At length it subsides. Dee coughs and breathes. She becomes aware of an acrid scent in the house, a mingling of dry grass and pepper trees, wattle and stinkbugs. The outdoors is coming inside where it doesn’t belong. She gets up, weak as a kitten, and follows the scent to its source. In the dusty living room a pane of glass is missing from the window. Dry leaves have blown across the scarred boards. Something has been sleeping in here. Not a skunk, she doesn’t think, but something. Possum or raccoon.

“Nope,” she whispers to the empty room. “No room at the inn.” She pushes a small bookcase in front of the broken pane, blocking it. She’ll probably have to get that fixed herself. Her landlord doesn’t seem like the type to go to any trouble. She doesn’t mind. The more he leaves her alone the better.

As an experiment, she looks around at the living room, walls brown with old cigarette smoke and corners hung with dust, and thinks, This is my home. It actually makes her laugh a little. She can’t recall the last place she felt was home. In her early teens, perhaps, when Lulu still slept in the next room, thumb locked tight between her pursed lips, emitting her light, penetrating snores.

She is surprised to discover that the gas is connected. Dee makes steak, green beans and a baked potato in the hissing white stove in the kitchen. She eats quickly and without pleasure. She can’t care about food, but she takes care of herself. She learned the importance of that the hard way. The stove still hisses after she switches it off and the kitchen smells faintly of gas. Another thing to get fixed. She’ll do it tomorrow—or maybe she will die in the night. She decides to leave it up to fate.

Dee sits cross-legged on the living room floor as dusk falls. The night flows in, pools in the corners, spreads across the floor like a tide. She looks at the dark and the dark looks back at her. The little circles in Ted’s windows light up. Through one, color and movement shiver—the TV, she guesses. Later the circles go dark downstairs, and for a few minutes two moons shine out upstairs. They go out at ten. Early to bed, then—no TV or book in bed either. She watches for a few moments longer. The house is dark but she cannot let go of the feeling that it is not at rest. There is something manic in its stillness. But she keeps watching and nothing happens. Her limbs are twitching with exhaustion; the dark revolves before her. She should sleep too. There is a long road ahead.