8. A boy, or a young man; the first time I saw him, he looked my age, thirteen or fourteen. He is leaning on his snow shovel—a long shovel, or a short boy. The top of the shovel’s handle comes to his ear. He is posing in front of a snowbank; he appears to have cleared the sidewalk and the entryway to a building, which has a tall door. Sometimes I think I see skis leaning against the building; the snowbank and an American flag are always there. The boy is handsome, but his smile is childlike. Except for the boy and the hotel maid, the black-and-whites have the look of the 1880s or 1890s. Like the photo of the maid, the black-and-white of the boy with his snow shovel could be from the 1940s. He’s wearing jeans and cowboy boots; his ski sweater and hat look like they might have belonged to someone else. The sweater is a little too wide for his shoulders; the pom-pom on the ski hat is girlish, or the pom-pom accentuates something girlish about him. The American flag and the tall door indicate the entrance to a hotel. A hotel guest, a woman, might have given her old hat and sweater to the boy.

When you stop sleeping soundly, you dream more. You’re also tired; you can’t always discern the difference between your dreams and what you imagine when you’re lying awake. When I started seeing the black-and-whites—in the seventeen months between my mom’s first meeting with the snowshoer and when she married him, when I still slept in the attic bedroom of my grandmother’s Front Street house—my sleep was further disturbed by the smell of human shit. It’s an unmistakable smell. You don’t dream it; you can’t imagine it. When I first woke up to that awful odor, I felt myself under the covers—just to be sure I hadn’t had an accident in my sleep. It wasn’t me. It was the nightwalker emeritus; he was also detectable by a creak on the attic stairs. The twelfth step, third from the top, invariably creaked. Had my nighttime visitor always come to watch me sleeping under the skylight? When I slept as soundly as a child, I probably didn’t hear him—or smell him. Before the prowling diaper man started shitting himself, I wouldn’t have smelled him.

One night—it wasn’t snowing, and the moonlight was bright—I woke to see the nocturnal diaper man standing in the silvery glow from the skylight. Gaunt as a ghost—naked, except for the loaded diaper—the disassembling emeritus had come to stare at the illegitimate child who’d taken his words away.