“He hit me.”

“What?”

Elizabeth drags her eyes to my mother and then to me. “That’s why I left, if you must know.”

The silence that rings in the wake of her pronouncement is heavy and cancerous. My mother rockets to her feet but then doesn’t seem to know where to go, so she stands there gaping. “How could he?”

“We were arguing. We’d been arguing a lot. Sometimes he grabbed me too hard. This time, he just … it went a bit farther.”

My mother shakes her head and strides over to the telephone. “That’s it.”

“Mother,” Elizabeth says again, tired, exasperated.

“It’s not right.” She picks up the phone and puts it to her ear, though who she would call I’m not sure, then drops it back down and turns to us. “Phone lines are down.”

When I finally find my cell phone, which I have left up in my bedroom, as it hardly gets any use, I find the battery giving its last gasps, and with that remaining seven percent, I hold it up to find a signal. The one bar that was there flickers out to nothing, and it seems no matter where I walk around the endless dismal hallways, I cannot find it again. When I return to my mother’s expectant stare, I shake my head.

Without any power to charge it, I have to watch as the battery winds down to nothing.

“If he won’t leave, then we will,” my mother decides. “We’ll get a hotel room in town.”

She nods to herself, and I feel a great respect for my mother, knowing as I do how ill it will make her to leave the house. But as Liz begins sluggishly gathering her things and I follow my mother to the foyer, a feeling of dread aches in my heart. She swings open the front door, and we find a drift of snow creeping halfway up the car, locking it in place, and a blustering whirlwind of thick flakes filling the air.

“Jesus,” she murmurs, but I am not surprised. I have been watching the snow from the windows, watching the wind sweep it into great drifts against the house.

We shut the door.

“Hold on,” says Elizabeth, who is searching her pockets and frowning. “Where’s my phone?” After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, Elizabeth growing more and more frantic as we open drawers and unearth couch cushions, we have to admit it is missing. Our last vital connection to the outside world.

Biting back tears of frustration, Elizabeth finally goes to the staircase and shouts up for Don. My mother and I hiss at her, as we’ve no desire to invite him down to us, but it is too late; he has heard her call, and we hear his footsteps groaning on the stairs before we see him emerging from the shadows at the top.

“Do you know where my phone is?” she asks.

“Have you misplaced it?” he says, heading to the kitchen, compelling us to trail along after him as he pours himself a glass of water from the tap. “You should keep better track of your things.”