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find Lise. There was a feeling to the place like in the basement at school, where they held classes for a while when enrollment ran too high. A furnacey smell and uncertain buzzing and whirring sounds. Turning the corners, the floor sloping, you felt like you were going down into something no one knew about, had forgotten about.
    At the end of the first long hallway she could see an old man sitting in a wheelchair, his white hair tufted high like a cartoon bird. He was wearing a very nice robe, quilted, like in an old movie. She wondered who’d bought it for him and where that person was now.
    The man’s head kept drifting from side to side, his mouth open in a kind of perpetual, silent panic. How did this happen? Why am I here?
    â€œHi,” she said as she approached, surprising herself.
    He looked up with a start, his swampy green eyes trying to focus on her.
    â€œNot another one?” he said, his voice small and wavery. “Are you another one?”
    One hand lifted forward from his silken lap.
    She smiled uneasily, not knowing what else to do.
    â€œOkay, well,” she said, and kept walking.
    Maybe that’s what it’s like when you’re old, she thought. Always more young people, a parade of them going by. Here’s another one.
    â€œI hope it will be okay,” he said, his voice rising as she passed. “I hope.”
    Far down the hall now, her head feeling hot, she turned to look back at him.
    â€œI…I…” he was saying, his voice like a creak.
    She started to smile at him but saw his face—from this distance a white smudge—and stopped.
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    It took five minutes, and no one questioned her or even seemed to notice.
    Rushing as if with purpose, she spotted Mrs. Daniels’s turquoise coat in an open doorway, hovering just inside the threshold, Lise’s grandmother beside her.
    Walking in, she saw the hospital bed webbed with wires, a sickly sac hanging in one corner like a trapped mite. It reminded her of Skye once telling them that you should put cobwebs on wounds, that it stopped blood.
    â€œDeenie,” Mrs. Daniels cried out. “Look at our Lisey.”
    The puff of both women’s winter coats, the sputtering monitor, a nurse suddenly coming behind her, and Mrs. Daniels sobbing to breathlessness—Deenie pushed past it all to try to get closer to Lise. Like people did in the movies, she would push past everything. She would not be stopped.
    But when she got to the foot of Lise’s bed, she halted.
    All she could see was a violet blur and something that looked like a dent down the middle of Lise’s delicate forehead.
    â€œWhat happened,” Deenie said, a statement more than a question. “What’s wrong with her.”
    â€œShe hit her head on the coffee table,” the grandmother said. As if that were the problem. As if the purple gape on Lise’s brow were the problem here. Were why they were all here.
    Though it kind of felt that way to Deenie too because there it was. A broken mirror where the pieces didn’t line up. Splitting Lise’s face in two. Changing it.
    â€œThat’s not Lise,” Deenie said, the words falling from her mouth.
    Everyone looked at her, Mrs. Daniels’s chin shaking.
    But it felt true.
    The nurse took Deenie’s arm roughly.
    â€œThey always look different,” the nurse said. “She’s very weak. You need to leave.”
    Mrs. Daniels made a moaning sound, tugging on her mother’s coat front.
    â€œBut are you sure it’s her?” Deenie asked as the nurse walked her to the door. “Mrs. Daniels, are you sure that’s Lise?”

6
    Pulling into the hospital lot, Tom found his daughter standing out front, pogo-ing on the sidewalk to keep warm.
    She climbed inside the car.
    â€œDad, I don’t want to be there anymore, okay?”
    â€œSure,” he said. “No one likes hospitals.”
    Her chin kept jogging up and down,