Chapter 16: Talking to the Air

"Where?" my father said. "Where is he?"

Pierce pointed at the chair I had been sitting in.

My mother looked at it.

She looked at an empty wooden chair with a cold cup of tea in front of it, and the color left her face.

"Ewan?" she whispered.

I stood against the wall, three feet from her.

"He's going to take me," Pierce sobbed. "He said I'm coming with him. Make him go away."

My father crossed the kitchen and pulled Pierce off the floor by the arms.

"That's enough," he said.

"Dad, he's right there!"

"I said that's enough."

Pierce stared at him.

For the first time in his life, he did not know what to say.

My father walked him upstairs with one hand under his arm and came back down alone.

He stood in the doorway for a long time.

"Lorna," he said. "He wasn't lying about everything tonight."

"What do you mean?"

"About the chair." My father's voice was hoarse. "You looked at it, too."

She did not answer.

I spent Monday in the house, because I had nowhere else to go.

Pierce stayed in his room.

The number on his wrist read eight at breakfast and seven at lunch, and nobody carried a tray upstairs.

At six in the evening, my father took a screwdriver from the drawer by the stove.

He climbed the stairs and stopped in front of my bedroom door.

The door was open now.

The bed had been stripped on Friday night, and the thick blanket lay folded on the mattress.

He knelt at the lock plate on the edge of the door.

He took out the four screws, one at a time, and set them in his palm.

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