Instead, she smiles and laughs a little too loudly and raises her voice over whatever is going on in her head, and she doesn’t look at the snow creeping up the windows, darkening the early-afternoon room to something akin to twilight. She doesn’t watch the snow burying us here, and she doesn’t get up to check how high it is now, how many inches have fallen.

And she doesn’t flinch, as I do, when the lights blink off as one, and leave us in this gray purgatorial dusk like television static. When my mother finds us, she mutters about the finicky old wiring, and she flips light switches on and off as if the rapid clicking will ignite them. “Sam, help me get a fire going.”

With the firewood we had stashed away ages ago hauled over to the fireplace, my mother manages to light a spark while I crank open the flue.

In the distance, Don’s voice comes to us, shouting about the power, that he needs light to finish the crib, and I hear him stomping down to the basement where he thinks he will find the breaker, and where he will indeed find the breaker, but he will also discover that flipping it will do no good, as the power isn’t looking to come back on anytime soon. Snarling, he stomps back up to the nursery, where he will have to finish his work in the dull gray light of the winter storm.

We sit around the crackling fire looking at each other as we listen. Eventually, my mother says carefully, “Has he always had such a temper?”

Elizabeth looks around the room as if she hasn’t seen it before a million times, anywhere but at our mother. Eventually she sighs. “Don’t act surprised. I know you never liked him.”

“Well,” says Mother, her mouth gaping. She closes it, having lost whatever it was she was going to say.

Elizabeth’s eyes have locked on to the fire now. “I’m not sure why you called him here in the first place.”

“I just want you to be happy.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth says to the fire, her voice bitter. “Look how happy we are.” I notice that her eyes are wet, bulbous with unshed tears.

We sit for a moment in silence.

“Why did you leave him, anyway?” I ask.

Elizabeth glares at me. “I told you.” Her voice is rough, biting like the winter wind. “We had a fight.”

The pop of the fire spitting a stray spark makes us jump. The room feels too close, closed in; the snow entombs us like primitive peoples sitting around a fire in a cave, telling the stories of our ancestors. Telling the same stories, again and again.

“Well,” says my mother, rubbing her legs. “Charades?”

Elizabeth shakes her head as she stares into the fire. Her eyes are very wide, as if she is trying to stop them from spilling over, as if, should she only make them wide enough, they will become like two bowls holding in the excess liquid. And finally, perhaps because she is doing such a good job stopping her eyes from spilling, she cannot any longer stop her mouth from spilling out the truth.