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coursework, too. I began to fail exams, which was difficult and surprising to me, since, aside from my appalling pile of absences, I’d been a good student all of my life. Now I found I couldn’t summon any focus or attention or even interest.
    The next fall, I let Fonnie and my mother persuade me to stay home. I can’t say it was any better for me there than at school. There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts. I couldn’t sleep, and when I could, I had terrible, obsessive dreams about Dorothea and my father, replaying the last awful moments of their lives. I’d wake to a panicked feeling and the promise of more joyless days and nights. And if I said that I remained in this kind of coma for eight more years, then you’d understand how ready I was to live just as my mother began to die.

    My mother was sick with Bright’s disease for years, but things got quickly worse in the summer of 1920. Throughout the hottest weeks of July and August, I hardly ever left the upstairs apartment, and when I did leave, she worried endlessly.
    “Elizabeth? Is that you?” she called out weakly as soon as she heard me on the stairs. I wasn’t sure why she was using my given name after all these years, but much about her baffled me just then. She didn’t resemble the steel-spined and difficult woman who had always been able to dissolve me with a single word. She was frail and anxious, calling out again as I hurried up the stairs: “
Elizabeth?
”
    “I’m here, Mother.” I came into the main room where she rested on the worn pink velvet settee. I put down my shopping bags and unpinned my hat. “Are you too warm? Can I open a window?”
    “Is it warm?” Her hands kneaded the afghan in her lap. “I’m chilled to the bone.”
    I pulled a chair over to the settee and took up her hands, rubbing them to bring blood to the surface, but wherever I touched, the impressions of my fingertips became set, as if her skin had become bread dough. I let her go and she started to whimper.
    “What can I do?”
    “Bring your sister. I need Fonnie with me now.”
    I nodded and stood to leave, but her eyes opened wider. “Don’t go, please don’t leave me.” So I sat again, and this is how it went, all that long night. She took a little broth and slept lightly for a few hours. Then, near midnight, she became suddenly calm.
    “I worry greatly for you, Elizabeth,” she said. “What will become of you when I’m gone?”
    “I’m a grown woman, Mother. I’ll be fine. I promise.”
    “No.” She shook her head. “Years ago Mrs. Curran and I spoke to Dorothea about you.” Her breath was labored, and I didn’t want to see her struggle this way.
    “Shh. It doesn’t matter.”
    “It does. We asked her about you several times and she rebuffed us. She had nothing to say.”
    I’d always been skeptical of the occult—the board, the hushed, candlelit séances and automatic writing sessions with red scarves on the lamps—but now I felt a rush of cold through me. Was it possible that Mother
had
been in touch with Dorothea? And if so, why had my sister, dead for nine years, turned her back on me? Did she know something hard and sad about my fate? The idea terrified me and yet there was no way to be certain. I couldn’t ask my mother to elaborate on the session; she was exhausted and more anxious than ever. I also wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. What if the future was worse than the present? What if it didn’t exist at all?
    All that August night I stayed in the straight-backed chair next to the settee. I swabbed Mother’s forehead and neck with a damp cloth and looked out at the warm summer night, the dark sky and darker trees, everything as remote as exhibits in a museum. And I knew that I too could die in this room. This was one way my life’s wheel could turn.
    Hours later, near dawn, my mother died without a sigh or rattle or ragged breath. How very different from the way my father had gone—the crack