, or grabbing the oven dial to be sure it’s in the off position, or fretfully picking the dirt out from under her fingernails; she doesn’t carry around small amulets for good luck; she doesn’t crouch at the end of the hallway with a candle in her hand, waiting for the beast to come slouching through his home.