I couldn’t listen to any more of this. “You had a great imagination. That’s not the same thing. All little kids imagine things. It wasn’t till after Mum died—”

“It was, Mikey. You didn’t know because when I was little you could just put it down to ‘Oh, kids imagine stuff,’ but it was always. Mum dying had nothing to do with it.”

“Well,” I said. My mind felt very strange, juddering like a city in an earthquake. “So maybe it wasn’t Mum dying, exactly. She’d been depressed all your life, off and on. We did our best to keep it away from you, but kids sense things. Maybe it would actually have been better if we hadn’t tried to—”

“Yeah, you guys did your best, and you know what? You did a great job. I hardly remember being worried about Mum ever, at all. I knew she got sick sometimes, or sad, but I didn’t have a clue that it was a big deal. It’s not because of that, the way I am. You keep trying to organize me, file me away all neat and make sense, like I’m one of your cases—I’m not one of your fucking cases.”

“I’m not trying to organize you,” I said. My voice sounded eerily calm, artificially generated somewhere far away. Tiny memories fell through my mind, blooming like flakes of flaming ash: Dina four years old and shrieking blue murder in her bath, clinging to Mum, because the shampoo bottle was hissing at her; I had thought she was trying to dodge having her hair washed. Dina between me and Geri in the back of the car, fighting her seat belt and gnawing her fingers with a hideous worrying sound till they were lumpy and purple and bleeding, I couldn’t even remember why. “I’m just saying of course it was because of Mum. What else would it be? You were never abused, I’d swear to that on my life, you were never beaten or starved or—I don’t think you ever even got a smack on the backside. We all loved you. If it wasn’t Mum, then why?”

“There isn’t any why. That’s what I mean, trying to organize me. I’m not crazy because anything. I just am.”

Her voice was clear, steady, matter-of-fact, and she was looking at me straight on, with something that could almost have been compassion. I told myself that Dina’s hold on reality is one-fingered at best, that if she understood the reasons why she was crazy then she wouldn’t be crazy to begin with. She said, “I know that’s not what you want to think.”

My chest felt like a balloon filling with helium, rocking me dangerously. My hand was clamped on the arm of my chair as if it could anchor me. I said, “If you believe that. That this just happens to you for no reason. How do you live with that?”

Dina shrugged. “Just do. How do you live with it when you have a bad day?”