Julian, are you ready to be born?

I turn back to Elizabeth to tell her who it is, to introduce her to her son, but she gasps in surprise before I can get a word out.

And then her water breaks.

PART FIVE

THE NEVER

18

In some other realm, we would not be who we are. My father would not have killed himself. Elizabeth would be a ballerina who moonlights as a punk rock guitarist. My mother would be happily tending to patients in her bygone medical career, the way she did when I was young and our father stayed home to watch us, back in those days when she would return with a smiling glow—you know the kind, the one you see in teachers after a rewarding student breakthrough and in artists who have just finished a painting, the glow of fulfillment that comes only from doing what you love. Perhaps I would be a renowned archaeologist, with a full professorship at the university where I adjunct now and funding to take expeditions into the swamp, to find the remains of Meriday, wherever she went when she disappeared back into the only place that ever felt like home to her.

Perhaps we would not be here, snowed into a haunted house with a devil tied to a chair and Elizabeth moaning through her contractions.

Panting through a wave of pain, she grabs me by the wrist. “I don’t want him here,” she grits out.

I look helplessly at my mother, who shakes her head. “We’ll have to deliver him,” she murmurs, and then goes off decisively.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that,” I tell my sister. “He’s coming.”

“Not Julian,” she hisses through clenched teeth. “I don’t want Don here. Don’t tell him. I don’t want him with me. I don’t want him with the baby.”

I let her cling to me, not wanting to tell her that it is too late—sooner or later, Don will be able to get himself out of my knots; we cannot keep him tied to that chair forever. And when he does get free, he will want to be there for the birth of his son. No matter where we go in this house, he will find us.

Where can we go that he won’t find us?

“Oh,” I say out loud, staring into the shadows in which Julian disappeared when Elizabeth’s water broke, leaving only a trace of childish laughter floating on the light that leapt across the room from the seething fire.

“Spit it out,” Elizabeth snaps.

“I have an idea,” I tell her, just as my mother comes back into the room with an armful of towels. I stand up from where I have been crouching beside Elizabeth, my knees popping.

When I was eleven and waifish, I used to fit myself into tiny nooks and crannies when I didn’t want to be found. I had secret little spots in the narrow crevices behind doors and the empty cupboards in the kitchen, back in the days when my mother wasn’t good about keeping food around and you’d be more likely to find dead flies and ancient rusted cans in the cabinets than anything else. I could tuck myself into my little dark space and while away the afternoon as Elizabeth frantically called my name, fearing she had lost me somewhere, and my mother would tell her to stop shouting.