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be landing in five minutes.”
    Cassie nodded silently, removed the headset, and dropped both it and the Walkman, along with her unread book, back into the big leather tote bag that had been her mother’s. The previous night, when she’d decided to take it with her, she had thought that the bag might make her feel better, might give her at least a tenuous connection with her mother. But every time she looked at it, her eyes flooded with tears, and already she was wishing she’d left it behind with everything else in their little apartment in North Hollywood, to be packed for shipment by the movers who would arrive the next day. She looked resolutely away from the bag as she fastened the seat belt, and her gaze drifted out the window to the city that lay below.
    All through the five hours of the flight, she had entertained the impossible hope that she might recognize Boston, but deep inside had known she wouldn’t. Now she discovered she’d been right. As the plane soared out over Massachusetts Bay, then banked into the final turn before gliding over Boston harbor to touch down on the runway at LoganAirport, Cassie searched the landscape below for something—anything—that looked familiar. But there was nothing, and as the plane sank lower and lower, until finally only the buildings along the waterfront were still visible, she turned away from the window. Why, after all, should anything look familiar? She hadn’t been here since she was barely two years old. How could she remember it? Besides, if it hadn’t been for the accident, she wouldn’t even be trying to remember it. For a split second she felt a flash of anger toward her mother, then resolutely put the feeling aside. The accident, she told herself one more time, was only that—an accident. But still the thought remained. Twice since her mother had died, Cassie had awakened in the dark, her body trembling and damp with a cold sweat, for the dream she’d first had the night before her mother died had come back.
    In the dream she was standing by the freeway watching the traffic rush by, and then, far in the distance, she had seen her mother’s car. In the dream it looked just like all the other cars on the freeway, there didn’t seem to be anything different about it. But still, somehow she had known that that particular car was her mother’s. And then, as the car passed her, she saw her mother turn and look at her. The odd thing was that the woman in the car, whom she
knew
was her mother, didn’t look like her mother at all. While her mother’s hair was a sort of drab brown—at least at the roots—the woman in the car in her dream had long black hair which fell around her shoulders, and deep blue eyes which seemed to penetrate right into Cassie’s soul.
    Her mother’s eyes had been brown, like Cassie’s own.
    And then, in the dream, her mother had said something.
    Cassie couldn’t quite make out the words, but a second later her mother had begun laughing, and the car suddenly shot forward. A second after that it veered sharply to the left, smashed headlong into the concrete supports of an overpass, and burst into flames. Cassie had awakened then, sweating and shaking, her ears still ringing with the sound of the explosion, her vision still filled by the sight of her mother’s face—the stranger’s face—flame consuming her as she stared at Cassie and uttered a single word: “Good-bye.”
    Then she’d started laughing, a high-pitched screechinglaugh, as if she didn’t care that she was leaving Cassie alone in the world.
    But the strangest part of the dream was that the woman in the car—the woman Cassie was still certain had been her mother—was a stranger.
    It didn’t make sense. Had her mother killed herself, or had Cassie herself, in some unknown way, caused the accident? And yet she knew she couldn’t have caused it, for she hadn’t even really seen it, except in the dream.
    The very next night the dream repeated itself—this time in