In the morning I frantically, belatedly iron out my lessons for the week, trying to catch Elizabeth’s eye as she lumbers past. I’ve planted myself in the drawing room, a book spread out on the table before me, the drapes pulled open to let in a bit of light. She ignores me.

My mother is upstairs, picking through dusty boxes of old toys and blankets from when Elizabeth and I were children. I had to come downstairs after trying to work in my room, because every so often she would appear in the doorway holding up two stuffed animals worn wretched with age and ask me what I thought. “For Julian,” she said when I only stared, dumbfounded, and it was all I could do not to tell her we shouldn’t give him any animals, even fake ones, not if he’s going to destroy them, like the bird. I bit my tongue, shrugged, thinking my silence would protect her. Eventually I could no longer take her constant interruptions.

Julian, I think, why will you turn out so cruel? What is it that could produce such a disturbing child?

I shiver, feeling trapped by the question, and wonder how long it will take him to pick up a knife for the first time, crawl his way to my room in the middle of the night, and beg for his auntie to let him in to play.

Elizabeth comes into the room again without looking at me and picks up a set of headphones, plugging them first into her phone and then into her ears, the better to ignore me with.

I always had the sense that Elizabeth was afraid of the cold depths of silence, and afraid of being alone—the silence of loneliness. She has always tried to fill the world with bright sounds, sought out distractions, noise, delightful chaos. Her most memorable rebellion against the eternal tomblike quiet of Wakefield Manor came when she was thirteen, loud, talkative, restless; she brought home a yard-sale mint-green Fender Strat, a junky guitar with warped strings she did not know to replace and pick scratches from unrestrained clumsy strumming. As soon as she plugged it into the cheap amplifier she’d picked up, she started playing feral nonsense—dissonant nonchords of the purest teenage rage. After a day or two they morphed into actual chords as she started to learn by reading tabs, and soon she was playing punk rock that echoed throughout the house as yet another seeming anachronism that lived there.

No surprise, then, that the screaming guitar and its unholy choir of demonic chords sent my mother into a towering drunken temper.

I remember hearing her footsteps overhead and the pounding on Elizabeth’s door and her shouts. “Do you want to hear this noise the rest of your life?” Then more shouting, on either end, until there was a door slam and the cold, ringing, uncertain silence that hovers in the wake of a fight.

The next day when we got home from school, me with a dandelion tucked into my hair for good luck and she sulking her way from the bus stop with her backpack slung over one slouched shoulder, a posture that later put her at risk of scoliosis, we came into the house to find a little girl peering anxiously out the windows, which I knew from photo albums was a younger version of our mother. The real one, the current one, was nowhere to be found.