The figure took the list from my hand and held it up to the light from the passage, so that the two holes made bright, uneven circles against its glove. “One for the passenger,” it said, touching the first, “and one for the person meeting her.” My mother asked whether my father would need a third hole to come back, but the figure folded the paper before she could see its face. Behind us, the baby began to fret, and the woman rocked her without taking her eyes from the list. Elsie shut the front door against the cold, though a narrow line of damp remained across the threshold where the blue thread had lain. When Thomas bent to pick it up, the thread moved under his fingers and drew itself slowly back toward the stairs.

We followed it into the bedroom, where the pillow had dried except for a ring the size of a saucer, and my mother’s disc lay in the middle with its pencil name washed nearly away. She picked it up and rubbed it against her skirt, then stopped when she saw that the writing was coming off. “He knows where to go,” she said, but she looked at the figure rather than at any of us. It opened the list again and showed her the second hole, around which the paper had begun to darken. The conductor had said someone must meet my sister at the next stop, it told us, but he had not said who would meet my father. My mother held the disc so tightly that its edge marked her palm, and asked what happened to a person for whom nobody was waiting.

The figure did not answer at once; instead it went to the window and lifted the latch, admitting the smell of wet soil and the faint, sharp smoke of a distant fire. Below, the pear tree had shed its last leaves, and something pale rested among them beside the gate. Thomas fetched it for us and brought it upstairs in both hands: a child’s shoe, stiff with old mud, its button still fastened. My mother took it to the bed and set it beside the disc, and for a moment the two objects seemed too small to have required so much searching. Then the shoe darkened as if dipped in water, and a trickle ran from its heel across the sheet toward the blue thread. The thread tightened, drawing a little knot from beneath the pillow, and with it came a scrap of paper folded around my father’s key.

My mother unfolded the scrap while I held the lamp close, and we saw my father’s handwriting, hurried and cramped, though the ink was still wet enough to shine. He had written that he had found her, and underneath, in smaller letters, that the station had no door on the side where he remembered it. My mother read the words twice, then placed the key in my hand and told me to bring the list. The figure surrendered it reluctantly, and she smoothed it on the bed, laid the key across my father’s name where it had appeared beneath my sister’s, and called him as plainly as she had called the child. Somewhere under the floor came the answering knock, but when we all turned toward the stairs, it came again from inside the little shoe.

My father crossed the passage before any of us could stop him and put his hand against the carriage window, just below his name. The glass was warm enough to clear beneath his palm, and through it I saw a row of empty seats upholstered in faded green, with a child’s shoe standing on the cushion nearest the door. He looked back at my mother, who had risen from the table but kept one hand resting on the back of the small chair. “I never found the other one,” he said, and she nodded as if she had been waiting a long time to hear him say it. The conductor came to stand beside him, taking care not to tread on the blue thread that now stretched from the stairs to the open carriage door. When my father asked why his name was on the window, the conductor rubbed at one of the letters with his cuff, but the mark remained clear in the glass.

“The next stop is the place where she was left,” the figure said from behind us, “and someone who knows the way must meet her there.” My father took the key from the list, though my mother’s fingers closed over his before he could lift it. He told her he had been the one to carry the cot out after the funeral, and that he had taken the little shoes from beneath it and put them in his coat pocket; one had fallen out somewhere between the house and the station, on the day they left. My mother released his hand and asked why he had never told her, and for a moment he watched the steam gathering around his name. “You were looking for it everywhere,” he said. “After a while I didn’t know how to say I’d lost it.” She went to him then and straightened the collar of his coat, folding it down with the same care she had used on my pillow.

The chair scraped again, and the piece of bread on the tablecloth tipped onto its crust. My father held out his free hand toward the space beside my mother, and the blue thread lifted from the floor and wound once around his wrist. He stepped into the carriage, stooping beneath the doorway, and the conductor followed with his ticket punch ready; at once the lamp over the nearest seat began to flicker, throwing the little shoe into light and shadow. My mother called our sister’s name, and my father turned as if someone had tugged him by the sleeve, then bent and lifted the shoe from the cushion. Water ran from it onto his hand, and he stood holding it open until a small wet footprint appeared on the seat beside him. The conductor closed his punch on the list, which I had brought to the threshold, and a round hole appeared beside the fourth line.

The carriage door swung inward before my father could sit down. My mother caught its edge, but the figure laid a gloved hand over hers and told her that it could not wait with the door open; after a moment she let go, and my father pressed the shoe against the window where she could see it. The thread slipped from his wrist and fell across the threshold, its loose end stopping just short of my mother’s foot. There was a shudder beneath the boards, a smell of hot iron and rain, and the carriage drew away without any sound of wheels. Beyond it the garden had returned, dark and still, though my father’s name remained suspended for a moment in the empty doorway. Then the woman with the baby came up behind us and asked why there were now two holes beside my sister’s name.

The figure turned the key in its glove, and from somewhere below the house came the long iron complaint of a coupling drawn tight. My father went to the window, rubbing a clear patch in the mist with his sleeve, but there was only the garden path and the pear tree leaning over the gate. The conductor followed him and listened with his head inclined, as though he could distinguish one carriage from another by the sound it made. “There’s no track here,” my father said. “There wasn’t one at the station, either, by the time we left,” the conductor answered, and unwound the blue thread from his arm. Its far end still ran across the floorboards and into the water on the pillow, where the disc had disappeared.

My mother knelt beside the bed and spoke my sister’s name, quietly at first, then again with the care she had used at the door for the baby. The hollow deepened beneath her hand, and a little water spilled over the pillow’s edge, leaving a dark mark on the sheet. “I should have told you,” she said to me, without looking up, and my father moved away from the window to stand behind her. He told me that after the funeral they had put the cot away together, although for months afterward my mother had gone into the room each morning to straighten its blankets. She reached back then, and he took her wet hand in both of his. The figure waited at the door with the key, while downstairs a spoon was set carefully against a plate.

When we came down, Elsie was standing by the table, her hands tucked beneath her arms, and Thomas had pulled out the chair nearest the fire. A small bowl stood at the empty place, with a piece of bread broken into it; the woman with the baby said she had found the bowl in the cupboard, though none of us remembered putting it there. My mother sat in the next chair and laid her hand on the tablecloth, close enough to the bowl that her little finger touched its rim. The list had grown damp again beneath my palm, and the fourth line was now complete, my sister’s name written crookedly from one margin to the other. The figure entered behind us and placed the key beside the bowl. “One place in the carriage,” it said, “and one name to leave this house.” My mother looked at the key, then at the empty chair, and asked whether leaving the house meant leaving us.

The conductor took up the key before the figure could answer and pressed it into my father’s hand. “I can take her as far as the next stop,” he said, “but someone must be there to meet her.” My father closed his fingers around the metal, then opened them again and held the key out to my mother; together they laid it across the fourth line of the list. From the passage came a soft scuff, followed by another, and the chair beside my mother shifted a little against the boards. She did not turn at once, but broke a smaller piece from the bread and placed it on the tablecloth. When she finally looked, she smiled at something below my sight, and the front door opened onto a carriage lit from within. On its nearest window, in the steam gathered on the glass, a hand had written my father’s name.

My mother reached the top stair and stopped, the disc closed in her fist, and looked back at the figure as though the name written on it were a coin she was not yet willing to spend. Below us the woman with the baby called again, and this time the word broke in the middle, as if she had forgotten which name she was meant to use. "It is yours," the figure said to my mother, and it nodded toward the second hollow filling on the pillow, where the brown water gathered in the shape of a smaller head. I understood then that the room was not being counted against me at all. It was being kept ready for someone who had not yet been named aloud.

I went to my mother and put out my hand for the disc, but she shook her head and turned it over so I could read the name in her slanting pencil. It was not the baby's, and it was not hers or mine. It was the name of the sister who had died before I was born, the one my mother never spoke of, whose cot had stood beneath that window until the winter I was moved into it. My father made a sound I had never heard from him and set his palm flat against the doorframe. "You wrote that," he said, and my mother answered that she had written it on the train, in the dark, when the conductor asked her to account for everyone who was travelling with her.

The conductor climbed the stairs behind us with the wet thread coiled over his arm, and he looked at the figure with the weary courtesy of one clerk addressing another. "She was never on the manifest," he said. "Nobody thought to enter her." The figure lowered its punch and said that the water had thought of it, and that was why it had risen in this house and no other. My mother stepped past me, back into the bedroom, and laid the disc in the hollow on the pillow; the water closed over it without a ripple, and the blue thread in the conductor's arm drew taut toward the bed, as if someone small had taken hold of the other end.

Downstairs the front door knocked once, politely, from the inside. Elsie cried out that the passage was dry, quite dry, and then, in a different voice, that someone had laid a place at the table. I looked at the list still pressed under my palm and saw that a fourth line had begun to write itself beneath the others, the pencil strokes pale and uneven, like a child learning to hold the lead. The figure bent its head to read it, and for the first time it took the conductor's blackened key from his fingers. "Then we shall need the carriage after all," it said.

My father took the lamp from the table and went to the foot of the stairs, where he stood listening with one hand on the banister. The conductor followed him, his key held between finger and thumb, while Thomas drew the others back from the passage. Above us a door opened slowly, its hinges giving the familiar little cry of the room where I had slept as a child. My mother asked for the list, but I kept hold of it and went after her, folding the torn edge under my palm. On the landing we found the bedroom door ajar, and a narrow line of water running from beneath it toward the top stair. My father lifted the lamp, and the light fell upon a gloved hand resting on the inside handle.

The figure had to bend its head beneath the lintel when it came out, though the ceiling in that room was higher than any other in the house. Its coat was dark with wet, and in its other hand it held a small metal punch such as the conductor used for tickets. The conductor stepped forward and offered the blackened key, but the figure passed its glove over it without taking it. “The carriage is open,” it said, in the same voice we had heard at the front door. “It is the room that must be accounted for.” Behind it I could see my old bed, the coverlet turned back, and on the pillow a shallow hollow filled with brown water.

My mother unfolded the list against the wall and asked whose room it was, although she knew as well as I did. The figure touched the paper beside my name, where the ink had risen toward hers, then placed its punch over the line. I caught its wrist before it could close the jaws; the glove was cold and soft, and water squeezed through the seams onto my fingers. My father set down the lamp and pulled me back, but my mother held the list steady and told the figure that I had left the room years ago. “Then let the room say so,” it replied, and she went past it into the bedroom, where she pressed both hands into the wet hollow on the pillow. When she lifted them, a length of blue thread clung to her wedding ring, and the child downstairs called out that she could feel it moving.

My mother drew the thread from the pillow slowly, feeding it through the doorway to me, while the conductor gathered the wet length in the crook of his arm. There seemed to be more of it than the child had held at the sill, and when the last of it came free, the hollow in the pillow rose and dried beneath my mother’s hands. The figure closed its punch on the empty air, leaving a small round disc of paper on the floor, then stepped aside to let her pass. My father picked up the disc and turned it toward the lamp; on one face was the number of the carriage, and on the other, in my mother’s writing, was a name none of us had spoken. Downstairs, the woman with the baby began to call for her, and my mother took the disc from my father before hurrying to the stairs. The figure remained beside the open bedroom door, watching as a second hollow slowly formed in the pillow.