Getting Elizabeth up the stairs proves an arduous task. We have to stop every few steps so that she can lean on one of us and catch her breath or grit her teeth against a contraction that elicits a low animal sound from the back of her throat. When I ask her if she is ready to move on again, she snarls at me to be patient.

As I fit the key in the lock, Elizabeth doesn’t even ask me how I came upon it, she is so focused on keeping herself together. The door opens with a primordial creak and shows us the way into the darkness.

My mother looks on without stepping inside, her face pinched and pale. “I’m not sure about this, Samantha.” Her eyes find me. She does not want to say aloud what we both know about this room, not in front of Elizabeth.

“Do you know anywhere else where Don won’t be able to get to us?”

When after a moment she does not respond, it becomes clear that she has no better suggestion; and it becomes clear, too, that she hasn’t set foot in this room since she spent all those hours watching my father kill himself. That image must be pasted onto the back of her eyelids now, must float ethereally before her when she looks in here, seared onto the scene like an image burned into the screen of an old television after it’s been frozen too long. I give her a little nudge.

“It will be okay.”

I can still hear him shouting for us, his voice echoing distantly.

Elizabeth groans, and we help her into the room, where the shadows entangle us in their musty, suffocating embrace.

We wait in the darkness as my mother goes to find the candles she hid away in her reading room after the last time the power went out. Were I to pull open the moth-eaten curtains, outside we would find only the encroaching night and the clouds too thick to let in a breath of the moon; and when my mother returns, she places the candles all around the room, dozens of them.

The room is as I remember it: wallpaper peeling like rotten flesh from the walls; undefined grime covering the blackened, creaking floor; the gross, stained mattress, the sight of which makes my heart rise into my throat; the beams of the unfinished ceiling where the creaking of a distant rope echoes dimly from the past; the rusted chains I see peeking out from under the bed, chains that must have held Jonah here; and all about that strange unreality, as if what I am seeing now isn’t really what is here at all, but only what the room has stitched over itself, like a kind of mask, to show us. The candlelight bends strangely over the room’s ancient cobwebbed fixtures, falling over a reality that is shaped quite differently than the one we inhabit.

My heart plummets when I see a tall oval mirror standing resolutely at the back of the room. It isn’t quite broken enough for my liking, although it bears a spider web of cracks on its splintered face. But I wonder—then how did this one break? I didn’t smash this one to pieces with the rest. Someone else did.