I thought, I’ll stay here until my hair reaches my ankles. What good is hibernation if you have to wake up from it? Well, I’ve had it, I thought, I’m through.

The night turned into morning, and I didn’t get up. I was catching up on a year of missed sleep. Dice stayed away. Someone left a tray of bread and butter on the nightstand.

I felt blighted, creaky, too warm and too cold. Even small motions required huge effort, and I found in myself a profound weakness I’d never suspected. Like a sinkhole, my ground had given way.

I spent the day staring out of Dice’s window at the whiteout. I parsed the landscape for motion, but what always seemed at first to be new people arriving invariably resolved itself into birds. I could see my face in the window, the barn melting into my eyebrows, the mountains just cresting my hair, and I looked like my mother.

I told myself that by the summer, I would be happy again. I would try to be good. I would understand how to break myself open—I imagined cracking a geode, the dusky crystals inside—and let the world rush in.

* * *

Bay brought me dinner right before sunset: cold sheep ribs and whole milk. He pulled me out of bed. “Get the blood moving,” he said. My head rocked. We sat side by side on Dice’s velvet sofa, but I didn’t turn to him. The milk was in a tin cup. The cream was yellow, the milk beneath it was blue. Sad, I was thinking, how milk is only white around the edges, where we see it, and inside it’s black. “Thank you,” I said.

He knocked his hand against my cheek. I felt sick looking at him. I pushed his hand away. “Did you kill her?” I tried to say. But the words came out not as words but as a hiss, a sigh. I worked my jaw like a dying fish.

“I want to make you feel better,” he said.

I didn’t look at him. “Did you kill her?” I tried again.

He took my face in his hand and turned it toward him. “Come on.” He didn’t give me a chance to pull on my sweater. Outside it was achingly cold. It was evening, murkily teal, precisely the time of day when the sky isn’t light enough to silhouette the trees, and pale shapes seem to float. The long house glowed bioluminescently. We sat in the spotty snow under the hickory, where we could almost be seen.

He gazed at me from the nest of his face. I wondered if Bay had left my mother slumped by the wall or prostrate on the floor, her solar queen waving goodbye. Who had found her—found her gaping? I’d thought Bay was the solution to everything.