I went to my own room. For some reason, you had to walk out into a courtyard to go up a floor. The snow fell steadily around me, more a column than a cloud, light and dark, metal and gem. Once inside, I sat on my bed, damp and shivering with nerves. I got out my phone and dialed up my Kindle and tried to read something, but by the time I got to the end of a sentence, I couldn’t remember the beginning. Finally I lay down, pulled the hood of my coat over my eyes like a tent. I must have fallen asleep myself, because later the knocking at the door hit me in the chest like a fist, and I gasped awake, rolling off the bed and stumbling onto the floor. I opened the door and Stefan stood there, snow spangling his hair.

“I can go out in a blizzard anytime I want,” Stefan said.

“Most people wouldn’t consider that much of a privilege,” I told him.

And he said, “Mom, it’s letting up. I thought I could sleep, but I can’t.”

“How come? Are you still sick to your stomach?”

“No, but there are all these crazy...noises. The heater keeps going tick tick tick like a bomb or something. You just settle down and then somebody slams a car door.”

A car door? How could that bother him after years of men wailing and banging on the pipes?

“I’m also just shaky. I still feel like I’m too close to The Hill.”

I flinched at the convict talk: The Hill was what prisoners called Belle Colline. Going down the hill, they said, when someone was freed. Jack and Jill went up the hill, they said when a convict got married. “What I really want is, I want to go home. Mom, please. Right now.”

I put on my shoes and jacket, unplugged my phone and charger, grabbed my purse and we left.

The blizzard wasn’t really letting up, but I thought the weather might get better the farther south we got. So we inched along the 320 miles at twenty miles an hour.

I will never be able to think of that nightmare trek as a “ride.”

A “ride,” even a long one, seems to me like something you do with cheerful purpose, like a biking event to raise money to defeat a disease—just as a “drive” is something you do with your grandparents on a summer Sunday.

This felt like a sort of rolling brawl, studded with strange thoughts and incidents.