“Are you O.K.?” Dottie asked.

“No. Crisped. Frightened.”

“I’m scared of Alzheimer’s,” Dottie said. “I’m afraid it’s encroaching. I’m pretty certain it is. I read the symptoms and I’ve got them.”

“Oh, fish sticks. What you’ve had is too much Colombian,” I said.

“One detail it took me a long minute to remember one night, and I tell you it had me in chills, was my bank’s name, the name.’ ”

I told my mother, “There are kids on the beach. Well, older than kids—a guerrilla army.”

“More power to ’em,” Dottie said. She bit the dainty wing of a Cornish hen. “Wherever land ends, you get people, Paige. They’ll come. It’s saline sympathy.”

“This bunch came in a black bus and has sort of uniforms. Any sort of uniform, I get nervous,” I said.

Dottie twisted a tiny drumstick from the hen. “I raised you well,” she said.

I slept for short intervals, and the all-night classical station interrupted Verdi’s Requiem on the quarter hour to report that snow was building, roads would be impassable, most churches were canceling tomorrow’s services; all should prepare for power outages; the New York Thruway and New Jersey Turnpike were sealed, the state of Maine had closed; snow would continue falling.

The chance of seeing Raf got further from me with each report.

The bus people invaded one dream that had just started to form. They were chasing Fredo and calling his name. I woke up to the bells from Our Lady of the Angels and an air-raid siren and the groan of the Misery Island foghorn.

At my window I saw a remade and padded world. Hip- high snow beds winked like sugar through the fog. The Point Road made a barely visible indentation.

Dottie hummed as she coasted around in her suite, the Commodore, straightening and tucking.

“Ready for another day? This one could be serious,” she told me.

“That’s all I’ve been hearing,” I said.

“The Patriots have the Jets at home. Could mean the play-offs,” she said.

“You mean football? Mom, we’ll be lucky if we keep the power on. And meanwhile, trespassers are freezing to death on the property.”

“Look,” Dottie said, nodding at the portable TV on the tabletop. A Ninja movie glowed on the teeny screen.

“Kwii-chee-boo-die!” she said and kicked at her reading chair’s ottoman. She backhanded a brush from her vanity table; sent it flying a good ten feet.

“Not that the beach is anyone’s defined property . . .” I began.

“I’ll define the property with my kwoo-chung-chee-boo,” Dottie said. She stuck out a thin arm with her fist clenched.