“Perhaps it’s Charles Severance,” I suggest lightly.

“Friend of yours?”

“No, Mother.”

She looks at me blankly.

“Don’t you remember The Parable of the Knocker? That serial killer in Alexandria who knocked on people’s front doors and then killed them? He wrote that biblical manifesto about himself. You must remember.”

The doorbell shrieks again with an irascible appeal. We are angering whatever begs to be admitted from the night.

“So you reckon there’s a serial killer out there ringing our bell?” says my mother in her gently chiding drawl.

“I’m all ears, then. Who do you suppose it is?”

“A little swamp creature that’s lost its way, ringing to see if we can spare a cup of sugar. Or perhaps arsenic.”

When she opens the door, the person beyond remains obscured, and I wonder with a thrill who it could be at this time of night. At this time of night? Have I become my mother? It seems so very like a thing she would say. In fact, I’m sure she’s said it just now, if I could only remember exactly when. But then, she is the one who’s opened the door.

“Oh, this is a surprise,” she says, before her tone drops with concern. “What’s happened?”

A little swamp creature, indeed—my enormously pregnant sister, not deliberate in the least, barges through the door. Her heavy breathing floods the foyer, which seems too bright against her red-veined eyes. At either side of her extraordinarily round belly she carries two small valises. It has been raining, and the sodden fraying rope of her hair glistens like the night sky.

“Elizabeth?” says my mother. “What on earth is it?”

The raindrops on her cheeks are tears. “Everything,” she spits out, dropping her bags. “Everything’s gone wrong. Can I stay here for a while?”

“Well, sure you can. But what about Donovan?”

Elizabeth’s words are brittle. “That’s what’s gone wrong.”

“Oh, honey,” my mother says, and wraps her arms around Elizabeth, who crumples into them like a child. From above my sister’s shoulder my mother’s eyes find me. “Well, don’t just stand there. Go put on the kettle.”

My banishment to the kitchen offers something of a reprieve from Elizabeth’s dramatics. Nothing my sister has ever done could be considered deliberate; she is more likely to react from pure animal instinct than from any sense of calculation, from any sense of decency. When we were children, every splinter and stubbed toe against a fallen log provoked wails of distress. Mountains and molehills are all one and the same, equally devastating to the one who pulls the universe in revolutions around herself.

I sometimes think to myself, proudly, that I am not like her. I will never be like her. I will melt into the walls; I will be careful and deliberate in all that I do.

The kettle squeals sooner than I anticipate, as I have some trouble telling time. It slips away from me here and there, quickly now and slow again, like running water—perhaps from living so long in a haunted house.