“Shut the fuck up!” I hear myself slur. “How do you know I didn’t have a seizure?”

“Seizure, my arse,” Peggy says. “You’re piss loaded and ya fell in the tree. Just like the Old Man. What did I always say, Black Bernie Fortune will never die as long as that one’s alive. Although I hear the Spensers were a bit of a wreck when they got on the booze, too.”

“Are you gonna let her talk to me like that?” I say, lolling my head around to look at Mama. But Mama’s not listening. She’s sitting in the rocking chair, cradling the pieces of Dough Baby in her hard, heavy hands, not even trying to conceal the tears racing down her cheeks.

“Ma, I’m sorry. I lost my balance —”

“Go to bed, Crow,” Mama says, her eyes fixed on the broken ornament.

“Effie, I —” Peggy starts.

“Go have your pie. Go home as soon as you’re done.”

And that is how I wrecked Christmas Eve. But Allie Walker managed to one-up me.

6 BLOOD AND WATER

One of the reasons Allie Walker did not die in the grungy bathroom of her father’s house on Christmas Eve night is that her kid brother, Lennon, is a demanding, impatient little tool. Despite agitated huffing and puffing about how he needed to fix his hair before his girlfriend arrived, Allie still wasn’t getting out of the bathroom fast enough. Lennon booted the door open. He found Allie in an empty bathtub, fully dressed, semi-conscious, with a broken Daisy razor beside her and an empty pill bottle in hand. The other reason that Allie Walker did not die in the grungy bathroom of her father’s house on Christmas Eve night is that the bathroom wasn’t even grungy. She scrubbed every inch of it with a toothbrush before dumping a mittful of Ativan down her throat, and trying to smash the blade out of a pretty pink razor.

“Allie, what the fuck?” It’s all I can stammer when I see her propped up in her hospital bed at the understaffed, rundown General Hospital in Town.

Her golden hair is woven into a careless braid, fluorescent lights give her skin a dewy, ethereal cast, and her grey eyes a blue, mirrory shimmer. IV lines and leads tether her to the moment-by-moment realities of her blanket-draped body. She looks perfectly at home here, in the cool, sterile professionalism of the clinical world. There’s an eerie elegance to her, like a porcelain doll in a glass case. Vulnerable and ­fragile, yet safe and secure. Allie would have made a kick-ass doctor. But she makes a beautiful patient, too.

“I didn’t mean to,” she mumbles, like she’s lost in a rather pleasant daydream. I stifle a gasp, as around her head I watch a band of blackened blue wrap around a wobbling sea of cobalt waves. A greyish-white froth erupts and is swallowed over and over again, as that hallucinatory ocean bashes against the hallucinatory wall. Meanwhile, a sickly smear of thick soot has moved in and settled over Allie’s midsection.