—This is the living room, he said, as if he were giving himself a tour.
Not much had changed in the room since he had been there last. His grandfather’s grandfather clock was still by the window unwound. The piano was still in the corner unplayed. And the books still sat on their shelves unread.
One thing different was that there was now a giant oriental fan in front of the fireplace, as if the fireplace were shy of its appearance. Woolly wondered if it was there all the time, or if his sister removed it in winter so that they could build a fire. But if she did remove it, where did she put it? It seemed so delicate and awkward. Perhaps it could be folded up like a normal fan, thought Woolly, and tucked away in a drawer.
Satisfied with this notion, Woolly took a moment to wind the clock, then exited the living room and continued with his tour.
—This is the dining room, he said, where you will have dinner on birthdays and holidays. . . . Here is the only door in the house that doesn’t have a doorknob and that swings back and forth. . . . And this is the kitchen. . . . And this is the back hallway. . . . And here is “Dennis’s” office, in which no one is supposed to go.
Working his way through the rooms in this manner, Woolly completed a circuit such that he was right back at the foot of the stairs.
—And this is the staircase, he said as he ascended it. This is the hall. This is my sister and “Dennis’s” room. This is the bathroom. And here . . .
Woolly stopped before a door that was slightly ajar. Easing it open, he entered a room that both was and wasn’t what he expected.
For while his bed was still there, it had been moved to the center of the room and was covered with a great big piece of canvas. The canvas, which was a dingy white, had been splattered with hundreds of blue and gray driplets—like one of those paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. The closet, where Woolly’s dress shirts and jackets had hung, was utterly empty. Not even a hanger had been left behind, or the box of mothballs that used to hide in the shadows of the upper shelf.
Three of the room’s four walls were still white, but one of them—the one where the ladder was standing—was now blue. A bright friendly blue, like the blue of Emmett’s car.
Woolly couldn’t take issue with the fact that his closet was empty or that his bed was under a tarp because the room both was and wasn’t his. When his mother had remarried and moved to Palm Beach, Sarah had let him use this room. She had let him use it over the Thanksgiving and Easter vacations, and for those weeks when he had left one boarding school and had yet to go to the next. Even though Sarah had encouraged him to think of the room as his own, he had always known that it wasn’t meant to be a forever room, at least not for him. It was meant to be a forever room for somebody else.
From the lumpy shape of the tarp, Woolly could tell that some boxes had been stacked on the bed before it had been covered—giving it the appearance of a very little barge.
Checking first to make sure that none of the driplets on the tarp were wet, Woolly folded it back. On the bed were four cardboard boxes with his name written on them.
Woolly paused for a moment to marvel at the handwriting. For even though his name had been written in letters two inches tall with a big black marker, you could still tell it was his sister’s handwriting—the very same handwriting that had been used to write the tiny little numbers on the tiny little rectangle in the telephone dial. Isn’t that interesting, thought Woolly, that a person’s handwriting is the same no matter how big or small.
Reaching out to open the box that was nearest, Woolly hesitated. He suddenly remembered the troubling theory of Schr?dinger’s Cat, which had been described by Professor Freely in physics class. In this theory, a physicist named Schr?dinger had posited （that was the word that Professor Freely used: posited） that there was a cat with some poison in a box in a state of benign uncertainty. But once you opened the box, then the cat would either be purring or poisoned. So it was with a touch of caution that any man should venture to open a box, even if it was one that had his name on it. Or perhaps, especially if it had his name on it.
Steeling his nerves, Woolly opened the lid and breathed a sigh of relief. Inside were all the clothes that had been in the bureau that was and wasn’t his. In the box below, Woolly found all of the things that had been on top of the bureau. Like the old cigar box, and the bottle of aftershave that he had been given for Christmas and never used, and the runner-up’s trophy from the tennis club with the little golden man who would be serving a tennis ball for all eternity. And at the very bottom of the box was the dark blue dictionary that Woolly’s mother had conferred upon him when he was headed off to boarding school for the very first time.