There was a time when I’d look out the window and feel the weight of the winter just past ease away because it’s so beautiful outside and if it’s not quite blossoms-spring-forth spring, it’s not deep-drifts-of-snow winter anymore, either. I’d insist on us going out and tramping through the woods. I could be out there all day and relish every moment.

That’s another impulse I push away, when it comes.

But if I could have it all again . . .

So I call their names.

Maida and Zia. Zia and Maida. Crow girls.

I feel kind of stupid, sitting in my wheelchair, calling to them. Geordie waits quietly on the bed, nodding encouragingly when I glance in his direction.

I call them again. The third time.

There’s no response.

I look at Geordie.

“Once more,” he says.

I nod and do it again, my gaze on him, watching him mouth their names with me.

And then suddenly they’re here.

One moment, it’s just Geordie and me, sitting in our hotel room, and in the next a tumble of black hair and black clothes lands on the bed in a tangle of limbs, squirming and giggling on the bedclothes, their eyes bright with laughter.

“Hello, hello,” Maida says.

She flops onto her back and looks at me from an upside-down vantage. Zia, sprawled across her stomach, spies the chocolate bars.

“Oh, look,” she says. “Bribes.”

Maida sits up and grabs one.

“Don’t be rude,” she tells Zia.

“They’re not bribes?”

“Why would our veryvery good friends Geordie and Jilly ever need to bribe us?”

Zia shrugs. “So that we’ll behave?”

“Don’t mind her,” Maida says to me. “She was brought up in a tree by an old magpie.”

Zia nods. “Oh, yes. Ancient and decrepit.”

“Wheezing and bony.”

“With long grey hair, tangled like a bird’s nest.”

“And there,” Maida says, throwing out her hand in a dramatic flourish, “is where we lived.”

They each open a chocolate bar and eat them in what seems like two bites. But while they obviously relish the chocolate, something about them changes when they’re done. Sitting on the edge of the bed, kicking their heels against the box spring, they face me with suddenly serious eyes and solemn faces.

“So, is it time?” Maida asks.

“Of course, it’s time,” Zia answers before I can. “Look how she glows. All the shadows have been burned away.”

Maida nods. “Except for that one.”

She points at me, but I have no idea what she’s pointing at.

“But that’s only a shadow of a shadow,” Zia says. “A memory, nothing more.”

Maida slides off the bed and walks over to my wheelchair.

“This will probably hurt,” she says as she stands on my right.

Zia joins her, standing on the other side of the chair.

“Not because we want it to,” she adds.

Maida nods. “Because we don’t.”