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I don't open the door.

Graham finally drops to a whimper, and then Hildie starts again hard enough to set him off.

In the front room, the tree is still lit. I forgot to pull the plug. The lights blink on the wall in a pattern I'm too tired to follow. One present under it is wrapped. There's a bag of paper and eleven boxes on the couch that are not.

I sink onto the arm of the couch with both of them before I pick up my phone and pull up Carson's name

It rings once.

Twice.

"Mackie."

There's movement on the other end already, the rustle of him sitting up, and what sounds like his belt buckle hitting the floorboards.

"I need help."

TWENTY-THREE

Carson

Bring a torch, Jeannette, Isabella / Bring a torch, to the cradle run!

I'm already on my feet with my jeans half buckled. Behind her voice, both babies are screaming, and it isn't the fussing I hear on the calls. They're both all the way worked up.

"I'm coming. Leave the front door unlocked."

"Okay."

"Mackie, put me on speaker and set the phone down. Don't hang up."

There's a scrape and a thump, and the screaming gets louder and farther away at the same time. I find a shirt on the floor by the mattress and my boots by the door. The pup lifts his head off the blanket by the woodstove and watches me get my coat.

"Stay."

He puts his chin back down on his paws, and the ear that never came up flops over his eye.

The truck is white with frost. I start it and scrape the windshield with my library card, because the scraper is in a box I haven't unpacked yet. I talk the whole time so she knows I'm still there.

"I'm in the truck. I'm pulling out now."

"Okay."

The lane runs down past the lower pasture, and the headlights sweep across twenty-five sets of eyes that lift and follow me to the road. Then it's the county blacktop and the long grade down toward the river. There's ice in the shade of every curve. I keep it at fifty and don't let it go to sixty, although my right foot keeps trying to.

"I'm at the river bridge."

Hildie's cry climbs and cracks. Mackie says something to her I can't make out, low and ragged, and then she says it again.

"I'm at the four-lane."

"I heard you."

"I know. I'm going to keep telling you anyway."

She doesn't answer that. I can hear her breathing between the cries. I tell her when I pass the Holly Ridge sign and again when I turn onto her street.

Her front window is the only one lit, the Christmas tree still blinking behind the glass. "I'm in your driveway."