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wanted to the boy could have run after it, could probably have caught it even, even with his numb feet. But he just stands there swaying, watching the truck recede as if one of them, the truck or the boy, is on an ice floe borne away from the shore by a half-frozen current. By the time the truck disappears over the hill the stranger has walked down from the barns and walked on by. There is smoke coming from a chimney on the left wall of the house and the stranger’s pitchfork makes a metallic ping each time it strikes the frozen ground.
    Feeling floods into the boy’s feet then, as if a pot of pastawater had tipped off the stove and spilled over them. He reels, bites back a cry of pain; catches his breath and catches his balance.
    Uncle Wallace? he says to the thin brown back retreating down the hill.
    The stranger doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn around.
    Get my hat, Dale, he says. At the door he pauses to look the boy up and down, and then he shakes his head one more time. In the failing light his scalp looks white and cold.
    Don’t forget your shoes, he says, and walks into the house.

2
    It is as dark as it can get now, and cold. It’s not like the sun’s gone down. It’s like the light has frozen in space on its way here, leaving the boy trapped on the frozen plain of this unfamiliar bed.
    This was your cousin Edith’s bed.
    It seemed to him that his uncle’s wife, Bessie—Aunt Bessie—had fussed over the sheets. She’d stretched them taut across the mattress, smoothed out the wrinkles with her palm as though he weren’t going to pull them back five minutes after she finished. She worked in silence after that one line though, until the boy realized it was his turn to say something.
    I have a sister—
    His voice cracked and squeaked into the little slope-ceilinged room. There is a slope to the loft’s ceiling as well, on Long Island, but nothing like this steep pitch, which comes to within a couple of feet of the floor on one side of the room. He’d had to duck down to cross to the other side of the bed from Aunt Bessie.
    The boy cleared his throat, tried again.
    A sister named Edith. Louder: Edi.
    In the dim room, illuminated by a single dusty lamp beside the bed, the multicolored squares of the quilt Aunt Bessie fluffed over the sheets seemed to spill out in a patternless yet intricate arrangement that hinted at some as-yet-unseen order, like the twilight stars before the constellations become fully visible. Aunt Bessie turned the top of the quilt down over the nearly featherless pillow, gave it a little plump, then straightened up and looked at him. The expression on her face wasn’t inscrutable, but so unfamiliar as to seem that way. No one—especially not an adult, and especially not a woman—had ever looked at him with pity before.
    You have a cousin named Edi too. A smile seamed her face, thin but genuine. Edith. Goodnight Dale.
    And it’s not like he’s never had a bed to himself, a bedroom, although it takes a series of events as rare and complicated as a planetary alignment to empty the crowded house on Long Island of father, mother, seven brothers and sisters. The old man on a bender somewhere, his mother pulling second shift, Gregory and Lance at daycare. All three of the girls off at friends’ houses, Jimmy knocking about the Pine Barrens collecting bird skulls or redeemable bottles or—if he can find him—the old man and what’s left of his pay, Duke doing whatever it is Duke does to keep clear of the old man’s fists. If on top of all this the boy doesn’t have to go in to Slaussen’s—and if he can find a way to make it past Robert Sampson and Bruce St. John and Vinnie Grasso without getting dragged into the Barrens himself—then he will round the corner from school and walk into an empty house, and even if he’s not tired he will climb the ladder to theloft and stretch his limbs across the pushed-together twin mattresses that make up the boys’ bed and stare at the canted