Gabby could still detect the ghosts of happiness in this room. Then, it had been suffused by white: goodness and righteousness. Regular laughter, smiles, the cracking of cardboard slabs spread wide to balance die and game cards. The smell of freshly baked cookies, and milk warming in abandonment. Father smiling behind the length of his pipe. The fragrance of that tobacco still slowly leaked like a gas. But smoking had not been allowed here for some time. Not since the arrival six months ago. Not since the walls were painted the color of an anemic summer sky.

It sat now out of her reach, in that crib decorated with various hanging amusements, those plastic stars suspended from fickle strings in a crudely jagged alignment over his sweet head, at which he often cooed, or giggled, or, most often, cried.

Yes, those were the sounds that now poisoned this space once drunk on laughter. What had once been a playroom was now an unholy shrine. Shouts, wails of dissatisfaction.

For now he was silent but Gabby could take no pleasure in it. It would be short-lived; there was never a three-hour period allowed to saunter by without first being tainted with the shrill piercings. A bird's wing against the window, an acorn loosened onto the roof, a car traversing the gravel road five hundred yards from their front door, even on the opposite side of the house from here, and again he'd wail, and Mother would charge up the stairs, shouting as she came, "Aw, sweetie, what's the matter? What's wrong, Andrew?" And she'd burst into the room with arms outstretched, float right past Gabby, and list forward into the crib to pluck out the mewing child. Sometimes she'd carry him to the rocking chair in the corner, unbutton her blouse, heave her right breast from her bra, and smother Andrew with it until he'd pucker those pink lips and take it, draining the sustenance from Mother until one day she'd have not the strength to climb the stairs, only to cry in an echo from the pit of the living room, a shriveled old woman collected on the throw rug, a pale blue housedress billowing with her shallow breaths.