“Liz, it’s freezing in here.”

With the room closed up and so far from the heating source in the house, it feels dangerously cold in here, although Liz’s pain seems to radiate and heat the air around her. The touch of her skin is hot as an infection.

Frost clouds the window, out which I have looked periodically to watch the drifts of snow below, to look away from the room that makes me dizzy when I try to focus my eyes; the snow has mostly stopped falling by now, just light flurries whizzing to and fro, but too late, indeed, for us to dig our way out through the front door, free the car, and get to the hospital.

“Tell me about him,” she hisses, talking to distract herself.

I hesitate. Did she believe me about him after all? Has she believed me this whole time, only pretending not to—clinging to normalcy? “What do you want me to say?”

“Say anything,” she snaps, her voice a fury of clenched pain. “For god’s sake.”

I think. “He likes animals.”

Her fury turns into a sob. “This isn’t how I wanted it to be.”

“I know, honey,” says my mother, petting Elizabeth’s untamed hair away from her slick face. “But pretty soon you’ll get to hold your baby boy in your arms and none of this will matter.”

She glances up at me, and I know she is thinking what I am thinking: what we know about that baby boy and the child he will become. Perhaps it is the habit the room has of shifting minutely around us, but I feel nauseated of a sudden, and I want Elizabeth to clench her legs together and not let him out into the world at all.

Somewhere above us is the maddening creak of a heavy weight swinging on a rope.

I do not know how many hours it has been; the candles have melted almost all the way down to their bases, dripping wax into puddles and expelling thin smoke that obfuscates the room, which smells of burning, rancid sweat, dust, and the faint pervasive musk of the swamp, so strong you could just about taste its bitterness.

Elizabeth’s low, familiar birthing groan turns into a throaty wail, and my mother checks below the sheet she has thrown over my sister’s legs and looks at me. “It’s time.”

Elizabeth’s scream echoes around the room, and I imagine the waves of it ringing out into the swamp, filling the swamp with the terrible sound of her labor—but it isn’t the swamp we have to worry about hearing.

All this time I have imagined Don somewhere below, pacing from room to room in search of his wife, finding, perhaps, strange ghosts who are not there, and strange memories that are not his. But now heavy footsteps pound their way up the stairs and creak down our long narrow hallway; he has heard, and he has found us.

“Liz!” he shouts through the door, which rattles and shakes as he works the knob, but remains mercifully locked. I never thought I would be so relieved to be locked in this dark, festering place. “Open this door!”