I can’t tell what it means, only that the room—yes, the room drove this person mad. Perhaps I should dwell on who this might be, but I cannot bring myself to consider. It was someone who lived in the house. Someone with a wife. No, no, I won’t think of that.

I am trying not to chew on this, listening to my students’ pencils scratching at their papers, scratching away the void, and it makes my skin crawl. A slacker who did not study approaches me to turn in a blank sheet of paper. I slide it away from me, horrified, the nothingness crawling up my throat.

“Zero,” I tell him, throwing the paper back in his dull, befuddled face. “Zero.”

10

I carry the journal with me even at home, unable to let it go. I’m bending the soft cover in my hands when I walk past Elizabeth’s room and hear her shuffling about inside, huffing in frustration over a box of wooden pieces.

She is trying to build a crib.

She has purchased one of those build-it-yourself contraptions. The pieces of wood and flapping pages of directions strew the floor while she sits on her bed, one leg crossed over the other, her foot jangling while she leans into her cell phone, texting furiously.

Most of Elizabeth’s friends from our younger days have moved on to other places, and her other friends, later ones, haven’t come out to visit. She must feel terribly alone, I think.

Her phone bleats again, insistently, and she makes a sound in the back of her throat while she types madly with her thumbs.

It is curious to see her glowering down at the phone as she texts; whenever I have seen her talk on the phone, she wears a smile to keep her words curving upward. It is funny to me, how we smile when we talk on the phone, even though the person on the other end cannot see our faces. Yet one can hear a smile just the same; there is no faking a smile in the voice without fitting your face to match, so we smile into the phone, hoping they will hear it.

She finally exhales with satisfaction, but the phone immediately begins to buzz again, and her face falls.

I enter and grab the phone from her. Elizabeth swears at me and reaches for it, but I hold it away from her and answer. “If you keep calling, you know she’ll eventually just shut off her phone.”

“Who—Sam?” Donovan’s voice comes through the device. “What are you …? No, she wouldn’t do that. Liz can’t live without her phone.”

“She’s been living just fine without you,” I tell him. “Maybe she’ll surprise you.”

I can hear the exasperation in his voice: “Will you just put her on?”

I hold out the phone toward the cold statue of my sister, feeling a pang of sympathy for Don, since it seems entirely possible to me that Elizabeth, prone to exaggeration and intense exhibitions of emotion, particularly of the sort that would garner her some amount of pity, might be angry with him for very little reason at all, or for something so minor as to hardly register to the rest of us. Certainly I could be wrong, but as I stare into my sister’s dispassionate eyes, her arms folded and refusing to take the phone, I have the urge to offer some sort of condolences to my brother-in-law.