The Doors

She did not answer it for four hours.

Nell had asked the question at two in the morning and then done the only thing nine years had actually taught her, which was to wait without deciding anything. She sat down in the chair by the cold grate, because standing over a seated woman while she decided whether to tell you the truth was a way of getting an answer and not a way of getting the right one, and she set the resonance glass on the writing table between them with the stopper out, where they could both see it. The needle went on doing what it had done on the stairs. Over and back, over and back. Sixty-one.

The lamp burned down and began to smell. Somewhere past four the frost came up on the inside of the window in the corner where the sash did not sit true,…