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agonies of illness. No one had been drawn to the house for years, and without people, the house had grown soft and overrun by encroaching rodents, colonies of ladybugs, and the persistent battering of wind, rain, snow, and sun. The demise of an abandoned house is marked by a sagging roof, door frames tilting from lack of touch so that doors can no longer close, the floors on the verge of buckling. Not that all this was happening in the old Costello house, but it was coming. The house longed for the press of bare feet on the floor, the good scrub of vinegar and water on the windows, and the pelting sound of human voices bouncing off the walls and ceilings.
    A good house, a truly good house, can hold multiple generations, stacking up layers of families like cordwood. This house had waited so long and had all but accepted its demise, ready to let go of hope, when the woman and dog had slowed their walking outside the property. She had been drawn by the scent of the wisteria down the road, lapping at her in drunken waves of fuchsia and purple. She had picked an armload of flowers, and then she came back and stood directly in front of the house, her feet spread wide, her head tilted as if she heard the halting heartbeat, the dog at her side. The house took a chance and let loose with a vibration of light and sound, squeezing the cellulose in the beams, letting the iron in the nails add to the subtle symphony. The dog led her in closer. There she was close enough that the house could beam its promise to her, set memories of summer nights to humming on the porch, let the upstairs windows in the three dormers catch the sun in a wink. Give me one more go at it, said the house.

Chapter 7
    Tess
    T here is a surprise in everything that the unseen moves. There are miracles at work. Tess read one poem per day. She had just read these words from the Nigerian poet Ben Okri, and the words were staying with her. Since Rocky had arrived on Peaks, Tess had learned to expect the unexpected from her. She had just gotten a call from Rocky. “Come to the old Costello house. I just bought it.” Did that mean she was staying permanently? Had Hill finally courted Rocky long enough and hard enough to win her over? Were the two of them buying a house together? As Tess tossed one leg over her bike, she scraped her ankle on the pedal. If her synesthesia had been intact, she would have seen a brilliant orange line shooting up her leg. Now she only felt the colorless throb of pain.
    Four months ago, the surgery that had repaired her exploding appendix and knotted-up colon had chased away nearly all her precious synesthesia. She had been tossed out of her multisensory world of synesthesia and into the drab world of the five senses firing predictably, one at a time, without intertwining, and she thought she had lost her mind, or the mind that she wanted. Now all she had left was a whisper of her coupling with numbers and shapes, which was entertaining and somewhat comforting, but nothing compared to her full Technicolor synesthesia. Before, numbers 1 to 10 had been softly molded cubes lined up like soldiers. The numbers 11 to 20 had climbed up a slope, and 21 to 30 had broadened and merged to the right. Now the way she saw the number 7, her granddaughter’s age, was like a dim memory of a cube seen through a haze, indecipherable and frustrating. In her physical therapy, she no longer felt the tingling buzz of constricted muscles as the sound of bumblebees.
    Tess parked her bike by the yellow truck outside the Costello house. Now that Rocky owned it, she had to stop thinking of it as the Costello house. Why did Rocky buy a house with such a painful history?
    She opened the front door and yelled, “Welcome Wagon.” Was Rocky too young to even know what the Welcome Wagon was? Rocky and Cooper appeared from the kitchen and greeted her.
    Walking with her young friend through the house she had bought with alarming speed, Tess felt useless: she