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at least go through the sweaters.
    All right, he said, putting the ties in a bundle on the bed beside him. Sweaters it is.
    She took a stack of sweaters out of the cedar closet and put them on the dresser.
    Three navy sweaters, all V-neck. Would you wear any of these?
    She handed him one so he could feel it.
    Nice, he said. Feels like cashmere. He pulled the sweater over his head. God, it’s hot for this kind of thing. Maybe I’ll sleep on the couch downstairs tonight.
    It fits you.
    No, too small. Remember how Dad seemed to shrink toward the end?
    Cashmere. She scrutinized the label. You’re right – though you could hang on to these until you shrink.
    Or give some of them to Damian, he said.
    Damian wouldn’t wear any of this stuff. You know, he comes home after staying with his friend Adam for three or four days and he’s wearing Adam’s clothes. They’re baggy – they hang on him. He’s heedless, but if it came to his own grandfather’s clothing, he’d be picky. He wouldn’t wear a thing here.
    How’s he doing, Ingrid? Roger asked.
    She folded the sweaters and stacked them neatly again.
    Oh, I don’t know. In the early spring he went up to Adam’s uncle’s cabin, off in the woods. He wanted to be by himself, he said, and that he’d only go for a couple of days, if that. But he was gone for five days, and the place didn’t have a phone –
    And you worried.
    He was very withdrawn when he came back. He wouldn’t say a word to me. I’d been frantic about him, but when I tried to talk to him about it he just brushed me off. Since then he seems to have got himself back on track, more or less.
    But not the same.
    No, not the same. He’s just so unpredictable.
    He blames himself.
    I’ve told him over and over that it was an accident. That it was no one’s fault.
    But does he believe you?
    I don’t know. I really don’t. I think that Damian –
    What?
    Oh, I worry about him. I’m worried he might do something.
    Do something?
    That he might
do
something to himself.
    You worry too much.
    But if he says anything – if he opens up to you – will you talk to him?
    If there’s anything I can do, I’ll do it.
    All of this – oh, Roger, it’s been so awful.
    She put the sweaters back on the shelf in the cedar closet and went out of Roger’s bedroom. Before going down the stairs, she put a hand against the wall.
    Uhhh
, she groaned, thinking of Lisa. Had Lisa been in pain? Had she known she was dying?
    She must have known.
    Ingrid stopped near the bottom of the stairs and tried to breathe steadily. Here she was, in her parents’ house. Roger’s house. She’d been a child in this house, once, a long time ago. She reached up to touch the skeleton of a snake that someone had hung from the light fixture with fishing line. What was it doing there? She couldn’t reach it, but it quivered as if she had touched it after all.
    Ingrid, said Roger at the top of the stairs.
    Don’t fall, she said.
    She was speaking in a dream, but she wanted to shake herself out of the dream, so she walked down the hall to the kitchen. If she stood by the screened door in the kitchen, she might not hear him coming, the cane making its hesitant sounds against the treads of the stairs as he came down.
    Ingrid had been at home in Halifax. The kids had gone up to the cottage at Cribbon’s, but she hadn’t gone with them. If she’d gone with them –
    She remembered picking up the phone and hearing Damian crying.
    What? – Damian? What’s wrong?
    She’d been staring out the window at a red van.
    Damian, tell me what’s wrong.
    It took so long for Damian to tell her. All the time she was watching the red van in the driveway next door. Her neighbour Yvonne got out, bent down, and picked up her terrier, taking it into the house.
    He couldn’t stop crying. All Ingrid could make out was that there’d been an accident. Lisa. Accident. Lisa.
    What
happened
to Lisa? she cried. What happened?
    She was dead. Lisa was dead. Damian said