At the Maddox farmhouse, no one was allowed to sit alone. A chair would be found, a place made, a little more water added to the soup; Elizabeth Maddox could accommodate anyone, and for thirty years her friends mistook this for a house rule. There were people who came for an evening and remained until their divorces were final. There were children who arrived with their parents and returned without them. Outside the kitchen window stood an oak that had grown around an iron fence post, a length of washing line, and the hook from a swing. What it could not move, it made room for.

When Elizabeth died, the farmhouse was sold. The new owners wanted light in the kitchen, and the oak came down on a Thursday in the autumn of 2019. The men cut it into lengths, ate their sandwiches, and left. After dark, someone came back for a piece.

It was Will Brandt, who had once lived in Elizabeth’s spare room for six weeks while he found somewhere else to be unhappy. He used a handsaw. Halfway through, the cut closed on the blade, and he had to put his foot against the trunk and pull. He fell backward when it came free.

There was nothing remarkable about this. Green wood can pinch a saw. Nevertheless, he apologized.

* * *

Seven years later, Claire Maddox invited four people to a cabin on Orcas Island. She wrote the invitations by hand. First weekend of November. I need all of you there. Please don’t make me explain in a letter.

Diane Weiss called her immediately. Claire let it go to voicemail, then sent a photograph of her ferry reservation.

“That manipulative little shit,” Diane told Phoebe, and booked a ticket.

She arrived with enough groceries for a week. Marcus Chen was already there, aligning five chairs around a table intended for four. He had found the fifth in a bedroom. It was a straight-backed kitchen chair with a towel folded over the seat, and he carried it out with the towel still on it.

“Where’s Claire?”

“Lying down.”

Something in the way he said it made Diane leave the groceries on the floor.

Claire was awake. She lay on top of the bedspread in a cardigan Diane had given her ten years earlier. The buttons were little wooden fish. One was missing, and the cardigan hung open over the place where there had been a body with some weight to it.

Diane sat beside her.

“How long have you known?”

“Since August.”

“You could have called.”

“You’d have come.”

“Yes, Claire. That’s generally the fucking idea.”

Claire took her hand. Her wedding ring was on a chain around her neck, although the marriage had been over for eleven years. She wore it when she needed something to worry between her fingers.

“I wanted one dinner before we did this.”

Diane looked at the little fish. She could sew a button on. She had needles in the car, in the kit Phoebe made her carry because she insisted on doing everything herself.

“All right,” she said. “One dinner.”

In the kitchen Marcus was putting away the food. He practiced family law in Tacoma and had become very good at knowing when to leave a woman alone. He passed Diane a mug of whiskey.

“Phoebe says hello,” she told him.

“How’s Chloe?”

She looked at him.

“Jesus. Phoebe. I’m sorry.”

“She’s fine. The alpacas are fine. Everyone you haven’t called is fine.”

He drank from his mug. “I’ve missed you too.”

That was enough to let them begin.

They chopped onions and disagreed about how much garlic Claire could tolerate. Rain moved across the channel. When Diane reached past Marcus for a towel, he put his hand on her shoulder for a moment, and she let him. She had expected to be angrier with him. There was always less time in a room with the actual person than there had been in the arguments she held alone.

Tom Aldiss arrived at dusk. He came in carrying a paper bag, gave it to Diane, and went back for his coat.

Inside were five satsumas. “He stopped at a store,” she said, very quietly.

Marcus nodded.

For seven years Tom had done only what needed doing. He ate, worked a little, kept his truck running. At Christmas he answered their messages with the same three words: You too. Thanks. His son Ethan had died at nineteen, in February 2019, and there were parts of ordinary life Tom still approached as though someone had moved the stairs in the dark.

But he had stopped at a store. He had counted them.

Will Brandt came last. His hair had gone completely white. He stood in the doorway with a canvas bag over his shoulder until Claire emerged from the bedroom and said his name. He put the bag down so carefully that Diane looked at it twice.

At dinner they did better than she had hoped. Marcus told a story about two parents who had hired competing psychics in a custody dispute. Will asked which one had been right.

“The child wanted to live with his grandmother.”

“Were either of them getting that?”

“No. I was getting that.”

Tom smiled into his plate.

They had met at Reed, except for Tom, who had arrived attached to an engineering project and stayed attached to them. Most of the friendship had happened in Elizabeth’s kitchen outside Portland. Elizabeth fed them and let them be clever until they became unkind. Then she would lay her hand on the table and say, “Tread softly,” and whoever was winning would discover a sudden interest in the salt.

It had taken Diane years to learn that the words came from a poem. Elizabeth had seemed quite capable of inventing them for the occasion.

After dinner Claire gathered the plates, got as far as stacking two, and sat down again.

“I have pancreatic cancer,” she said. “They can treat it. They can’t fix it.”

Marcus reached for his mug and left his hand beside it.

“How long?” Tom asked.

“Months. They’re vague. I used to find that annoying in a man.”

Nobody helped her with the joke.

“Look,” she said. “You’re all going to be wonderful about it, and I’m grateful. But there’s something I want to do while I can still get on a ferry by myself.”

She looked at Will.

He did not move.

“You promised.”

“I promised to bring it.”

“Then let them see.”

* * *

The board was smaller than Diane expected. She had pictured something expensive and ridiculous, an object with brass fittings. Will took out a shallow oak frame with a sheet of cream linen stretched across it. He had painted the alphabet in two rows, numbers below, YES in one corner and NO in the other. GOODBYE ran along the bottom.

The pointer was a wooden triangle with a hole through its center. The grain curved around the hole like the lines on the pad of a finger. In one corner Will had blotted the ink with his thumb and painted over the mark. She could see his worktable in Olympia, the newspaper laid down, the small brush between his fingers. This had taken him evenings. He had gone to bed thinking about it and got up wanting to finish.

“A Ouija board,” Marcus said.

“A talking board.”

“Oh, well.”

“He made it from the oak,” Claire said.

Diane looked up. “Your mother’s?”

Will nodded.

“And she talks to you on it.” Marcus waited. “Is that what we’re being asked to believe?”

“I’m asking you to sit with me,” Claire said.

“Those are different things.”

“Then do the easier one.”

Diane cleared the plates. She was annoyed by the candles Will requested and more annoyed by the part of herself relieved when he said the electric lights could stay on. Outside the window the channel was black. A little kitchen clock ticked over the refrigerator.

They sat where they had eaten, Claire at the end, Tom and Marcus along one side, Will and Diane along the other. Diane had the chair from the bedroom. Without its towel, the seat was cold through her jeans.

Will put two fingers on the triangle.

“Very lightly. It’s called a planchette.”

“Will,” Diane said. “Before we do this. What happened when you used it?”

He kept his fingers where they were.

“Usually nothing. Sometimes answers.”

“From Elizabeth.”

“That’s what they said.”

The kitchen clock made eight small ticks.

“Once it called me Billy,” he said. “She never called me that. No one does.”

“You’re admitting you might have imagined it,” Marcus said.

“That would be preferable.”

“And you went on using it,” Diane said.

“Nothing else in my house answers.”

Claire was watching the board.

“Have you used it?” Diane asked her.

“With Will. Twice.”

“And?”

“The second time it told me to bring you.”

“All of us?”

“By name.”

Diane sat back. She was conscious of the cold seat, of the bottle on the counter, of Tom’s hands flat on his knees.

“Claire, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Neither do I.” Claire’s voice was level. “But I’ve had months of people telling me what they don’t think is a good idea. I’d like an evening off.”

Will lifted the triangle and showed them its underside. Three felt feet, a shallow crack in the wood.

“There’s one thing. If it starts moving through the numbers backward, take your hands off. Don’t wait for me.”

“Why?” Tom asked.

“The last time it did that, I stopped at six. I put it away in a pillowcase and tied a knot in it. In the morning the knot was still there. The pointer was on the stairs.”

“You should have led with that,” Marcus said.

Will put it down.

Nobody reached for it. Rain ticked against the window, briefly louder than the clock. Diane could get up. She could take Claire into the bedroom, close the door, sit on the bed again and explain. She had spent thirty years as a veterinarian telling people things they did not want to hear. She knew how to keep her voice steady.

Claire laid her fingers on the wood.

Tom followed.

Diane looked at his hands, the wide pale band where he no longer wore his wedding ring. She put two fingers beside his. Across the table Marcus released a breath through his nose and joined them.

“Elizabeth,” Will said. “We’re here.”

Nothing happened.

The cramped arrangement of their fingers made Diane think of a game Ethan used to make them play, each person adding a hand to a pile until the hand at the bottom had to come out and slap the top. Elizabeth always lost. She would leave her hand underneath, apparently forgetting what they were doing, and Ethan would dissolve into his peculiar little wheeze before he could get a laugh out. He accused her of losing on purpose. She denied it so badly he laughed harder.

“Is anyone here?” Will asked.

The planchette turned beneath their fingers.

Diane looked at Marcus. He was looking at her.

It stopped on YES.

“Did you do that?” she asked.

“No.”

She could feel a tremor through the wood. With so many hands on one object, it could have belonged to anyone.

“Who is this?” Will said.

C. L. A. I. R. E.

Claire frowned.

“Mom?”

Diane remembered. Claire Elizabeth Maddox. The mother had used her middle name. Neither woman liked the confusion, though Elizabeth had created it and could hardly complain.

YES.

“Why wouldn’t she say Elizabeth?” Diane asked.

The planchette started moving again before Will could answer.

YOU BROUGHT THEM.

“I said I would.” Claire’s chin had begun to tremble. “I’m here. We’re all here.”

GOOD.

Diane looked at Will. His eyes were wet.

“Ask it something,” Marcus said. “Something only she would know.”

Claire wiped her cheek with her free hand.

“What did you sing when you washed my hair?”

The wood pressed against Diane’s fingers, paused, moved.

YOU NEVER LIKED MY SINGING.

Claire made a small, broken laugh.

“No.” She put her knuckles against her mouth. “No, I didn’t.”

It was a lovely answer. Diane disliked it at once. You could give it to almost anyone. Yet Claire had begun to laugh in earnest now, with her free hand over her eyes, and Diane remembered Elizabeth at the sink with a towel over one shoulder, making a noise that rose without warning above their conversation. Someone would protest. Elizabeth would get louder. It had irritated her then. She would have given a great deal to stand in that kitchen and be irritated by it again.

“Ask for the song,” she said.

But the planchette was already moving, and Claire was following the letters with her whole body, leaning forward as if she could get nearer to the hand that wrote them.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE BOY.

Tom took his hands away.

“No,” he said.

The triangle kept moving. Diane felt his absence as a sudden imbalance, a cup tilting toward her.

HE TOLD ME.

“Stop.” Tom stood. His chair struck the wall behind him.

Will lifted his fingers, and Diane did too. Claire held on another moment, then let go. The pointer stopped between two letters.

“I didn’t ask about Ethan,” Claire said.

Tom was looking at Will.

“I wouldn’t,” Will said.

Marcus picked up the board. He turned it over, nearly upsetting a candle, and ran his hand across the back. There was nothing to see but linen, staples, the penciled numbers Will had used to match the corners of the frame.

“Give it to me,” Claire said.

“Enough.”

“It’s my mother’s tree.”

“It’s a piece of wood.”

“Then you shouldn’t be frightened of it.”

Tom went to the front door. Diane got up to follow him, but he held out a hand without turning. The latch worked. Cold air came in, and with it the sound of rain in the trees. He stood in the open doorway for a long time.

Diane could see his truck. He could reach it in ten seconds.

“What did he tell her?” he said.

“Tom.”

“You heard it.” He looked at Diane now. “‘He told me.’ What did he tell her?”

She knew precisely what her face had done. She felt it happen and could not prevent it.

Tom shut the door. He kept his hand on the latch, then let it fall.

* * *

They sat down again without discussing it. Marcus replaced the board. This time Tom reached for the planchette first.

“What did my son tell you?”

The pointer moved so slowly they had time to form each possible word and abandon it.

HE DIDNT WANT TO LIVE.

Tom stared at the hole in the wood.

“When?”

LABOR DAY.

“That last weekend,” Claire said. “I came on Sunday. Was he there before I got there?”

“Saturday,” Tom said. “He drove up with me.”

“Mom never told me.”

SHE TOLD DIANE.

No one turned abruptly. That was worse. They looked at her with an awful care.

“She called on Monday,” Diane said.

Tom did not move.

“She said he’d talked to her in the garden. That he was frightened of himself. She wanted me to talk to him.”

“Did you?”

“I gave her the name of someone in Portland. A psychiatrist.”

“Did you talk to Ethan?”

“No.”

The kitchen clock ticked. Diane wanted a drink of water. The glass stood six inches from her free hand, and she could not make herself reach for it.

“Why you?” Claire asked.

“Because in 2004 I tried to kill myself.”

Will’s fingers tightened against hers.

“Elizabeth drove me home from the hospital. I stayed with her for a while.” Diane looked at the candle in front of her. There was a gnat in the wax, intact beneath the surface. “She thought I would know what to say to him.”

“You might have,” Tom said.

“Yes.”

“You might have tried.”

“Yes.”

“Instead you gave her a number.”

She had rehearsed this conversation for seven years. In the rehearsals she managed to explain what it had cost to be well again; how carefully she had arranged her days, how frightened she was of disturbing anything. Sitting across from Tom, she could remember only that Elizabeth had called during breakfast. Diane had put her on speaker and buttered a second piece of toast.

“I told her to tell you,” she said. “She was afraid he’d deny it. That he wouldn’t trust her again. I said to give him a few days to make the appointment himself.”

“And after a few days?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Tom’s eyes had gone bright.

“Did it help you?” he asked. “Having somebody come and get you?”

Diane lowered her head.

“Look at me.”

She did.

“Did it help?”

“Yes.”

Under the table something touched her ankle.

She jerked her foot back. Will glanced at her. Both his feet were visible, drawn beneath his chair.

The touch came again, higher this time, against the outside of her calf: a brief, clumsy pressure. At Elizabeth’s table, someone had always reached a foot across to tell the person being scolded that they were still loved.

Diane pulled both feet onto the rung of her chair.

Tom was still looking at her.

“I should have called,” she said.

The pointer moved.

MARCUS HAS THE LETTER.

Marcus’s hand came off so quickly he caught Will’s knuckle with his nail.

“What letter?” Tom said.

“I need some air.”

“What letter, Marcus?”

He was already standing. Diane looked down at the blood gathering on Will’s hand, a single red bead beside the nail. Will seemed not to have noticed.

“Elizabeth wrote to you after Ethan died,” Marcus said. “She gave it to me when I visited her in April. She asked me to deliver it.”

“You didn’t.”

“She was very ill.”

“I know how ill she was. I went to her funeral.”

“I thought you had enough.”

“You thought.”

“Yes.”

“Is that all it took?”

Marcus looked toward the door, then sat without bringing his chair closer. He had left a gap between himself and the table.

The planchette turned.

GREEN BOX.

“Oh,” Claire said.

For a moment she only looked at him. Then she touched the ring hanging from her neck.

“My mother’s emerald. You said you hadn’t seen it.”

Marcus folded his hands in his lap.

“It was on her dresser when we cleared the house. The box was open. I put it in my coat.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do.”

He looked at her then.

“I wanted something.”

Claire released the ring on its chain. It clicked against a wooden button.

“So did I,” she said.

Diane heard the little sound clearly. She could hear the clock, the rain, Will breathing through his mouth. Something was missing. She looked at the window, where darkness pressed flat against the glass, and tried to think what it was. Then she knew: the water. Since she arrived there had been a soft drag and collapse of waves against the shore. She had stopped noticing it, but now its absence made every sound inside the cabin seem too close.

“And the letter?” Tom said.

“Under the tray. In the box.”

“Where?”

“My car.”

“You brought it?”

Marcus looked at Claire. “I was going to give it back.”

“When?”

Nobody rescued him from the question.

“Go and get it,” Tom said.

Marcus stood. This time no one objected. He took his keys from the counter, opened the door, and went out into the rain. Before he pulled the door shut there was the rain, and still nothing from the shore.

Diane watched him through the window. His car lit up. He bent into the passenger side. For several seconds she thought he would get in and drive away, and she wanted him to. She wanted somebody to do the obvious thing.

He came back with water in his hair and a small green box in his fist.

“Hands off,” Diane said.

They took their hands off. She picked up the planchette and set it on the kitchen counter.

The ring lay in green velvet. Marcus lifted out the tray. Beneath it was a folded sheet of thin blue paper, split at one crease from having been opened many times.

Tom reached for it.

Marcus did not immediately let go.

“There are things in here she says about all of us.”

“It has my name on it.”

Marcus released the paper.

Tom read standing up. Diane could see Elizabeth’s handwriting through the sheet, its long, impatient tails. An e was always nearly an i. Even from the wrong side she knew it.

Tom reached the bottom and started again at the top.

“Why didn’t you give me this?”

“I told you.”

Tom turned the page outward. He put a finger beneath two lines halfway down.

“Read it.”

Marcus did not.

“Read what she says about you.”

“Tom, please.”

“I’ve read what she says about me.”

Marcus looked at the paper.

“‘I am sending this with Marcus because he knows what I am saying is true. Whether he gives it to you will depend on whether he can bear to be disliked.’”

No one spoke.

“She put it in an envelope,” Marcus said. “I opened it in the car.”

“You could have put it back.”

“I know what I could have done.” He raised his voice, and it sounded so much like the old Marcus, the one who could be funny and contemptuous in the same breath, that Diane almost expected Elizabeth to intervene. “She gave me a sealed letter and arranged for you to know I’d read it. She knew exactly what I’d do. She put that in there and she knew.”

“Yes,” Claire said. “That sounds like her.”

Marcus looked at her. She was crying now, quietly, and smiling at something he could not see.

Diane remembered Elizabeth at her most difficult: the precise remark, the eye that followed you after she made it. How eagerly they had joined in when it was somebody else. Once, over breakfast, Elizabeth had described the kind of woman Marcus would marry. They had laughed until he left the table. Later Diane had found him sitting in his car. She had knocked on the window and said, “Oh, come on,” because she wanted him to come back inside and make it all right. She could not now remember what Elizabeth had said, only how certain she had been that Marcus ought to take it well.

Tom laid the letter on the table. The page had gone soft where his hands had held it.

“She says he talked to her beside the oak. She says she meant to tell me before we left.”

His voice had changed. The anger was still there, but it no longer knew where to go.

“She says I was happy that morning. That he was making me laugh. She didn’t want to spoil it.”

Claire put a hand over her mouth.

Tom pulled out his chair. He sat with the paper between his forearms.

“We’d had a good drive up,” he said. “At least, I thought we had. He had this song. Some band with a name I could never remember. Every few weeks he’d ask if I’d heard it before, and I’d say no, and we’d listen to it again. It was our thing.”

Diane kept her eyes on him.

“That morning he turned it off halfway through. He asked if I ever felt as though people would have an easier time if I wasn’t there.”

He rubbed at a mark on the table with his thumb.

“I told him college was hard. I said everybody had days like that. Then I turned his song back on.”

The thumb moved back and forth.

“I think I pointed at a hawk.”

Diane put her feet down. The floor was empty beneath her. She moved her chair back from the table, crossed to Tom, and knelt beside him.

“I would have listened,” he said. He was looking at the blue paper. “If he’d said it so I could understand, I would have listened.”

“I know.”

“He did, though.”

She put her hand on his arm.

“He did say it.”

In the kitchen, wood struck wood.

Diane turned. The planchette lay at the edge of the counter.

She had left it beside the sink.

It moved another inch. One felt foot reached the edge and went over. The triangle tipped, hung for a moment, and dropped to the floor.

No one had a hand on it. No one was anywhere near it.

The sound it made was small. Tom drew in a breath. Then, from under the counter, came a little wheeze of laughter.

His hand closed on Diane’s wrist.

It came again. The same preliminary hitch, the breath caught before the laugh.

“Ethan?”

Will made a sound in his throat.

Tom let go of Diane and began to stand.

“Don’t,” Will said.

Under the counter the laugh started for a third time. Diane heard it properly now. It began at precisely the same place. Broke at precisely the same place. There was no breath between one and the next.

She got to her feet and switched on the light over the stove.

The planchette lay upside down against a cupboard. Three round pads of felt. A crack in the oak.

The laughing stopped.

Tom was standing so close behind her that she felt his shirt brush her back.

“Do it again,” he said.

Nothing moved.

“Please.”

Claire came past them. She bent with one hand braced on her knee and picked up the wood.

“It’s warm,” she said.

Diane took her elbow.

“Put it down.”

“It’s all right.”

“Claire, put it down.”

Claire held it against her chest. With her other hand she peeled Diane’s fingers from her arm, one at a time.

“You don’t have to stay.”

* * *

Diane stood at the sink while the others sat. Will was saying they needed to end the session. He said it three times, as though repetition might turn the proposal into something they had already done.

Claire put the planchette on the board.

“Then help me say goodbye.”

It sounded reasonable. Marcus sat down. Tom followed, keeping his chair a little away from the table. Will looked at Diane.

She could go back to her room. In the morning she could say she had known better than to stay.

Instead she returned to the fifth chair.

“We’re finishing,” she told Claire.

“Yes.”

Five hands touched the wood.

“Elizabeth,” Will said. “Thank you. We’re going to stop now.”

The triangle stayed still.

“Goodbye.”

It moved toward the bottom of the board. Diane followed the hole as it crossed the linen. Almost there.

It stopped on the first letter of GOODBYE.

Then it went back.

YOU HAVENT ASKED.

“Don’t,” Diane said.

Claire looked straight at her.

“Will I be alone?”

The pointer moved to NO.

Claire closed her eyes. Diane watched the muscles around her mouth relax.

“When it happens. When I die.”

NO.

“Will you be there?”

YES.

“We’ll be there,” Diane said. “I’ll be there. You know that.”

Claire opened her eyes.

“After,” she said.

The kitchen clock went on ticking. Diane had never hated an object as much as she hated that clock.

“I’m frightened,” Claire said. “Every night. I wake up and I think, not tonight, and then I think, what difference does it make which night? I turn on the lamp. I leave the television on. Once I called the pharmacy because they’re open all night and I wanted to hear somebody answer.”

She had said all of this to the board.

“Is she there, Will? Tell me.”

Will’s lower lip moved.

“Something is.”

The pointer slid to 9. Will pulled his hand away.

“Off. Now.”

Diane let go. Marcus did too. Tom’s fingers dragged over the cloth as he withdrew them.

Claire kept her hand where it was.

“Claire.”

8.

Diane gripped her wrist. She lifted it clear of the board.

The pointer stopped.

For a moment nobody moved. Diane held the thin wrist between her fingers. Claire stared up at her with a naked, astonished hatred.

“Let go.”

“Listen to me. Your mother called him Will. She called herself Elizabeth. You asked her for a song and she didn’t give you one.”

“Let go of my hand.”

“That was the same laugh. Three times. Exactly the same.”

“You don’t know what it’s like there.”

“Neither do you.”

Claire tried to pull free. Diane held on. Across the table Tom had begun to cry without making a sound.

“You’re hurting her,” he said.

Diane looked down. Her thumb had made a white oval in Claire’s skin.

She loosened her grip. Claire snatched her hand away and put it back on the planchette.

7.

Something knocked beneath the table. All the candles bent toward Claire, five thin flames lying almost flat. Diane caught her own chair before it tipped backward. Its front legs had lifted clear of the floor.

6.

Will went for Claire’s hand. She put her other hand over his and pressed it to the wood.

“Help me,” she said.

He could have lifted her whole arm. Diane saw him measure it: how little she weighed, how easily he could do it. He stayed bent over her.

5.

Tom reached across the table and laid his hand beside theirs.

“If he’s there,” he said.

Nobody answered him.

4.

Marcus caught the edge of the board with both hands and pulled. The frame came toward him an inch. The candle flames stretched longer. Diane could hear something scraping along the floor behind Claire, although the wall was only a foot beyond her chair.

“Pick it up,” Marcus said to Will. “Help me pick it up.”

3.

Diane got hold of the other end. The linen was hot against her knuckles. Together they lifted the board. Claire’s arms rose with it. Her fingers were white from pressing down.

For the first time she looked afraid.

“Mom?”

From directly beneath the board, Elizabeth Maddox said, “Tread softly.”

Marcus let go.

The frame struck the table, and Diane lost her hold.

2.

Claire lifted her hands. Will fell back against his chair. Tom was touching nothing. They all stood or sat with their hands clear, plainly visible in the electric light.

The planchette moved to 1.

The light went out.

Diane still had her hands in front of her. She lowered them until she found the table.

Someone was breathing close to her ear. She leaned away and struck another person’s shoulder.

“It’s me,” Marcus said.

The breathing continued on her other side.

She could smell the whiskey on Marcus. There was another smell with it: wet earth, and the green, bruised smell of stems cut for a vase.

“Phones,” she said.

Nobody answered. A drawer opened in the kitchen. She heard the unmistakable drag of wood on wood, then the small rattle of cutlery.

The drawer shut.

“Who’s over there?”

“Nobody,” Will said.

“Who’s got a phone?”

Claire said, “I’m here.”

Her voice came from the end of the table, where it should have been.

Something below Diane’s hands pressed upward against the tabletop. The pressure traveled along it, slowly, toward Claire. A knee, she thought, and then she thought of how far it had traveled.

Tom began saying his son’s name.

A chair scraped across the floor. It stopped. Scraped again, a shorter distance, as though its occupant was adjusting it to eat.

The kitchen clock resumed. Diane had not heard it stop.

Marcus’s phone lit his face from underneath. Beyond him, Claire sat with her head tilted, listening to someone at her shoulder.

“Hi, Mom,” she said.

The overhead light came back.

There were six chairs around the table.

The new one stood beside Claire. It had a rush seat, blackened with age, and a crooked brass screw through the top rail. Diane knew the screw. She had once caught the sleeve of a sweater on it in Elizabeth’s kitchen. She had been wearing the sweater when she sat down and had taken it off, draping it over the chair, because the kitchen was too warm. Coming home from the hospital, she had been cold for weeks. Elizabeth had kept turning up the heat.

Claire put her hand on the rail.

“We threw this out,” she said. “When we sold the house. I watched them load it.”

Will was backing toward the wall.

“Don’t touch it.”

Claire ran her thumb over the screw head.

“Marcus,” she said. “Get me a glass of water, would you?”

He did. Diane watched him go to the sink, fill a glass, bring it to her. When Claire took it, he stood for a moment looking at the empty place in front of the new chair.

“Just one,” she said gently.

He sat down.

* * *

There was no ferry until morning. They kept every light on that night. Marcus tried the cabin’s landline, found a dial tone, and put it down again. He made coffee. Will wrapped the board and carried it outside. Through the window Diane watched him lay the bag in the bed of Tom’s truck, then change his mind and bring it back to the porch. He stood in the rain beside it.

Claire went to bed. Diane followed her and said she would sleep in the room.

“There isn’t another bed.”

“I’ll take the floor.”

“You’ll never get up again.”

Diane fetched blankets from the cupboard. When she came back, Claire was asleep. Her mouth had fallen open. The expression on her face was ordinary exhaustion, and for a moment Diane was able to look at her without fear.

She spread the blankets beside the bed. She lay down without taking off her clothes.

In the main room, someone moved the sixth chair.

“Leave it,” she called.

The sound stopped.

After a while Marcus came to the bedroom door.

“Did you say something?”

“Stop moving the chair.”

He stood with his hand on the doorframe. Then he looked back into the main room.

“Marcus.”

“I heard you,” he said.

He left the door open.

In the morning Diane sat on the porch with Elizabeth’s letter. Tom had asked her to read it. The paper was drying into little ridges where his hands had held it.

Near the bottom Elizabeth had crossed out a sentence so thoroughly that the pen had worn through. Beneath it she had written: I keep deciding what you can bear to hear. I am doing it even now.

Diane ran her finger beneath the words.

“She never told Ethan she called you,” Tom said from the doorway.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what it says.”

She looked down at the sheet. “Yes.”

“I keep reading it. I think there’ll be something else the next time.”

Diane folded the page along its weakened crease and handed it back.

“I’m sorry.”

He took it. For a moment she thought he would touch her shoulder. Instead he put the letter in his shirt pocket.

Inside, Claire was peeling one of the satsumas. She had set the sixth chair back against the wall. A curl of orange skin hung from her hand.

“Did she always do that?” Tom asked.

“What?”

“Peel it in one piece.”

They watched her remove the last of the skin and lay it on the table in an unbroken spiral.

“I don’t know,” Diane said.

* * *

Claire lived another nine months. Diane drove over from Bend as often as she could, and called on the days she couldn’t. She brought food Claire sometimes ate. She replaced the missing button with a little blue one because the wooden fish were no longer made.

Marcus returned the emerald. Tom answered his messages. Will said he had burned the board, and when Diane asked whether he was sure it was gone, he said he was sure he had burned it.

There were good afternoons. Once all five of them sat in Claire’s living room and complained about the neighbors while Claire dozed through the best parts. Tom was offended by a bird feeder shaped like a lighthouse. Marcus defended it with increasing dishonesty until Claire opened one eye and asked whether he owned one. Diane held on to that afternoon. She remembered the crumbs on the sofa, the volume of the television, the way Claire reached up without looking and Tom put a biscuit into her hand.

The chair came up in March.

Claire was on the telephone. Diane was washing a bucket in the barn.

“I’m having it brought over,” Claire said.

Diane turned off the hose.

“From the cabin?”

“Where else?”

“Claire.”

“It’s a chair. I can have my mother’s chair.”

The bucket knocked against Diane’s boot. She gripped the phone so hard that its edge hurt her ear.

“I don’t think you should.”

Claire sighed. “You never have to sit in it.”

By April it stood at the head of Claire’s kitchen table. Diane drank her coffee at the counter.

At the hospital in August, the visitor’s chair was upholstered in blue vinyl. Diane checked the first time she went in. Steel legs. A manufacturer’s label coming loose beneath the seat.

She felt foolish. Then she sat in it.

Claire looked at her for a long time.

“What?” Diane asked.

“Nothing.”

She moved to the edge of the bed.

On the last afternoon Claire was awake, Diane read to her. A paperback of Yeats lay open across her knees. She had marked the poems Elizabeth used to read, but Claire wanted a different one, then another, then asked her to stop.

“Sorry. I can’t follow it.”

“We don’t have to do anything.”

Diane closed the book. Down the corridor someone laughed, and Claire turned her head toward the door.

“Diane.”

“I’m here.”

“I told you that you didn’t have to stay.”

“At the cabin?”

Claire nodded.

“You stayed.”

“Yes.”

Her hand came across the blanket. Diane took it.

“How do you know when it’s somebody?” Claire whispered.

Diane leaned closer.

“What do you mean?”

Claire was looking past her at the blue chair.

“Sometimes I forget and say things. Things I was going to tell you. Then you come and you don’t know them.”

Diane’s hand tightened around hers.

“What things?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Tell me.”

Claire looked at the chair again. With her free hand, Diane reached out and pushed it back against the wall.

“Look at me, Claire. I’m here now.”

“I know.”

“I’ll stay.”

Claire held her hand. Gradually the grip loosened, then tightened with startling force.

“Don’t let her take me,” she said.

Diane stood so quickly the book fell from her lap.

“Who?”

Claire’s eyes were open. Her face had emptied of everything Diane knew how to answer.

“I don’t want to go. I said I did, but I don’t. Tell her.”

Diane pressed the call button and kept her thumb on it.

The nurse came, asked Claire where she hurt, checked the pump, stayed until her breathing settled. Diane stood on the other side of the bed with Claire’s fingers locked around two of hers. She could not seem to persuade anyone that the words mattered.

Claire fell asleep. Diane stayed until she woke.

“How’s Phoebe?” Claire asked.

Diane began to cry.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Claire reached up and touched her cheek. “It’s all right now.”

Behind Diane, the blue chair gave a small metallic click.

Claire looked over her shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said.

* * *

After the funeral, Diane told Phoebe everything.

She told her at the kitchen table, in daylight, with both their phones lying between them. Phoebe listened. When Diane got to the hospital, Phoebe took her hand and waited until she could go on.

“I should have told you before,” Diane said.

“You’re telling me now.”

They put a lamp on the landing. Phoebe left the bedroom door open because Diane wanted to hear the ordinary sounds of the house. At night, when she woke, she would listen for water running through the pipes or the low fuss of the alpacas beyond the barn.

For three weeks this helped.

Then, a little after two one morning, a chair moved in the kitchen.

Diane opened her eyes. The landing light lay in a narrow strip across the bedroom floor. Phoebe slept beside her, one hand caught under her pillow.

The chair moved again.

“Diane?”

Claire’s voice. Tired, a little impatient. The voice she used when she had been waiting on the phone while Diane finished something that was supposed to take a second.

Diane sat up.

“I know you’re awake.”

She put her feet on the floor. The boards were cold. She remembered the fifth chair in the cabin, the touch against her leg.

In the kitchen, Claire coughed.

Diane reached for Phoebe’s shoulder and shook it.

“Wake up.”

Phoebe stirred.

“Wake up. Don’t go downstairs.”

“What is it?”

Diane held on to her. She heard herself begin to say Claire’s name and stopped.

“There’s something in the kitchen.”

Phoebe sat up. They listened together.

“I can hear you,” Claire said. “I came all this way.”

Phoebe reached for her phone.

The chair scraped a short distance. Diane could picture it being pulled closer to the table. She could picture a hand laid flat, the little pause before Elizabeth required everyone to be kind.

“No,” she said.

The house was quiet.

Then Diane’s voice came up from the kitchen.

“Phoebe? Come here a minute.”

Phoebe stopped with the phone in her hand.

The voice was very good. It had the slight strain Diane always heard in recordings of herself, a complaint she never heard while she was speaking.

“I need some help.”

Diane pulled Phoebe against her. She felt the phone trapped between them, the hard corners against her ribs.

Downstairs, in Diane’s voice, something began to cry.

They stayed on the bed. Diane kept one hand on the back of Phoebe’s head. With the other she reached for the lamp and turned it on.

The crying stopped.

A chair scraped across the kitchen floor, out into the hall. They heard it catch at the bottom step.

There was a pause.

Then the wooden legs knocked against the next one.

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