Quickly, she looked at the small photograph of her mother. It was in a gold frame on his desk.

Was it a photo of Epiphany? Amelia didn’t know. Her mother was so young in the picture. It could be her, she thought. She heard the toilet flush down the hall and fled.

In bed, in the dark nothingness of her room, she talked to Dr. Cotton; it was like a little play. She imagined his reassuring voice, his firm questions.

Amelia: I guess I’m afraid.

Dr. Cotton: Of what?

Amelia: Life.

Dr. Cotton: What about it?

Amelia: It’s too big.

Dr. Cotton: How so?

Amelia (after a long pause): It’s so big that I don’t know what will happen.

The next thing Amelia knew it was morning. Dr. Cotton sat on his shelf, mute and lifeless. Same as always. It seemed nothing in the world had changed. But then she remembered Epiphany and she sensed that the world would never be the same.

18 • Nothing

According to Mrs. O’Brien’s breakfast report, the day promised to be a gentler one, with a delicate blue sky, a warming sun, and only a slight breeze. It was still chilly, she’d said, but Amelia took the weather as a sign—a good sign—that today would be an important day.

Amelia bent the shape of her morning to accommodate Epiphany, forgoing the clay studio and Casey. She wanted to be home in case Epiphany came back. Amelia’s waking dream, her fantasy, involved a reunion scene in the front yard that caused her skin to tingle when she considered it.

Amelia waited, but nothing happened. Epiphany didn’t ring the doorbell. She didn’t telephone. There was no silver car out front. Nothing.

Amelia ended up spending a good part of the morning in the yard. Maybe the silver car would drive by; even a glimpse of it would sustain her. The dingy lawn was littered with twigs and branches from the previous day’s wind. Amelia drifted about, hunched over, picking up sticks and piling them by the curb, something she’d seen her father do.

She was marking time. And time had slowed. Drip, drip, drip.

“Looking for spring?” It was Mrs. O’Brien. She came down the porch steps and approached Amelia. She was wearing an oatmeal-colored sweater with big wooden buttons over her pastel shirt. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest.

Amelia started. She’d been staring at a twig, rubbing the little nub at the tip, but her mind had been spinning with a detail from her waking dream. “I realized how much I needed you,” Epiphany said in the dream. Amelia had replayed the line several times, drawing out the word needed and pumping it full of emotion until she felt purely exulted.

“Oh, hi,” said Amelia, turning. She rose and dropped the twig onto the pile. She knew she was blushing.

“Honey, I think I know what you’re doing,” said Mrs. O’Brien. Her fierce gray eyes were watery from the sharp air. Her smile was a bemused smile.