“Certainly, copper wiring is a conduit.”

“I’m sorry?”

An elderly woman walks into the room, disrupting our conversation.

She is vaguely familiar to me, with white hair pulled neatly back into a bun, a pashmina wrapped around her plump shoulders, and a face marked by laugh lines.

“Hello,” Nathaniel says to the new arrival, who, of course, ignores him.

“Sam,” Agnes says, easy, nonchalant. “You remember your great-grandmother, Harriet?”

Oh yes, now I recognize her.

“Hello, ma’am,” Nathaniel tries again, louder this time, as if the old woman is merely hard of hearing. She walks slowly, gingerly, about the room, touching potted plants that aren’t there, straightening pictures on the wall that are already straight. We watch her perambulations with mild fascination.

“Is she … all right?” asks Nathaniel.

“Oh no, I’m afraid not,” Agnes says lightly.

Nathaniel looks alarmed.

We continue to watch Harriet’s slow, laborious movements around the room before she starts toward the couch on which Nathaniel is sitting. He moves over to make room for her, and through good fortune she sits in the vacated spot rather than on top of him. I’ve had this happen to me before, where an echo will occupy the same space as me for a moment or two, and while it doesn’t physically feel like anything, it is an incredibly unsettling experience.

Harriet slumps back now, her breathing labored. What did she die of? A heart attack? Stroke? I can’t quite recall.

My mother and I exchange a look. You know the one—I give her a quirk of my eyebrow, silently asking where this is going, and she retains that genteel smile-that-isn’t-a-smile, her eyes glittering as if to say, Watch, and you will see.

“Ma’am, are you all right?” Nathaniel shouts in Harriet’s ear.

Abruptly, she freezes, all her muscles strained taut, and her tremors become unnatural shaking as her eyes roll up to reveal the rheumy whites and her jaw clenches in a teeth-cracking grimace. Ah yes, it was a seizure. She was epileptic.

Nathaniel lifts his hands as if to grab her, but he won’t bring them close enough to touch her seizing body. “What are you all doing? This woman needs medical attention!”

“Oh, it’s too late for that, I’m afraid.” Agnes gazes fondly at her grandmother. “Don’t worry, it will be over soon.”

She watches Harriet die like one who has watched many people die, and the look in her eyes disturbs even me. How much death has she seen in this house, after all?

When the seizure is over, Harriet slumps to the side, straight into Nathaniel, who shrieks as she passes through him and leaps to his feet, dropping his camera and turning to stare at the woman gone cold-eyed, one arm flung out above her head, which rests upon the spot where he was sitting. She is now still.

“What happened? What just happened?” Nathaniel cries out, patting his hands over his front as if to check that he is, indeed, solid.

“Now, Nathaniel,” I tell him, smiling. “Don’t pitch a fit.”