It is not because of the stones and the bones and the myriad ghost stories I read as a kid. Not even because of my own circumstances, although I’d like to think I can do better than being boxed up and dropped into a hole in the ground. Graveyards remind me of my mother’s youngest sister, Janice. In my earliest memories, she was my gorgeous, glamorous, teenaged aunt who’d come to babysit. She’d bring me Popeye cigarettes and root beer, doll me up with glittery eyeshadow and red lipstick, and let me prance around in her high heels. Everybody in Town called her Crash, because the mere sight of her walking down the Halfway Road was known to distract male drivers and cause accidents. But on a sweltering summer day when I was eleven and a half, Crash Fortune herself crashed. Or snapped. I was with her when it happened.

Janice showed up on our doorstep just after sunrise, insisting that she needed me to come on an adventure with her. I assumed that she had a long day of beach bumming and junk food scarfing planned, but instead she took me to graveyards. One after another, after another, searching for something. Someone. She wouldn’t — or couldn’t — say who.

“I’ll know it when I hear her,” she’d moan, as she writhed around on top of people’s grave plots, grinding her ear into the ground so hard that her strawberry blonde hair got caked with grass and dirt. “I’ll know it when I hear her.”

By sundown, Janice had heard nothing but me complaining that I was starving, exhausted, and more than a little freaked out. She finally took me home, but when we got there, she leapt out of the car and ran into the woods. I told Mama what happened. We found Janice a short time later, just past the spot where I’d begun construction on what would become the world’s most epic stolen road sign tree fort. She was on the ground again, curled in the fetal position, eyes red and teary.

When she saw us, her voice erupted in a manic speed and pitch, “I heard her! Among the coal black heart’s tendrils! Crow, she sang to me!” Mama told me to go back to the trailer and call Peggy.

The next time I saw Janice, she was locked up in the Butterscotch Palace, which is what everybody called the old psychiatric hospital. She remained there for the better part of her life. And I say that not meaning “most of her life,” but quite literally “the better part.” There, she had three meals a day, a roof over her head, and couldn’t get arrested for running down Main Street naked as a jaybird, and then trying to burn down the bridge with Molotov cocktails. She was kept in a comfy chemical straightjacket, a shell of her former wild child self. But at least she was safe.

When the Butterscotch Palace closed in the mid-nineties, Janice moved in with Peggy for a time, then abruptly dropped off the face of the Earth. No one knew where she was or what had happened, and after a while, no one even mentioned her name. Until I got the phone call in Toronto, five years ago. It was the police. They’d identified the body of an OD’ed hooker in my Toronto neighbourhood as one “Janice Fortune.” On her paperwork at the shelter she frequented, she’d listed me as next of kin. Aunt Janice was three blocks away from me when she died. I’d probably walked past her in the street a dozen times on my way to the subway station.