“Damn it, Don,” said Elizabeth. “Are you smoking again?”

When he finally pulled his hand away from his eye, we saw the purple blooming over the swelling lid. It was lucky he didn’t lose the eye. His brow ridge absorbed the worst of the blow, leaving him with a ghastly black bruise and a burst blood vessel that turned the white of his eye red.

I was lucky, too. They didn’t press charges, didn’t even want me to cover the medical bills. They just wanted me to leave.

Perhaps it was time to go home, but when I thought of home, I didn’t think of that lonely apartment I had been living in for the last several years; I thought of the mansion on the edge of the swamp with its proliferation of rooms and towering bookshelves. And even though I intended to go back to my apartment, truly I did, when I started my car and crawled away from their suburban bungalow, I imagined myself settling into bed that evening alone, surrounded by the darkness within and the darkness without, figures creeping around outside my windows, shadows with nothing visible but the whites of their eyes, breaking through the front door, stealing into my apartment, pushing me to the floor, pressing death to the back of my neck. Before I knew it, I was driving in the other direction.

I drove up the winding roads, through hilly forests and leafy vales, and when I arrived at the house, it welcomed me as if I had never left.

My mother, answering the door, looked at me like a stranger. She opened it only a crack, giving me a slivered view of her wary eyeball.

“Yes?” she said.

The porch light wasn’t on. All was dark, and I a shadow.

“Mom,” I said.

She flipped the switch, and the low yellow light buzzed to life.

When I stepped in, she padded away in her slippers to fix some tea. I brought in my things, and from the foyer I heard the distant murmur of her talking to someone in the kitchen. By this time, my mother had been living alone for nearly ten years, ever since her youngest child flew the coop for college and other worlds—her only company the house itself and whatever it deigned to offer her.

When the teakettle started screaming, I found the kitchen abandoned and the kettle rattling with a volcanic expulsion of steam, which only calmed when I shut off the burner and went searching through the labyrinth to find where she had gone.

As I turned through the lonely halls, a terrible sensation came over me—the strange uncertainty of this house, the inescapable feeling that I had never actually left, but that I had been wandering these halls and finding in them doorways to other places, unreal places, dorm rooms and cafeterias and movie theaters and coffee shops, as if my life outside these walls had never actually existed but only been a twisted sort of pretend, the house making up the whole of my reality.