“I want to nap,” Amy insists.

“Come on, Amy.” Trenton takes a step forward and puts a hand on Amy’s shoulder, drawing her away from the bed. “I’ll meet you downstairs, okay? It will only take a second.”

“What the hell?” Now that Amy is gone, Minna doesn’t bother controlling her anger. “I thought you were going for more boxes.”

“Forgot my wallet.” Trenton shrugs. “We got all the way to Oakbridge, and—”

“Jesus Christ, Trenton,” Minna explodes. “What the hell is wrong with you? I ask you to do one goddamn thing—”

“What’s wrong with me?” Trenton backs out of the room. “It was a mistake. You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”

“Don’t you dare call me a bitch.” If Minna were not stuck in bed, naked, I’m pretty sure she would get out of bed and slap him. She lies stiff, white-faced, for several long minutes, until she hears Trenton pound downstairs again, until she hears the front door open and then slam. She keeps her sheets at her chin. She leans her head against the headboard. Otherwise, she is frozen.

“Can I come out now?” Chris’s voice is muffled.

“Yes,” she answers.

He wriggles out from the bed and stands again. This time, he doesn’t bother cupping. His Thing has returned, now, to its normal, shriveled state, and again I think of an animal that has retracted, burrowed away to nurture its hunger.

“Phew.” Chris sits heavily on the bed. “I had no idea you had a kid. God, that could have been awkward. Well, all’s well that ends—”

“Get out.” Minna closes her eyes.

Chris starts. “Hey,” he says softly, after a long pause. He reaches out and touches her face. She doesn’t withdraw. She doesn’t open her eyes. “Hey. Look, I’m sorry about that. But I thought you wanted to have a good time. That’s what you said, right? And we were just getting started . . . ”

“Please leave now,” Minna says simply. “The kitchen door should be open. Or you can leave through the hall. It’s up to you.”

For a moment, Chris watches her. Then he stands abruptly, searches the floor for his shirt, and angrily wrestles on his pants.

“Crazy,” he says. Just as he did during intercourse, he lets out a volley of curses, a string of half-muttered words: “Fucking insane. I just came here . . . and I had no idea . . . you were the one who wanted . . . That’s f**ked up, you know?”

Minna says nothing.

When he has laced up his shoes, and cinched his belt, he stands, staring down at Minna. She must sense it. Still, she doesn’t open her eyes.

“Fucked,” he says, one last time, and then bursts out of the room, and down the stairs, and out the door, leaving his small black folio, full of urn styles, sitting on the hall console. I think he may remember and come back for it, but he doesn’t.

For a long time, Minna lies there. I can’t help but remember the way her father sat for a whole day after Caroline had taken the children, while the milk curdled in his coffee.

“Good-bye,” she says finally, into the empty room.

Then she pushes off the sheets and stands, and goes into the bathroom, and turns on the shower.

I wanted Amy to trip. I wished for it. I willed my way up through the stairs. And then she tripped.

First, the lightbulb in the basement. And now Amy.

I’m working my way back: into a real body, into feeling.

Touching, pushing, blowing.

Power.

I wasn’t always as helpless as I am now. When I first died, when I found myself here, in this house, I could still feel my old body—hands, legs, arms. And I could still go blundering, occasionally and blindly, and find that I had accidentally upset a vase or rattled a table or bumped against the washing machine and turned it on. The Killigans were in the house then, and they used to joke about it: the house is haunted, they’d say at dinner parties. I swear, just the other day, the TV turned on by itself.

It’s like the men who came home from the war missing limbs. Afterward, for a long time, there were the agonizing itches in long-lost toes, the cramps in amputated calves. Ed lost his left pinkie finger to an artillery blast, and until the day he died he claimed he could feel a hangnail there. One time, I came downstairs in the middle of the night and found him, half drunk, hacking away at the air with nail scissors. Phantom limb syndrome, they called it.

When your whole body is gone, it’s the same thing, just on a larger scale—phantom body syndrome. You feel it, you sense it, and somehow this keeps you grounded in the physical world and allows you to knock elbows with the TV and bump shins against chairs.

But as time went on, as I learned to see by touch, and hear by echo, as air does, and smell the ways walls do, by absorption, the old body receded further and further into the past, and so did my ability to affect things in the physical world.

Is that why Trenton can see her? The girl, Vivian—if it is Vivian—is still so new. She hasn’t forgotten how to be alive.

That’s the trick: to remember the old body as closely as possible, to feel my way back into it. The narrowness, the needs; the exhaustion and hunger; the pains and the explosions of pleasure. If there’s any hope of escaping, I must.

The bed in the Yellow Room isn’t so very different from the bed we bought for Maggie once she had outgrown the cradle—from Woolworths, of course, delivered to us sheathed in plastic by men as solemn-faced as pallbearers. For the first six months after we moved her from the cradle, Maggie would wake up screaming. I would climb into bed with her and gradually she would calm down, while I whispered into her hair and kept one arm locked tightly around her waist, to show her I was there.

I remember: the frantic fluttering heartbeat winging through her back, against my br**sts and rib cage.

I remember: her sputtering, sniffling breaths, the feel of sweat seeping through her pajamas, and the smell of raspberries in her hair.

I remember the ramrod terror, too, when I heard her crying—the fear that she would never calm down, the fear that I could never pull her back from that black dream-space, the yawning nightmare mouth. Even after she calmed down, the fear would keep me awake: this fragile shell-person, this strange miracle of bones and blood, so easily ruptured and broken.

I wanted to absorb her back inside of me. I would have taken off my skin like a snake and folded her away, to be my secret again.

But she grew, and grew, and grew; and our bodies took us farther from each other. Did she remember those nights? Did she remember how I used to hold her, and rock her to sleep, and sing lullabies into her hair?