It wasn’t far and she’d been there a hundred times, but somehow she got turned around, the snow transfiguring every feature of the landscape till it was unrecognizable, and before long she realized she’d gone right by the place. Angry at herself now—and her hands were freezing because she’d forgotten her gloves and why hadn’t she at least thought to bring a flashlight?—she had to backtrack through the blow, getting angrier by the minute, till finally she stumbled across the stone steps and went up them and into the warmth of the house.

She saw that the kids had a fire going—the only light in the place—which was why she’d walked right past it. She smelled the sharp tang of woodsmoke and something else too: marijuana. She couldn’t believe it—they were smoking marijuana after that little scene in the hallway? Jesus. And where were they? There, there they were, sprawled out on the floor in their sleeping bags though there were beds enough for them all, dark humps against the darker field of the floor and the shadowed walls. Humps. Dark humps. And so what if she was high on marijuana herself? So what?

“Corey?” she whispered.

No one stirred, no one answered. Gradually, as she stood there adjusting her eyes to the firelight, she began to distinguish one hump from the other—that was Tommy Eggers lying there in the corner, and the twins here in the middle of the floor. And that was Jackie, wasn’t it? And Suzie stretched out on the couch? She wanted to flick on the lights, rage through the room, shake them all awake—shoplifting, marijuana, what were they thinking?—but she didn’t. She just stepped around them, her arms flung out for balance, looking for her son, for Corey, because he was all that mattered.

She found him at the far end of the room, about as far from the fireplace as you could get, and he was in his sleeping bag, the down bag she’d bought him four years ago when he was in the Boy Scouts, but the thing was—and it took her a moment for it to sink in—he wasn’t alone. No, Nancy was squeezed in beside him, the two of them there in a confusion of limbs that were like the protuberant bones of some exotic two-headed creature made of nylon, and before she knew what she was doing she had hold of the thing and was shaking it like a rug and the two faces there came instantly to life and her son—her son—let out a curse, a whole string of curses, and then Nancy was shouting and clawing at her arm and the whole room erupting in chaos.