Slowly she cups her hands and then raises them to her lips, covering her mouth like a mask. She whispers into her palms, a name and a question, over and over. Clouds scud across the moon, throwing light and shadow on her face, gleaming on the wet sheen of tears.

The next morning she resumes her post by the living room window. She keeps the curtains drawn at all times and does not turn on lights after dark. She knows how a lit window shines like a beacon in the night. Ted does too, it seems. The plywood-covered windows make it look as if his house has turned deliberately away from her, to face the forest.

She begins to learn his habits. Sometimes he goes to the woods, and he does not return for a night, or several. Other times he goes into town, and those visits are in general shorter, sometimes lasting only hours, or an evening. Sometimes he returns very drunk. One morning he just stands in the front yard and eats what looks like a pickle spread with peanut butter. He stares ahead, blank, and his jaws move, mechanical. There are bird tables and hanging feeders in the yard, but no birds ever come. What do the birds know?

She finds out everything she can online. Ted sometimes sends in his sightings to the rare bird column in the local paper. His mother is a nurse. She is very beautiful, in an old-fashioned way that seems divorced from such things as flesh or food. In the grainy photograph she holds her certificate in delicate fingers. County Nurse of the Year. Dee wonders what it must do to you, to have a child like Ted. Does she still love him? Where is she?

The first time Dee tries to follow Ted into the forest, he stops at the trail head and waits in the dark. She hears him breathing there. She freezes. She is sure he can hear her heart. After a time he makes a sound like a slow beast and moves away into the forest. She knows she can’t follow, not this time. He felt her there.

She is relieved despite herself. The dark forest seems full of the sliding passage of snakes. She goes home and throws up.

Dee watches the house, instead, after that. After all, it is not him she has come for. She waits, patient. Wuthering Heights lies open on her lap, but she does not look at it. She stares at the house without pause, memorizes each flake of paint that peels away from the old clapboard, each rusty nail, each frond of horsetail and dandelion that bobs against its walls.