But someone else’s hands do; they grab me from behind and pull me from the water until I lie gasping on my back in the sludge, my vision blurring with stray raindrops until a face looms over me. It is too dark to make out who it is. The fox fire, I realize, is gone.

“What in God’s name were you thinking?” My mother’s pinched, angry voice greets me from above.

When I drag myself fully from the water, I notice a snarl of thin roots tangled around my boot. My mother helps me pull it free and leads me back home.

The three of us sit around the blazing fire. Mother has piled an immoderate amount of blankets upon me until my teeth stop chattering, but deep in my soul I still feel the watery chill of the grave. We sip hot tea, tea the color of the swamp water, and listen to the crackle of the fire and the tinny drumming of rain on the roof.

“Well?” says Agnes, as if she has been waiting for me to speak. “Are you going to explain your spontaneous dip in the swamp?”

“It’s kind of a long story.”

“We’ve got all night, haven’t we?”

“Leave her alone, Mom,” Elizabeth cuts in. “Sammy’s crazy; you can’t fault her for that.”

“I’m not crazy,” I mumble under my breath.

A faint buzzing fills the quiet in the wake of this pronouncement. Elizabeth’s phone rattles on the table, shifting several millimeters to the left each time the buzzing commences. She turns it over, looks at the screen, and puts it back down.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?”

She purses her lips, perhaps tasting Donovan on them, tasting his words. “No.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake.” Agnes sets down her tea and casts her eyes to the ceiling.

We sit within our own thoughts for some time before Elizabeth says, half-seriously, “Well. Board game or charades?”

Any games that might yet lie in storage here are likely in the basement, so I tell them it is flooded. I don’t mention that I lost the candles and the flashlight somewhere in the swamp, probably devoured by the hungry waters that wanted to suck me in, but I make a mental note to replace them. We cannot, cannot be without these sacred totems of light and warmth.

“We’ll deal with it in the morning,” says Agnes. “I’ll get paper for the charades.”

We end up playing several riotous rounds, coming up with more and more outlandish things to act out. We are some of the best charade players you’ll ever meet. Some of it feels rusty, though, like pulling out old clothes that have lain in the attic for years, that now fit stiffly and smell of mothballs and are no longer familiar, comfortable.

Throughout it all, my mother casts me furtive looks that she must think I don’t notice, looks weighted with indefinable emotions too complex to be explained in such simplistic terms as grief or anxiety—the looks of a woman whose husband killed himself and whose daughter nearly killed herself, whether intentionally or unintentionally, this very night. What has she seen of the future in this house? I wonder.