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occurred to her that it would probably be a good idea to go find Tonio and Dewey.
    Something passed by in the hallway and she turned and saw Robbie there—Robbie, plain as day. By the time she got to the doorway she could see only his feet—she felt certain those were his boots—going up the stairs. Without saying anything she followed.
    When she reached the third-floor landing Robbie was nowhere in sight. It didn’t seem to matter much for some reason. It was just like Robbie to saunter past when everyone was looking for him and then disappear again. The Addisons were a peculiar bunch. Inarguably, being part of the family conferred privileges; when you wanted to buy a car, a house, a small tropical island, maybe, there were the Addisons, checkbook at the ready—any amount of money was fine, just so long as you didn’t ask them for an emotional response to anything. But they were definitely eccentric, possibly a little bit insane, and certainly exasperating, every last one of them, Robbie included. She didn’t really believe in God, but she did believe in the idea of penance, and she was ready to accept the Addison family as an elaborate form of it, but still—they were getting on her nerves. She’d take one good look around for Robbie, but that was it.
    Obviously the third floor had not been renovated—there were holes in the walls and holes in the planks of the ceiling and in one place she could see all the way up through the fourth floor and the roof. Only one door in the hall stood open, and she found herself in the doorway, room 306. She stood there in the half-light from the window and her hand stretched forward into the space of the open room, as if she were trying to push aside a screen. But there was no screen.
    Room 306. A room of light and air, so different from room 202, where they were staying. This room let in the whiteness of the snow through every window; it had a pure, crisp whiteness. Everything smelled of…what…jasmine? Jasmine, with a hint of oil and smoke. The furnishings too were white, like an embodied form of air. She sat down on the edge of the bed and stared out at the world of snow and whiteness. She picked up a snow globe from the nightstand. She swirled the fake snow and it came down thick, so thick she could barely make out that in the globe was a hotel, a hotel just like this one. She lay down on the bed and watched the whiteness out the window spread and spread, and she determined she would not go anywhere until she could sleep. As she drifted, she noticed one last thing—the door had shut behind her.

10
    D ewey sat there on the floor and played more jacks than he would have guessed he’d ever play in a lifetime. He was getting so good at jacks that he wished jacks were an activity he cared about getting good at, like archery.
    No one came around. The lobby was pretty dark, even in the daylight with the white snow flying by the windows. There were a lot of windows, and Dewey had a good view of the street, which almost nobody ever came down, and he had a good view of the door his father had gone out and the path he’d taken around the corner, and every minute or so Dewey would look out at the path in hopes of his father’s return but his father was never there. It seemed like it might be getting time for lunch, and if they didn’t manage to start something soon, it was going to be too late for sledding.
    His father had told him to wait in the lobby, but he felt pretty certain he hadn’t been expected to wait this long, although it could be one of those deals where he lost track of time again, which he did frequently, and not in the usual sense, but where he would get so absorbed in some line of thought that almost entire days could pass without him recalling them in any way. This had happened once recently when he went to his friend Avery’s house for the first time and found out that Avery’s dad had a two-hundred-gallon aquarium with some of the most awesome tropical fish