She doesn’t look so angry now, but contemplates the idea with her tongue just behind her teeth, like she is testing it out, seeing how it tastes. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll divorce him.” Her eyes have become sharp, like shards of glass. “And I’ll do everything on my own. A single mother.” After the words are out, the moment of empowerment leaks away from her bright cheeks.

Neither of us knows what to say. As she looks around, perhaps for something to distract her from the conversation’s turn, Elizabeth’s eyes light on the journal that’s been sitting beside me on the floor all this time. “What’s that?”

I shuffle it behind me, like a secret. “Just an old journal I found.”

“One of yours?” Her eyes gleam. “Come on, give me a taste. What deep thoughts did little Sam have as a child?”

“It’s not mine.”

“Oh.” She deflates; I think she was eager for something juicy. “Whose is it, then?”

I pretend to concentrate on tightening a screw. I think I might know, but I cannot tell her, cannot voice it aloud, not until I’m absolutely sure. Someone who went mad, who stepped through a zero of his own making.

“I don’t know. Just some old journal. I’m reading it for academic purposes.”

“Well, that’s thrilling.”

I finish tightening the screw and move on to the next one. “Have you ever wondered what’s inside the locked room?”

She frowns. “Sure, maybe. I guess I never really thought of it as, I don’t know … existing, if that makes sense. I mean, I know there’s a room in there, but it’s like there isn’t, really, at the same time, you know? It’s just a door that doesn’t open. You can almost pretend there’s nothing behind it.” She shrugs. “There’s probably nothing worthwhile in there anyway, it’s been shut up so long. I wouldn’t want to go in there. Probably infested with spiders. No thank you.” She glances again at the journal while I work. “Does that shed any light?”

I pick up the next piece of wood to affix to the base. “No,” I tell her. “Not really.”

I finish the crib in silence, and it looks strange, cold and white and empty. Because there is not enough room in here, we decide to move it into the nursery, and once we leave it there, it is as if it no longer exists. We forget about it, go on with our lives, the crib a passing moment like the passing moments in the swamp, something to think fondly of and promptly forget, as it is not useful, not functional, not yet.

Leaving the crib there reminds me of the canoe, long abandoned in the marsh, somewhere at the bottom of a river, rotted and grown over with algae perhaps, a home for fish.

When we were teenagers, Elizabeth and I, bored with the house and the land immediately surrounding it, began to venture farther and farther out into the swamp, escaping our lives. We became amateur explorers of the alien landscape.