After dinner, the family pulled the chairs into a square and paged through long maroon songbooks. Nothing else I’d seen at the farm had words on it, other than the calendar with its wooden plaques for the months. Sara gave the key at the beginning of each song—“Fa, la, so,” she sang, and then the sound blossomed as everyone matched their voices to her. The songs were eerie, clamorous, with wide rifts between the chords, and fugues during which the melody circled through the group. There was no tension at all in the harmonies. I couldn’t follow the music so I watched the family’s faces. Some, like Gemini and Bay, knew every word and barely looked at their texts. Others looked tentative, following along with a finger. My favorite song that first night was “O’Leary.” The singing frightened me a little and I loved the feeling, the same feeling as looking at Bay’s scarred arms.

How will my heart endure

The terrors of that day,

When earth and heav’n before His face

Astonished shrink away?

Afterward, the women put on nightgowns and the men long johns and they carried candles to the bedrooms. No one seemed to have a claim to any particular bed.

I climbed the hayloft ladder alone and found the way to my mattress. The night wind sobbed in the hay. I thought of my old bedroom in Durham. Together, my mother and I had decorated the walls with nature magazine photos—octopus suckers curling in a gloomy sea, a sand-filled old house in the desert. The pages had stiffened and curled and lost their gloss. My bookshelf was shoved full of castoffs from the gift shop where my mother worked. I had wind-up chattering teeth, magnetic lettuce, a pig-shaped flashlight with two LEDs in its snout, and well-worn cardboard-framed heart-diffraction glasses.

I had taken barely anything with me when I left Durham. That morning, I’d packed winter clothes and over-the-counter cold softgels, little cabochons to set in a brooch, orange for the day and blue for the night. I stuffed plastic jewelry into a Ziploc. I rolled my French Toast schoolgirl blouses and wedged them into my oxfords. I paced my room, cupping old possessions like eggs: my extra track spikes and varsity J, my pearly contact sheets from Isaac, long exposures of me snow-angeling on dark ground.

That afternoon, Isaac had taken me on a farewell trip to the quarry. We’d broken up a few weeks before. Neither of us knew how to interact now, so we behaved the same as ever, except weighed down with a melancholy so intense I felt I was acting in a play. He drove past the park where I’d posed for him over the hurricane-swollen stream.