“It is your prerogative, Dvorah Leah, to squander your final moments if that is what you wish to do. But it is unwise to tempt the wrath of such a one as I.”

Now Dvorah Leah laughed long and loud, but the laughter was false—pushed and angry.

“At what do you laugh, Dvorah Leah?” asked the rising storm of the stranger.

“At you, whatever you are. You’d like to think you’re just a gardener, just a messenger, just a retriever of lost things, but when it comes right down to it, you get crabby when you’re taunted, just like anyone else.”

The stranger made no response.

“No matter what I do, I’m not going out that door on my own two feet, am I?”

“No, Dvorah Leah. You are not.”

Bluma’s heart was beating so hard that she was afraid it would be heard.

“All right, then,” said Dvorah Leah. “Here’s exactly what I think of you.”

Bluma heard her grandmother take a hobbling step forward and fill her lungs with air.

And then it happened.

Shuffling feet.

Falling furniture.

Her bubbe was angry, but she was prevented from speaking.

There was something metallic, and as it came into contact with a bedpost or table corner, it rang out reverberantly, like a bell.

Thrashing. Anger.

A bump and rumple of bedclothes.

A choke and a gurgle.

Metal scraping against something rigid—crockery, perhaps, or bone.

Outside, the wind had begun to fly by with greater and greater force, quicker and quicker, as if something were trying to flee, which it was.

Suddenly, terrible, still silence.

Silence.

Tears blossomed in Bluma’s eyes.

And then, from inside the bedroom, footsteps began to approach the door.

—

Bluma flew down the steps, quickly, quietly, as swiftly as possible without making a sound. Feet pressed into the floorboards above her, and she dropped to the floor and slid herself into the small gap beneath her bed.

Too late she remembered that she had been atop the bed before. And if the stranger thought to look…

Too late.

The stranger’s feet reached the bottom of the stairs. She came to a halt and let out a long, low sigh.

Bluma stopped up her breath and sealed it in, wrapping her fingers tight against her lips. She must not make a sound.

Her heart was thundering in her chest.

She must not make a sound.

“Unpleasant,” said the stranger to herself. “That is the word. Unpleasant. And unfair.”

The stranger’s shoes pressed into the floor, one foot first and then the other, and with a surge of fear, Bluma realized that she was moving closer. Her feet were visible now, walking wearily along the side of Bluma’s little bed, moving their way up toward her pillow.

The feet stopped.