I insisted they borrow my old down sleeping bag. Lily carried it. Karen carried Perley, and together we made our way up the hill. The camper windows, dark for so long, showed the light of an oil lamp. The chimney sent forth a modest stream of woodsmoke. Karen set Perley down, and he approached the camper in the manner of a young prince.

“My own house,” he said. “Here, I make the rules.”

“Don’t worry, Piglet,” Lily said. “I’ll sleep up here with you.”

“No way,” he said. “Not unless I say so.”

“Someone’s got to be with you tonight, at least,” Karen said. “We’ve got to watch your temperature, and change the dressing on the wound.”

“You keep trying to mess with it,” Lily said, catching his hand again. “You have to stop messing with it.”

“Who are the McCanns?” Perley asked, pointing to the old markings above the door. “What does AWA mean?”

“These are the questions that plague us,” I said. We squeezed inside.

Lily tended the woodstove while Karen set up a first-aid station on the low counter: herbs, salve, iodine, clean rags, thermos of hot water. Perley insisted on making the bed. When he unrolled my sleeping bag, a string of photo-booth photos fell out. He picked it up and studied it. “What’s this?” he asked, handing it to me, and so I looked into my boyfriend’s face for the first time in nearly a decade.

We pressed our faces to the camera. He wore safety goggles. I wore a man’s fedora. We stuck our tongues out. Frowned and smiled. Kissed on the mouth. I remembered when we’d crammed into that photo booth. It was soon after we’d bought the land. To warm up, to get a little electric light, to avail ourselves of the hot running water, we’d had a night out at the second-run movie theater and arcade. It hadn’t ended well, because my boyfriend had spent most of the evening talking to the ticket-taker, a neighbor of ours, forgetting, as usual, that we were supposed to be on a date. I wish I could say that he was flirting with her. At least then people would know where to aim their pity. But it wasn’t that. He simply loved nothing better than to chat at length with strangers. He loved any chance to make a good impression. I rode the bumper cars and fed quarter after quarter to the mechanical claw that’s supposed to pick up toys. I didn’t get a toy. I didn’t want a toy. I wanted my boyfriend and he didn’t want me, at least not very badly. Well, the joke was on him. It turned out I didn’t want anyone. Anyone but this family.

“That’s him,” I told Perley. “That’s the man that you told me I look like. It’s just that you’ve never seen him before.”