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he’d been victorious. Dad slammed the door behind him and tucked me back into bed. Still wearing his Milky Way brown leather jacket and smelling of cigarettes and onions, he sat down next to me with his tan boots hanging over the edge of my bed. Just to make sure Neil couldn’t take anything else. He stayed sentry until the sun came up. I know, because I woke to him silently slipping away.

    I bounded up when the phone rang, knowing immediately who it was. “Were you sleeping?” Aunt Lorraine said as I lifted the receiver.
    “It’s two-thirty in the morning.”
    “You don’t know what’s going on here,” she said. “Rowdy won’t wash dishes or shower, the government’s talking to him through the water or something, I don’t know. Everyone’s crazy—really! I can’t trust them anymore. Your mother said she’d take the phone away.”
    “Okay, calm down. Nobody’s taking your phone away. I’ll talk to Mom.”
    “Her, I don’t care. She’s worse than those doctors, treating me like I’m some kind of baby, but I know exactly what’s going on.”
    I got out of bed and walked over to the kitchenette. “What do you want?” I asked, turning on the floor lamp next to the counter. My eyes adjusted to the muddy light.
    “You know what I want, your—”
    “No you don’t.”
    “I do!” Her voice stopped me cold it was so childlike.
    “Look, he probably won’t even take my calls. I’m no use to him anymore.” I heard my tone growing harsh, felt the back of my neck get all hot and sweaty. I was still suffering from the remnants of a lousy lay. And I didn’t have a job. And now Aunt Lorraine was deserting me.
    Worse, I was sick of playing death’s little emissary in this family. It began the day Dad dropped dead of a heart attack, and Mom, who’d been seeing shrinks for as long as I can remember, finally graduated to the psycho clinic. She showed up at the funeral two days later looking like Gloria Swanson in big sunglasses, flanked by two extraordinarily beautiful nurses. Sobbing through the rabbi’s soliloquy, she fell to the ground before the service was over. We all ran to her, but the nurses stopped us, one handling crowd control, the other reaching into her pocket for smelling salt. Mom rose dramatically, smiling beyond those of us who’d gathered around her as if the footlights rendered us invisible. The nurses led her out and that was the end of Dad’s funeral.
    Aunt Lorraine was more Bette Davis in All About Eve. She believed drama was better left to the stage or at least confined behind locked doors. Then why the urge to see Kaminsky? He was all image, nothing but a spin-doctored psychopomp.
    “Honey, I just want to talk to him,” she pleaded with me. I stood silently at the kitchen counter, naked underneath my red sheet.
    “I heard he’s from Poland,” she said. “Both of his parents were killed in Auschwitz. We’re practically related.”
    “Then why don’t you call him?” I lifted my left pinkie to my teeth and gnawed.
    “How can you say that? You have no idea how I feel, you barely know what you feel. You’re such a journalist sometimes.”
    “Not anymore. I’m nothing now.”
    “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I’m dying and don’t you try and tell me anything different, because I’m sick of taking care of everyone else’s troubles. I need you, you understand?”
    I took a deep breath, picked at my chapped lips with my fingernails. I couldn’t stay mad at her for getting sick, for seeking out even the most bizarre anesthesia. “All right, I’ll call him,” I said finally. “But just to talk.”
    “That-a-girl,” she said.
    When we hung up I was in the bathroom. I lifted my red toga and peed, hoping the warm liquid might thaw out my vagina, yet I felt nothing but a vain hole between my legs. I might as well be Barbie.
    Standing up, I caught a quick glance in the mirror. My eyes burned into my face, the eyes of death’s messenger, unemployed adulterer and