Snow melted under his boots and made puddles on the linoleum. He took off the boots and socks and lined them up by the cold stove out of habit. When he looked back toward the rocker, he saw the pill bottle on the table. The cap was off and most of the little round pills inside were gone. In the beginning, some doctor in town said the pills would help her rest from the pain after she got hurt, but that all happened a long time ago, and from then on she got the pills any way she could. Now she slept in the rocker day and night and didn’t greet him at the door or eat or take baths or say things that made sense.

Wind, or something else, rustled upstairs. He went to the stairwell and stood looking up. The light dimmed halfway and shrank to darkness at the top.

“Mom?”

She had to be up there, in the bathroom. Maybe sick again from taking too many. He climbed the creaking carpeted stairs and flicked on the hall light and waited. No sound. A gust of air along the roof.

He crossed to the bathroom.

He imagined he’d find her hunched by the toilet throwing up, eyes sunken in cups of livid shadow, or standing in front of the mirror, starving-thin, like a crumpled paper doll. But she wasn’t there.

Bathroom empty. Rose-pink porcelain.

Octagon tile, dingy white.

He thought of her lying somewhere outside in her nightgown with the life seeping out of her into the frigid snow. Stop it, he said to himself. She’s okay. Somebody came and got her and maybe took her to the store. That’s all.

But this was a lie. Of course it was.

He left the bathroom and stared at the closed door at the end of the hall, and that door got bigger as he looked at it. Only one room left in the house, and she wouldn’t be in there. No, she never went in that bedroom. Not since they came in the night and pulled Dad from his bed with them both still in it and hauled him away.

No. That room was a grave. And she wouldn’t go in.

He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it.

She was hanging from the ceiling fan. A belt was coiled around the fan’s downrod and cinched around her throat. One of her frail hands twitched.

He tore to her and raised her up by her legs, but she was limp all over. Beneath her lay a wooden chair on its side. He let her go and shoved the chair up and stood on it and lifted her but her head lolled forward. Her eyes didn’t blink. Oh God. He yanked on the belt and the fan shuddered. Plaster dusted his face. Please, he thought.

Oh, dear God, please.