I woke because the air had changed. Not to a sound, not to anything I could have pointed at and named, but to a feeling that the house had shifted on its bones, the way a held breath shifts before it is let out.
My room was dark. The curtains were drawn but they bowed inward at the middle, where the wind pressed through some seam I had never noticed in daylight. The wallpaper had its ordinary pattern. The posters on the cupboard door were the same. The little clock on the bedside table said a time I did not look at because I already knew it was the wrong time to be awake.
I sat up. The duvet slipped to my waist and I felt the cold come off my own chest, a small cold, the kind that lives inside pyjamas. The radiator under the window was off. I could tell by the way the pipe near the floor did not tick. In our house, the radiators ticked when they were working. When they stopped, you noticed, the way you notice a clock you had stopped hearing.
I put my feet onto the floor.
The carpet was colder than it should have been. That was the first real wrongness. In winter the upstairs of our house held its heat like a held cup, the way the airing cupboard did when you opened it after the boiler had been on. The floor under my toes was the floor of a house that had decided to stop trying.
I stood. I did not switch on my lamp. I do not remember why. The dark felt like a thing I had agreed to without saying so.
The landing was narrow and familiar in the way that a road is familiar even when you are driving it in the dark. The nightlight was on, the plug-in one shaped like a little moon, throwing its small yellow circle on the carpet between my door and the stairs. The other doors were slightly ajar, as they always were at night. We were not a house that shut doors against itself.
I went to my parents' room first because that is the order you go in, when you are small and the house is wrong.
Their door was the heavier one. I pushed it with the flat of my hand and felt it give in that slow way heavy doors give, swallowing the light of the landing behind me. The curtains in their room were thick and almost touching the floor. I could not see the window for them. The room was very dark and very warm, in a held way, in a way that felt like the warmth had been put there earlier and was now being slowly spent.
I called my mother. I said her name. I did not whisper, I said it the way you say it when you have woken and are not sure why, the way you say it when you want to be told that nothing is wrong so you can go back to bed.
She breathed. She did not wake.
Her shoulder was a pale curve above the sheet. Her hair was loose on the pillow in the way she never wore it in the day. I could see, on the bedside table, a glass of water with a bendy straw in it, the kind my sister had brought home from a party once and my mother had kept because she liked the colour. The straw caught a little of the nightlight from the hallway and looked almost lit.
My father was on the other side of the bed. He had pulled most of the duvet with him in the night. I could hear his breathing, low and even, with the small catches that meant he was very deeply in. I put my hand on his shoulder. I did it carefully, the way you touch someone who is sleeping and you want them to stay that way. I said his name, low, close to his ear. He shifted. The dufted weight of him moved a little under the covers. Then his breathing settled again, exactly as it had been.
I did not press him. I do not know why. It was not that I thought I would wake him if I tried. It was something else, something that lived in my stomach like a small cold stone, and it said: do not make them open their eyes.
I pulled the cover back from him the way I would pull a page to see what was under it. His pyjama trousers were rucked up at one ankle. Below the knee, where there should have been a calf and a foot and a warm heel against the sheet, there was only the flat of the sheet, pressed down, as if the shape of him ended at the knee and the rest had been carefully smoothed away. I let the cover fall.
I went to my sister.
Her door was easier to push. She slept with her curtains not quite meeting in the middle, and a thin grey line of streetlight came through and lay across her floor. The fairy lights she had strung along the shelf were off. Her stuffed rabbit was on her pillow where she always put it, turned to face the wall. She slept curled on her side, one hand under her cheek, the way she had slept since she was very small.
I called her name. I called it twice, because she was older than me and I thought, the way children think, that older meant closer to waking. She murmured something that was almost my name. Her mouth moved around a shape that wasn't a word. Then she turned her face further into the pillow and her breathing went slow again.