The inn sat at an intersection with flashing red lights. It was early evening when we arrived with our mom, our sister Annie, who was seven, and our brother Conor, four. They threw long shadows across the hot pavement when they exited our car. Their car. Our family. We thought we belonged with them.
The room was cold and dark, the thick curtains closed. Mom switched on a light. One bed, she said. She’d asked the man at the desk for two. Then Conor said, Mom! He stood in the corner in an open doorway we hadn’t noticed. There’s a whole nother room!
Annie called it a parlor. Conor called it a living room. Two chairs flanked a couch in the center. The walls were papered beige, with white, vertical stripes. Portraits hung in ornate frames, like in a museum, painted in thick oils that shone like they were still wet. Children from long ago, with smooth faces and receding hairlines and rouge on their cheeks—adults in miniature—posing with pets with near-human eyes and lips.
This isn’t a bed, Mom said into her phone, lifting the cushions of the couch. I asked for a room with two beds but got two rooms with one bed. She listened for a moment. Yes, she said, a rollaway.
Conor hugged himself. It was even colder in the parlor than in the bedroom. He studied a painting of a bearded man on horseback, wearing a red jacket, tan pants, black boots, and a black helmet, holding a rifle in one hand, reins in the other. Dogs with eyes and teeth that glinted beneath the ceiling lights led the horse.
He’s hunting foxes, Annie said. You wear red when you hunt foxes.
She examined a painting of two boys, maybe twelve, on the cusp of adolescence. They wore matching suits with white shirts buttoned to their chins.
Twins, she said. Like Kevin and Kyle.
Kevin and Kyle didn’t look alike, Conor said. There were photos of us at home, framed on shelves.
They weren’t identical, Annie said, using the precise word, but they looked alike. She remembered everything. Dad, us, everything.
She picked up one of two dolls sitting on a glass end table. The dolls were made of wood, painted white, connected by string threaded through limbs, torsos, faceless heads. Their clothes were loose. Conor picked up the second doll and made its feet tap the table’s surface as if to dance.
Annie dropped her doll, which crumpled on its side. She shuddered and made a sour face, which Connor copied. Then she shrieked and ran from the room. Turn the heat on, will you? she said.
Yeah, the heat! Connor followed, then paused in the doorway, surprised to find the doll still in his hand. Annie grabbed it and threw it into the parlor, pulled him into the bedroom, and slammed the connecting door shut.

Later, after the rollaway had been delivered, unfolded, and made, after they’d bathed and changed into their pajamas, they lay on the bed, the three of them.
Will Dad come for us? Conor asked.
Mom sighed. He can’t.
Does he love us? Conor asked.
Mom took a moment, then said, Yes.
I’m scared, he said.
Mom pulled him close. She pulled them both close.

The rollaway went unused. They all fit in the bed, of course. We remembered when we were small, before Annie and Conor were born, wedged between Mom and Dad on nights when we were frightened of things—rain, thunder—outside the house.
Now we curled together on the parlor floor to sleep. We didn’t mind that it was cold, or if there were noises. We didn’t mind if the dolls stood on their wooden feet and danced, or if the man on the horse killed a fox, or if his dogs barked and bared their sharp teeth, or if the twins poked their heads from the canvas and examined us, the way we had them.
We woke well past dawn, the sky a deep blue through the jagged gap in the curtains. The bedroom was empty—luggage, everything. We peered through the window. Our car was gone.
Their car.
We didn’t know what to do, where to go, so we sat on the couch in the parlor for some time and some time more, until the door adjoining the bedroom opened and we looked to see who was there.