She finishes her wine in one long pull, slams the glass down on the table so hard I’m surprised when it doesn’t shatter, and pushes herself to her feet in what is supposed to be a sharp rise but turns into a laborious toddle. “Anyway, you’re an adult now. It isn’t my job to take care of you. Frankly, it never was. But I did it anyway, because Mom wouldn’t. You can’t expect me to look out for you forever.” Her eyes are iron. “Making up stories for attention won’t make me feel sorry for you. Poor, neglected Sam. Always has to have some invented problem. Well, some of us have real problems.”

She stalks away before I can think of anything to say.

4

Elizabeth has locked me out of her life now, refusing to talk to me.

I have made myself an enemy, and now she will defy me in her spite, retracing her childhood footsteps of rebellion, which always came so easily to her and so hard to me. Rebelling against Mother, against the house, against the quiet.

She used to do this to me when we were kids, sometimes even quite literally locking me out of the house.

Once, when I was fifteen, I stayed out late with my study group, and when I returned the house was dark, dormant, the front door locked. They were supposed to leave it open for me, but Elizabeth and I had been fighting that day, and I knew she must have crept downstairs and locked the door at some point to get back at me. I circumnavigated the house, tried the back door, tapped on forbidding windows. I looked up to the second floor, begging for a light to shine through the draperies—Mother awake reading, Elizabeth sulking in her princess bed. Their rooms were dark.

Moonlight made a mystical landscape of the swamp, which seemed to whisper its mysteries to me, saying, Don’t worry if you can’t get in there, the swamp is always open, we’ll let you in. Why I thought the swamp might want me to wander, lost, through its narrow creeks and sorrowful trees must have been the fanciful workings of an overactive teenage mind, one fraught with the anxiety of being trapped out in the darkness, barred from home, from the grace of light.

I went around picking up small pebbles—small enough, I hoped, that they wouldn’t damage the old windows, which even then had seen better days. Feeling like a cliché—I am a boy who is in love with a girl but we are only sixteen so I will throw pebbles at her window—I tossed my little prizes here, and here, but my aim was terrible. One of the pebbles flew off course and hit the window overlooking the back corner of the house. The only one that is truly inaccessible from the inside: the window of the locked room.

A heavy curtain hangs there, never touched, never opened, leaving the window perpetually black even in broadest daylight. But then, one can hardly tell the difference from any other room. All the house feels encased, enclosed, with its heavy draperies pulled over each orifice as if to keep the outside world out.