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had gone wrong with Susannah who had been married and
divorced twice already by the age of twenty-five. The only one who had done no
wrong was Jamie, and that had to have been because she escaped to college at
seventeen and then to the Peace Corps. I think my mother saw her all of twice
in ten years and that for only a couple of days. I remember sitting in a
restaurant in Germany with Jamie a couple of years before my mother died. I
asked her why she never came home. Her response was, “Why have you never left?”
    So, though I was in the throes of new and exciting love, I wasn’t
exactly in a great place. Fran was undeterred in her mission to give me the
world’s best birthday. After dinner, she cut the cake and sat naked on my lap,
feeding it to me. We went to bed and made the kind of love poets write about
for years afterward. After, as she was falling asleep on my shoulder, I reached
over and picked the kaleidoscope off the bedside table. Squinting against it, I
aimed it for the light coming in from the hallway and tried to see the patterns.
Within seconds, a buzzing started in my ears and moved into my head. It felt as
if something was crushing the sides of my head in on itself. It didn’t hurt,
but I felt a swelling in my brain, and the buzzing turned to a roar. I tried to
speak, but I couldn’t make a sound. I was sure I was having a stroke, but I
couldn’t even move to get Fran’s attention. As the roaring in my head
increased, a tunnel formed across my vision and it felt as though my brain was
being thrown down a long, dark hallway. At the end of the hallway was an image
and I moved toward it, determined to see what it was. It was Fran. I called out
to her in my head, but she didn’t know I was there. She was sitting on the
grass in a field I didn’t recognize. She was pulling the grass up by its roots
and staring at it in her hands. Blood was trickling down her face and I could
tell that it had soaked through her clothes and pooled on the ground all around
her. Mesmerized, I watched the blood sink down into the earth all around her. A
moment later, she looked up at me and mouthed, “Help.” In that moment, I was
back in my own bed, my arm wrapped around Fran so tightly, she was almost
choking. She had poked at me until I came fully awake.
    Shaking myself, I realize that Sam has been poking me for several
seconds, in the same way Fran had poked me so many years ago.
    “ Ow ,” I rub my arm and poke her back,
hard.
    “ Ow ,
what the fuck?”
    “You were hurting me.”
    Sam punches me on the bicep. “You were out of it. I was about to
throw you in the pool, but I was afraid you would drown.”
    “I know you would save me,” I grin.
    “Yeah, I might throw you a noodle.”
    “You’re a true friend.” I smack her on the head.
    “I thought you were having another seiz – uh – episode.”
    “I was thinking about the first time I had one. It was on my
actual birthday.”
    “So a long, long, long time ago,” she jibes.
    “Yes. Thank you so much for pointing that out. Your humor is
unbearable. I’m laughing on the inside.”
    “Way deep down on the inside?”
    “Exactly.”
    She pauses. “So, what happened?”
    “I was in bed with Fran. She was sleeping. I had a vision of her
bleeding from her head.”
    Sam shakes her head. “How much of the book is true?”
    “Basically, all of it.”
    We stare into the water again, lost in our own thoughts. Trying to
smile, I poke Sam on the arm again. “You know, I once went to a psychic. When I
walked in, she stood up and pointed at me, screaming. She ran into a back room
and refused to come back out. At first, I thought it was some kind of dramatic
act, meant to drum up business, but later, I wondered. I mean, it’s not as if
she got any of my money that day.”
    Slinging an arm around me, Sam
smiles. “I felt
like screaming in terror the first time I saw you, too.”
    “Ass.”
    “Totally.”
    Standing up, I reach down for my shoes and hold the