“That’s enough,” Sandra says. Then, to the new ghost, “Will you kindly shut the hell up?”

But the new ghost keeps going. “Though I walk through the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . . ”

Now I can’t stop. Part of me knows that I’m not really angry with Sandra. I’m angry with Trenton, and Minna, and Caroline, and even Richard. I’m angry with the whole stumbling, fumbling world, which we’re forced to watch, a sick repetition of the same tired hungers and needs. I’m thinking of Richard’s body, bundled in white; and Sandra’s face half spread across the walls; and Trenton standing beneath a rope. I’m thinking of bodies hauled up from the funeral parlor next to St. John the Divine when I was a kid, and the smell of smoke and skin in the air, and how there will never be an end to it.

“You lost your friends,” I say. “You nearly lost your house. And what about the man—Martin? If you hadn’t died in time—”

“I said, that’s enough.”

I feel a spark of anger, a quick flash, like a match striking. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

Trenton cries out, and everything goes dark.

CAROLINE

Caroline heard glass breaking, and a short cry, as soon as she walked into the house. The sound cut through the “muffling”: that’s what the awful woman at Sunrise Center had called the effect of alcohol on Caroline’s brain, the time she had been forced to go to a rehab center after accidentally tapping another car on the way home from a dinner. No one had even been hurt, but the other woman, who’d had a baby in the car, had been hysterical about it and insisted on calling the police.

Muffling—the woman at Sunrise had said it as though Caroline should be ashamed. But afterward, whenever she’d had a couple, Caroline always imagined her brain nestled in a kind of hand-knitted mitten, warm and protected.

But now the muffling split apart, and for a short second everything was sharp and painful.

“Trenton,” she said, turning to Minna, feeling a sudden panic. “That’s Trenton.” She turned blindly in the hall; she didn’t know where the sound had come from. “Trenton? Are you okay? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” His voice was faint. She still couldn’t tell where he was. She had always hated that about the house: how it sucked up sound and voices and footsteps, as though they were all being absorbed, slowly but surely, into the walls.

“Where are you?” she cried out, still unable to quell the panic. Her chest felt as though it had collapsed, as though a big fist had reached out and punched backward in time, back to that awful night of Trenton’s accident—the two-hour drive through the dark; the dingy hospital and the ugly woman who’d barred her from going into the operating room, staring at her as though she was some species of insect; the long wait without anything at all to drink.

“He’s in the basement, Ma. Stop shouting.” Minna opened the basement door with a foot, as though it was the door to a public restroom and she was worried about germs on the handle. Amy made a rush for the stairs, and Minna grabbed her arm.

“What did I tell you, Amy?” she said. “You don’t go down there. Not unless Mommy takes you.”

Amy began to wail.

Caroline moved past both of them and angled her body so she could squeeze down the narrow staircase. Her head was pounding. “What are you doing?” she said, moving carefully down the stairs. Each step sent a small tremor of pain through her body: ankles, knees, hips. The doctor had said she should lose some weight. Cut out the booze. She had nodded and said oh, yes, absolutely, as she had done so many times with Richard, when she had no intention of listening.

If the doctor had her estranged husband, or her children, he would drink, too.

“Nothing.” Trenton was standing in the middle of the vast cluttered space, looking guilty about something. “I was just—cleaning up.”

It was obviously a lie. Trenton hadn’t helped at all in the three days since they’d been back in Coral River. Caroline realized that he’d probably been looking at  p**n ography. He must have found his father’s collection.

Several months after Trenton’s birth, Caroline had gone looking for Minna’s old stroller in the basement and found a stack of magazines, stashed unself-consciously in a trunk that also contained several baby items and the hat Caroline had bought Richard on their honeymoon. She’d sat on the ground for hours, unable to look away, unable to stop turning the pages—the way she’d heard that a bad electric shock caused you to hold on.

“What was that awful noise?” she said. “Did you break something?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Trenton said. “The lightbulb just . . . exploded.”

“The wiring in this house was always screwy,” Minna said. Caroline turned and saw she had come halfway down the stairs. Amy was trying to get around her, and Minna shuffled side to side, like a hockey player protecting a goal.

Of course. Minna was taking Trenton’s side. Anyone could see he’d been fiddling around where he wasn’t supposed to—maybe he thought he had the right, now that the house was his. Caroline felt a rush of anger that replaced the fear and obliterated it.

The house had been a constant point of contention in her marriage. She had not initially wanted to move from their sprawling, sunny home in California, on its small trim lawn on a small trim street in a nice gated community not far from the ocean. She had liked the guardhouse, where an ever-rotating cast of polite young Mexicans stood watch and checked names against a list—as though each time she returned home, she was accessing an exclusive party.

And then Richard had decided he wanted to be back in New York, close to where he had grown up. He had dragged her across the country and installed her in a vast, dark, drafty house, plagued by mice and termites, erratically heated, prone to leaks and pipe freezes and toilets backing up onto the floor.

Caroline had declared war, first on him; she had refused to sleep with him for two months. When she realized that her tactics only amused him, and that he was getting it elsewhere, anyway, she declared war instead on the house. She ripped out wallpaper and replaced it with patterns of her choosing. She scrubbed the cabinets, rearranged the furniture, shopped, and shopped some more. She put lights everywhere, as many as twelve in a room. She’d never been good with her hands and never before cared to do work herself; in California, there had always been gardeners, and decorators to match the cushions with the couch, and Caroline had to do nothing but approve it all. She was surprised to find she had taste. She could get things done.