Sometimes it’s auditory—gentle echoes riding in on the waves of time; other times it’s visible—holograms of what has happened in the house or on the land in perfect re-creation.

We find Elizabeth in the library, perusing the collection of books that have been accumulating since time immemorial.

“At least I’ll have some way to occupy my time,” she says, gesturing to the towering bookshelves that lean in close, crowding the room into a claustrophobia of untouched volumes. “How is it you still don’t have internet?”

Mother waves her off. “I’ve no use for that.”

Elizabeth looks at me incredulously, and I tell her I go into town when I want to check up on the digital world.

“You’re something,” she says disapprovingly. “This place is going to eat right through my data plan.”

“Come on downstairs, Lizzie, and I’ll make us some breakfast.”

“Please don’t call me that,” she cuts in. “I’m not a child.”

“All right,” Mother says, conciliatory. “Eggs. Poached?”

“I haven’t eaten a poached egg since I was twelve.”

“I thought they were your favorite.”

“They were,” she says, exasperated. “When I was twelve.”

While we breakfast on fried eggs and toast, Mother gazes off at the doorway to the kitchen or out the windows where memories are stirring with the morning. In the middle of a lengthy rant about swollen ankles, swollen feet, and swollen fingers, Elizabeth pauses with her fork halfway to her mouth, waiting for Mother to respond.

“I’m sorry, what?” She blinks out of her reveries.

Elizabeth lets the fork drop. “Was it the same way for you?”

“Oh,” she says distractedly, the sun-yellow orbs of her cooling eggs leaking viscously across the plate. “Why, yes. I suppose it was. I don’t remember all that. I just remember looking at your face for the first time and thinking, look what I’ve made.”

“How convenient, to forget all the awful parts.” Elizabeth rolls her eyes at me, as if expecting me to agree. She has always expected me to follow along with her in a sort of obligatory mimesis.

“It will be worth it, when you get to hold him in your arms. Just you wait,” says my mother. “Sam, would you do the grocery shopping this afternoon? We’re low on milk.”

Elizabeth offers to accompany me. She looks too large for the kitchen, as if she is caged, desperate to escape.

The drive into town is about twenty minutes on the country road that bears little sign of civilization. Rural areas like this that once flourished now seem to be expiring in the face of urban rush. There is something lonesome about the drive, despite Elizabeth’s ceaseless talking, which makes me wish she would shut up so I could enjoy the rumble of movement, because I quite like the lonesomeness, sometimes. The road, flush with light, slices through gold-leafed trees vivid with rain.

The town is called Shadydale, and I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it, for it consists of little more than the main street with its dismal shops that sell antique things, and its diner inhabited by suspicious folks hunching over their bitter coffee possessively, and the lone movie theater where hollow-eyed teenagers make their weekly pilgrimage on Friday nights to stave off an existential boredom, the faded marquee calling them forth. I like it, though. Everyone moves at a country pace, like tortoises. We go over a wooden bridge to get there, and it is autumn so the maple trees are shrugging off their painted foliage.