The boy takes one mangled wing and breaks it with a sharp little snap. Awful sounds issue from that beak, sounds I have never heard from a bird before. Holding the beak shut as if to quiet the thing, he breaks the other wing.

“Stop it,” I say again, and lunge forward, but my own hand passes through air. They are mere echoes, untouchable. Whatever has happened in this moment cannot be changed.

When it seems the boy has grown bored with the bird, he drops it to the floor and stomps. I hear the crunch and creep slowly around the table, expecting to come around the edge and see the pulverized corpse flattened into gory pulp on the floor, but before I can see it, the bird and the boy are gone and I am alone in the kitchen.

I wonder when this boy was here, how long ago. Was he a Wakefield? And if so, are we all doomed to evil and cruelty, like Mad Catherine—are we cursed to be horrible people? Is that just who we are? Some of us had to be good. The Quakers, they were good. I tell myself this as I back out of the kitchen, tell myself that I can be good, too.

The house feels darker. Unsettled. Beyond the window in the overgrown yard, the girls are playing again, framed this time by the moon and their laughter now sounding of the night, of mystery and malediction, playing on an endless repeating loop. Where is their mother now? My mother, the Agnes of the present, is upstairs asleep. But what about the “now” that these echoes inhabit? Why is the Agnes of my childhood never present when current Agnes sits watching memories of the past?

The Agnes of my childhood is in the library, sunk into an armchair and leaned back to where the thin light cannot catch her face. She is drinking brandy from a tumbler with melting ice and contemplating the bookshelves with detached passivity. The half-empty bottle sits near her feet. She is there when the girls come inside, and from there she yells at them to slow down, not to stomp, not to make so much goddamn noise, and her nerves unravel with each giggle and shout and childish footfall. Elizabeth wants to keep playing, for she is a queen and Sam is a peasant in this game, but Sam wants to read a story and so she creeps into the dim library, knowing better than to startle her mother.

She stops in the doorway.

“What do you want?” says Agnes.

“A book.” She goes to a shelf and picks one out. “Will you read to me?”

“You know how to read. You’re not a baby anymore.”

Sam hugs the heavy book to her chest. She looks hesitantly at the other armchair.

“Go read somewhere else. I’m busy,” says Agnes. Sam doesn’t move. Tears glisten on Agnes’s cheeks. “I said go somewhere else. Are you deaf?”

“Do I make you sad?” Sam asks hesitantly.