I sit until the sun goes down for an early dusk, until the shadows creep out around me. Something heavy sits in my gut. I cannot bring myself to turn to the next page.

My father’s journal.

How can I reconcile these ramblings with the man I knew? I never knew my father to be anything but sharp and keen, bright as reflected sunlight. All the marks of a mind that knows what it is, not one unraveling in the dark. I guess I didn’t know him as an adult knows a person, but as a child looking up at the largeness and infallibility of a parent.

But was he truly mad, or did he catch a glimpse of something he wasn’t supposed to see?

Am I mad?

Whatever was sitting heavy in my gut crawls up and up, into my throat, strangling me.

Am I?

And then, muffled by a multitude of walls and the softening effect of thick, old wallpaper, I hear a knock at the front door.

11

I ease the journal in among the other volumes on my bookshelf.

Three more heavy knocks, like the three knocks signaling the Devil in Beethoven’s Fifth, reminding me of my tarot reading, and now I hesitate, wondering if this is the moment of change, if this is what my reading foresaw.

I wait for someone else to get the door, but Elizabeth is closed up in her room, silent, and I can hear my mother puttering about in the kitchen putting together dinner. She calls up to me, asking me to get the door, and reluctantly I go.

On the doorstep stands a young goateed man, perhaps in his twenties, wearing a camera around his neck and a tweed jacket too light for the season, a plaid shirt buttoned up to his chin, holding a trifold brochure in his hand like he isn’t sure how it got there.

“Oh,” he says, as a breeze staggers up behind him. “Good afternoon.”

“Can I help you?”

“Can you help … oh,” he says again, as if suddenly remembering the trifold. “Sorry to bother you, but if I could just have a few minutes of your time, I’d like to talk to you about our Lord and Savior.” He seems more convinced of himself the more he talks.

“No thank you.”

“Sam, who is it?” I hear my mother coming to the front of the house now, and I see her form emerge from down the hall.

“Just a Jehovah’s Witness.”

“Well,” says the man, as Agnes approaches and looks him smartly up and down. “Well, I—”

“Don’t be rude, Sam. Invite him in. I’m sorry …?”

“Nathaniel,” he says, sidestepping me to shake my mother’s hand with a bit too much enthusiasm.

“Mom, he’s just trying to sell us religion.”

“Oh, I’m not trying to sell—”

“Come on into the sitting room.” Agnes waves him toward the semidilapidated sofa, where he perches bemusedly on the edge of the time-faded cushion. “Can I fix you some tea?”