Mrs. Keller talks to them, talks to Serena most of all. She should be sleeping through the night, right? She’s dying, after all. But Annie can hear the whispers through the walls, and she wonders what they could be saying, what Serena, with her scowl, could possibly be giving Mrs. Keller in the way of comfort.

Annie has slipped out of bed, put her ear to the door, but the voices are too hushed, the house too noisy with its churning, clanging radiator for her to make out a syllable.

The house itself, though, seems to be caving in on all of them, as if succumbing to the pervading sickness inside. It hums to Annie, its corners dirtier, the lawn browner as winter prolongs itself. She wakes every morning and covers her ears, shivers, wants to enact her plan now and not look behind her. But she has to wait. Patience is a virtue. She knows this.

Because it’s not just the whispers from the closed guest bedroom door or the hissing of the steam heat, but Mr. Keller, stamping around all night in the grips of insomnia, pouring whiskey into a coffee mug when his wife thinks he’s asleep. And the crying. God, his pathetic sniveling. She hears it during the daytime, too, when she passes his office. Because of course he’s still supposedly working.

One night he gets drunk and goes out into the snow in his bathrobe and cries, sinks down into it and rocks, right by the back porch. Annie doesn’t do anything but watch, hoping that he doesn’t get hot, throw off his robe, the signs of hypothermia.

He gets up after a minute, shaking, his teeth clanging like the radiators, and she hears him draw a bath upstairs, still sobbing. She finally goes to bed, Suzy tucked in under her arm.

And then there’s Suzy, dragged into this mess by her foul mother and splintered excuse of a father, a child who just wants somewhere to sleep where she doesn’t have to hear all that noise. Annie knows this, knows that she’ll only get a good night’s sleep in Annie’s own bed. Not in her dad’s bed, certainly not her decrepit, dying mom’s.

So Annie takes her and puts her in her own narrow bed every night, nuzzles her head, tickles her ears with stories of what the spring will be like when Mrs. Keller is finally gone. She hopes these stories enter her dreams.