It’s almost three in the morning, and my mother’s half asleep. I understand when she declines. My irritation over identifying the song or chiptune or whatever it is–she’s humoring this with a thinly veiled sense of worry.  

I still have my phone. During the last few weeks, I don’t think they gave me my phone in some of the hospitals–it’s hard to remember. The seizures started four or five nights ago.  

“Honey, we can talk about this later,” Ken says in a stagey voice now, tilting his head toward Sandra, who’s reappeared with the young couple, the three of them staring. 

 “I want to talk about it now, honey,” Mary says. “You think I don’t know where you go on your so-called bowling nights?” 

At night, we lie in bed and tell stories about the people we’ve met at the Marx, the things we’ve heard and seen, and we try to scare each other for fun. We talk about The Shining, which we saw just before we moved here, when a babysitter wanted to see it so bad she took us to a matinee and made us swear not to tell our mother.

It’s not much but redemption begins in the smallest acts. A tiny step towards the light is a supersonic flight from the blood-red darkness of his past. As Michael hammers another plank of wood to the window that opens up to the veranda, Harrison sits next to him and passes him nails. 

I tilt my head back too and see a white cloud enveloping our room. With it came a cold, like we were standing in our freezer, and one by one little snowflakes fell around us. My dollhouse, already destroyed by the thunderstorm he created before, started to be covered in white. It looked like Christmastime and I imagined my dolls inside, running over to look outside at the snow.  

The man grazed the pocket of his leather jacket, revealing the edge of what I knew to be a gun. The only other time I’d ever seen one had been in the cupholder of my friend Jack’s Chevy Impala. It was the first time that I glimpsed the graveness of his addiction.