At home. Rudy was watching television, Rose was reading obliviously, Timmy was running his cars around in circles, and Eliza was trying very hard not to scream and tip over the TV and shove Rudy’s fifth beer of the night up his ass.

For some reason she could never explain later, Rose looked out the window. She saw a shadow flit across the side yard, and when she craned her neck to look out the back window she saw the shadow continue very quickly around the house and hide behind a tree.

The book in Rose’s hand was The Prisoner of Zenda. A peek in her closet showed some homemade princess dresses. She’d nagged her mother into buying her gauze which she attached to the sleeves of old shirts with lopsided stitching, she’d dug through the attic and found her mom’s old prom dresses, which belled out and fell to the floor on her nine-year-old frame, she’d crowned her brother Prince of Eldonia and herself queen, until she changed her mind and named him the Evil Grand Vizier. She even had a paper cone-cap that had gauze attached to it, too. She lived in a world of unicorns and usurpers, a world of fauns and enchanted wardrobes, and only much later would she realize that this was her nine-year-old version of escapism from a family that alienated her. Later, too, she would come to know that matters of court are rarely as much fun as paper cone-caps with gauze attached to them and old prom dresses dragging the floor.

There was an old tent set up in the backyard that was eventually thought of as permanent in the collective mind of the Barry family. Sometimes Rose dragged her cat out there and played princess, and sometimes Timmy took his snot-nosed friend Chuck out there and they played GI Joe. But mostly it just sat, an eyesore, and crusted over with weather, killing the grass beneath it. Rose saw the tent flicker and shiver in the floodlight from the back of the house, and she felt sure that the shadow had darted from behind the tree into the tent. She looked at her parents. Her father was staring, practically in liquid state, at the dreaded box, and her mother was staring, equally engrossed but with a different mood, at her father. Timmy was still concentrating on his Hot Wheels. She put her book down on the worn carpet.

“I think I’ll go out to the tent for a minute,” she said, her voice unnaturally high.

Despite the proliferation of things to think about, Ernest is dozing on and off in the passenger seat. It’s been a long day. Fiona drives, thinking about her mother again, wondering when and if she should go home. She doesn’t want to leave the desk, but she wants to leave the desk. She remembers Rob’s words about how drawn to it and sickened by it he was as a child, and she realizes she’s felt this way since she stripped the finish off it. She is tormented by its ghosts but she feels somehow that it’s herself she’s making new, as she does every time she restores something old and beautiful, that she’s refinishing and filling the cracks and polishing the edges of her soul. She’s never admitted this to anyone, and it comes as a surprise to her when she realizes it in the car as they’re driving through Connecticut.

Her eyes fix on something white at the side of the road, ahead. The headlights flash over it, it’s a blindingly white spot there. The shape comes clearer, and it’s a young woman in a white dress with her thumb out. She looks bedraggled but not dangerous, and Fiona decides on a whim to pull over, although she has never trusted hitchhikers before.

The car stops just in front of the girl, who looks about sixteen. She has straw-colored hair and is carrying nothing. She makes no move toward the car, just stands there, faceless, as the close headlights illuminate the linen of her dress below the waist. The fabric blows gently in the highway wind.

Fiona gets out of the car. The traffic is very light, it’s late, and she feels no danger about getting out of the car. Ernest has not wakened at the stop or the slam of her door.

She comes around the front of the car and looks closer at the girl. By her face Fiona can see that it’s her, it’s Emily, and she is so grateful to see her that she reaches out to give her a big hug. For the first time in years, Emily speaks to her, stopping Fiona’s arms before they touch her shoulders.

“Mom...don’t you remember? Don’t you know?”

“Know what, sweetheart?” whispers Fiona.

“Me,” says Emily. “Don’t you know about me?”

Fiona is confused, but before she can form another question, Emily steps back so her face is illuminated. It is transparent, and changes fluidly from second to second from a smooth pink baby’s to a rotted mask of death. “I don’t exist,” Emily whispers. “I’m gone, Mom. Gone from your life.”

Fiona’s hands move underwater up to her face and she begins to clutch and scream. Emily, not a malignant ghost, doesn’t laugh at her, but merely looks sad and begins to fade away into nothing. Before she disappears, she raises an empty hand. “To those ghosts of time,” she intones, and becomes the air.

Ernest gets out of the car and takes Fiona by the shoulders, his face shadowed. “Fiona! Fiona! Stop it! What’s wrong?” He shakes her as violently as he can bear to, but Fiona is screaming and screaming.