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know the house. She dove into her sleeping bag as soon as it was dark. Cooper lowered his bulk to the side of the mattress. Rocky scrunched her way closer to him and let one hand fall onto his warm back. She wanted to see and hear everything the house had to say. When the weight of darkness took hold without the benefit of ambient light from any human source, she was grateful that Cooper was by her side.
    Rocky didn’t know what to expect, but something had repelled others from the house, some continued taint of suicide from Mr. Costello that would be loud and ominous. What she wasn’t expecting was how the house would voice itself.
    Was a house like a child or a dog, reverberating to emotions around them, unable to put the waves of sadness into words? Rocky unzipped the sleeping bag, determined to take the pulse of the house even though her heart pounded and she felt small in the belly of the house. She wasn’t like Tess: she didn’t smell colors or see time passing in shapes. But if this house had come to her, if it had walked into her therapy office, she would have said, “Tell me why you’re here.” Which was what she said to the house now.
    â€œTell me . . . ,” she started. Before she could finish, she was sure she heard the house sigh, the kind of sigh that a child makes after a long crying spell has ended. Then she sat for hours, as witness to the sad house, letting it expel the shudders of crying so that it could move on to begin its new life. She would later think that the sound had to be the wind or the house settling, that she had perhaps dreamed about the muffled noise. And she did fall asleep several times, waking to listen again. She wanted her 4:00 A.M. brain to experience the house, the time when thinking goes spiral and catastrophic before morning light restores reason.
    She woke once and saw moonlight reflected in Cooper’s eyes as he sat by her mattress. The wall with the open windows looked oddly wet, gleaming as water does, as if a steady sheet of water flowed along the wall from ceiling to floor. In her half-slumber, this phenomenon seemed understandable, even a sign of rebirth. Such is the way of 4:00 A.M. thinking. In the morning, she only half-remembered the water, but when she did, she touched the wall in many places and all that she felt were the brittle flakes of wallpaper.

Chapter 6
    The House
    T he house had been waiting, stuck in time at the moment of unimaginable despair, staring in vacant hunger. There had been deaths before; the ebb and flow of people had washed through the old house like tides, but grown children or new people had always followed. First came the young lovers, bleary with the fright of buying a house, not knowing that the house had selected them, called to them as they drove by, heads hanging out of car windows, or walking by, pausing as the house issued a call to them if they were a suitable fit. As the house pulled them into the heart of the kitchen, blowing future dreams into their palms that stroked windowsills and banisters, the couple would talk and murmur. We could put the nursery here. . . . I could look out the window when I cook. . . . Do you think this hot water heater will last? . . . Oh, how the windows rattle; we’ll freeze. On and on they would talk, inhaling the memories of others, the people who had lived in the house before them, through babies, love, dogs and cats, clamorous sounds, coughing in the night, birthday parties, doors slammed in anger, the muffled murmurs of sex that followed.
    If these visitors were not right for the house (and so many were not), there were ways to send them away—a precipitous drop in temperature, a door creaking shut as they examined the darkest corner of the basement or a closet.
    The last inhabitants had ended with calamity after a long and good life. The crack of the shotgun had jarred the house to the foundations, a final assault after the prolonged