Chapter 70

The cold took things in the order a careless clerk loses pages: not the important ones first, nor the last, but whichever happened to be on top.

My mother’s face went that spring, in my third year.

I noticed it on a night like any other, lying on my bench with my back to the wet wall, doing what I did every night before sleep, which was to walk through the house in Silverbrook from the front door to my own bed. The step that rocked. The hook where my father hung his coat, stiff with paint. The smell of linseed. My room, and the wall, and the white horse.

The horse was there. Every dapple of light on her flank, the way my father had done it with the edge of a dry brush. His own hands on the reins, blue and ochre to the wrist. My mother was in the saddle, with her hair loose and her face turned up to the light.

And where her face should have been, there was the light, and nothing else.

I lay very still and tried to find it. I tried coming at it sideways,