David and Sally Nickerson love their father but he has become so distant and guilt-ridden in these months following Billie"s death that he cannot connect to his children they way he once did. Isaac is especially disdainful of David"s affinity for crystals and the occult that his sister Dorothy encourages by bringing new magic “rocks” to him after each of her excursions abroad. This was also Billie"s doing and her undoing. Her obsessive belief in the paranormal kept driving them further apart. He couldn"t compete with it or even understand it.
Isaac so bitterly regrets that his daughter is bound to a wheelchair from the accident he caused that he is blind to her buoyant spirit and the light in her eyes. Or perhaps he resents that the light in those eyes is for David only, the brother she w
