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imaginings. He just looked sad. And tired, maybe. And like his eyes had seen great troubles.
    Joanne had never imagined that all this might change things with Katie, though. That Katie might actually listen to her now, might become her friend again instead of just her sister. She wonders if Katie might let her tag along more. Downstairs the grandfather clock strikes the hour and the two girls listen as the chimes drift through the sleeping house to fall silent, letting the house grow quiet again. A floorboard squeaks as though someone walks the hall, and Joanne catches her breath, wondering if it’s him, but only silence greets her straining ears.
    ‘I talked to him.’ Joanne can feel her older sister’s eyes on her even in the dark. ‘I think he punched the wall. I fetched him down to supper. He asked where Daddy was.’
    ‘Oh.’ Silence between them. ‘Why’d he punch it?’
    ‘Dunno.’
    Joanne kicks one foot out from the sheets. Knee down, her left leg is free and the skin feels like it can breathe again. She wishes she could kick the sheet all off. Wonders if maybe Katie will let her.
    ‘What’d you tell him?’
    ‘ ’Bout what?’
    ‘ ’Bout Daddy.’
    ‘That he’s gone.’ She hesitates. ‘Katie …’
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘What’d he do?’
    ‘Go to sleep, Jo.’
    ‘You know, don’t you?’
    The thick silence her only answer. No breeze blows in
now. Again Joanne misses her bed in her room where she could look through the curtains and count stars till she fell asleep. Counting stars works better than counting sheep. Mom taught her that. ‘Tell me ’bout Daddy again.’ Then softer, barely a whisper, ‘Please.’
    Repeated and repeated as lullabies on sleepless nights, Joanne knows Katie’s memories of their father as if they were her own. How he used to hold a cold beer can to Katie’s cheek and dare her not to smile. How he’d toss Katie in the air till she felt like she was flying. The roughness of the calluses on his palms. How he always called Katie ‘Lady’, and could wiggle his ears. Joanne was three when he left. Her only memory of him is being carried back to bed one night after she’d woken from a bad dream, his arms around her, breath stale, shirt smelling of tobacco.
    Into the darkness, ‘Katie?’
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Do you think maybe Daddy might come home like Uncle Jasper did?’
    Silence thick as humidity in the air between them. Wind blows through the open window, pulling the curtain out long. Katie reaches across the bed and lightly touches Joanne’s cheek. ‘Daddy ain’t coming back, Lady.’ The curtain hangs limp again before the window. Breeze spent. Joanne smiles. She likes it when it’s just the two of them and Katie calls her that. Even if the nickname’s a hand-me-down.
    ‘Jo …’
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Don’t feel too sorry for Uncle Jasper, OK? He ain’t here to be our friend.’
    Sleep does not come quickly. On the cell block there was the metallic creak and groan of locking bars to scream, ‘Lights out.’ There were the rough voices of prison guards and the convicts’ rougher sneered replies. And then the click of every lamp falling dark. And sometimes the moans of men overpowered. And sometimes low groans in the darkness. And sometimes crude jokes and laughter called from cell to cell before the guards would knock the bars again and demand, ‘All quiet.’ And then later sometimes the sounds of haunted men crying out in dreams.
    Here there is just silence.
    Silence of the prairie stretching out beyond, the huge openness of which, after so long enclosed in concrete, unsettles him. Silence of the house all dark and sleeping. Silence suffocating him in this room, wrapped around his ears, his head deafening in all its lack of sound. Then a lone coyote calls somewhere far off and he thinks perhaps there is hope, perhaps there is life beneath, beyond, this stillness.
    His door locks from the inside. He can’t resist the sweet temptation. Rises to cross the room