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inaudible.
    “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it. I just don’t want you to leave.”
    “I know,” she whispered. “It’s not that I want to, Eli, it’s just that I’ve always . . .”
    “You’ve always what?”
    “Try to imagine what it’s like,” she said. “I don’t know how to stay.”
    “Come here.” He pulled her up out of the bathtub, threw a towel over her shoulders, and held her close to him. He could feel her heartbeat against his chest. She let her head fall on his shoulder, and the cold water in her hair seeped through to his skin. She let herself be led to the bedroom by his hand around her wrist; her pulse didn’t register against his fingertips. She eased herself down onto the bed, still without looking at him, and he saw for the first time that there were tears on her face. She pulled the duvet over her head and curled away from him.
    Eli left her there. In the kitchen he found the pomegranate he’d bought for her and quartered it quickly on a pale blue plate. He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blue might please her. Any one of a number of details can prevent a ship from sinking. He carried the plate back to the bedroom and set it on the bedside table to grope for the flashlight under the bed. He took off his shoes, his belt, his jeans, left them in a heap on the floor, held the flashlight between his teeth and climbed under the duvet like a man entering a cave. He reached out for the blue plate and then turned to her, and her face was illuminated in the dimness.
    “Don’t leave me,” he whispered. “Stay, I’ll buy you pomegranates. I won’t throw any more of your books out the window, I promise.”
    She smiled faintly, still in tears.
    “Here,” he said, “hold the flashlight.”
    She sat up and took it from him, the duvet a tent between their heads. He sat cross-legged with the plate on his lap and tore the pomegranate apart, juice running down his hands and wrecking the sheets. He began to feed her pomegranate beads, two or three at a time, and she stopped weeping long before her lips were stained red.

6.
    Lilia left her mother’s house a little after midnight. Her half-brother Simon was the first one downstairs in the morning; he woke up shivering just before dawn. A cold breeze filled the house; the front door, closed imperfectly, had blown open after she’d left, and also a kitchen window was broken. A glass of water was frozen solid on his bedside table.
    He climbed out of bed and pulled his quilt over his shoulders like a cloak. It trailed heavily behind him down the stairs, gathering dust. The linoleum of the kitchen floor felt like ice on his bare feet; he almost immediately lost feeling in his toes. The kitchen door was wide open, and snow had drifted over the threshold. At that hour the air outside was suffused with the greyish light that comes over northern landscapes just before the sun rises, when everything seems tired and somewhat unreal. He stood just inside the door, clutching the quilt around his shoulders and staring out at the lawn, and even though the scene outside was exactly what he’d been expecting, he found at that moment that he needed his mother, and also that he couldn’t speak. He reached outside, around the doorframe, and began ringing the doorbell over and over again.
    She was by his side almost instantly and then running back up the stairs. He stood still in the doorway, listening to her footsteps in the upstairs hall, the sound she made when she saw that Lilia’s bedroom was empty, her footsteps coming back down the stairs. She was on the phone a moment later, although it took the dispatcher at the police station a few minutes to understand what she was saying. She called the more recent of her two ex-husbands and screamed obscenities into his answering machine until the machine cut her off. She hung up, shaking, and stared at her son. Her face was white. He met her