But inexorably there is the collision; I find my mother in the kitchen, one of our few areas of congregation, grown irritable with wine. “Storms do nothing for my nerves,” she says by way of explanation, as if we are always needing to explain to one another why we all drink.

“Could you pour me some?”

She does, slides it across the table slowly, shrewdly. “Something on your mind?”

“Am I that transparent?”

“As a ghost.”

I could tell her about Julian, I reason. She would listen to me. But it would break the spell of joyful anticipation that has come over her. She would slide into the place that constantly tries to tug her back down, back to drinking heavily in dark rooms.

And if she doesn’t believe me—if she tells me I cannot be seeing someone who hasn’t been born yet—what will that mean?

How will she look at me then?

I take a large ungraceful gulp and put down the fragile glass rather too indelicately. “All right, mind reader: mind read.”

She closes her eyes and presses fingers to her temples in exaggerated concentration; then she takes my hands, turns them palm upward, frowns at the lines, lets them go. She is only playing. A moment later she looks into my face and says, “Frustrated with your sister?”

“Good guess.” I choose my words carefully. “She won’t listen to me.”

“Listening was never her strong suit.”

The glasses swirl with red. The corkscrew, an abysmally old thing with a nasty spiraled spike, sits open on the countertop, pointing at us. Evidence of carelessness, or frequent use. I am looking for a black feather sweeping across the floor, or a muddy footprint the size of a child’s bringing the swampsmell, that odor of rotting vegetation, into the house. For totems of proof that what I have seen is real.

You cannot know how maddening it is to be so sure of what you have seen but to have no evidence of its existence, and no way of verifying that it ever happened, because it hasn’t happened—not yet, at least. But that it hasn’t yet happened does not mean it didn’t happen. Does that make sense? Am I crazy anyway? The images leak away in sips of wine and grow fuzzy, unreal. Did I see the boy after all, or have I really imagined him, like the Nothing Man, like the old woman with Xs for eyes?

You do believe me, don’t you?

Instead of a feather, I see a bottle of prenatal vitamins left on the counter, promising healthfulness.

I am always looking for good omens, meaningful artifacts. That must sound silly and childish, this desire for small magical enchantments in ordinary things. Perhaps I am foolish to believe that the house is cursed or the swamp is under a dreamy spell of dark vegetal magic, but if I did not believe these things, then nothing would make sense to me. Everything would be so hard and cruel. Please do not think me whimsical, though.