I made for the kitchen. But as I passed that china cabinet, I noticed an open door to my left, in the middle of the hallway—the door to the basement, which I knew to be unfinished, like mine, just cement floors and boxes and storage. Through the open door, light—the only light I could see anywhere in the house—was flowing.

I took one step toward the door, edged it further open with my toe, and listened for voices. All that came was a peculiar whirring and glugging. Something like a drill seemed to be buzzing, and I heard it the way you hear a dentist’s tools in your mouth: in your temples, in the space below your eyes. The sound lifted. Footsteps were coming up the stairs. I hurried to the kitchen and located, on the countertop, in the darkness, my knife.

The lights flipped on. Behind me were Anita and her mother. The door to the basement was flung open behind them. Anita looked perfectly vital, completely well. From Anjali Auntie’s arm dangled one of those totes that she had kept me from grabbing. In Anita’s hand was a glass that at first I thought was empty. But I looked again and saw that the bottom of it was filled with a kind of sunlight-yellow sediment. Some bubbles popped in a column. Anita quickly drained the sediment. That otherworldly yellow was gone through her lips in a moment.

“You look healthy,” I said. I held up my Swiss Army knife. “I left this.”

Anita was very still. Her breath seemed to be coming intentionally, as her chest rose and fell slowly.

The open basement door swung in my peripheral vision. Anjali Auntie took a step back and kicked it shut with her toe. She and Anita glanced at each other for the briefest moment. They really were starting to look alike. Anita was becoming a new creature and her mother had never looked much like a mother, anyway—no wrinkles, no crow’s feet, not a sprinkling of silver or gray in her hair. As Anita grew taller, grew breasts, it was as though they were not getting old and older but moving toward a prearranged meeting point in the middle.

“I was just making Ani some of the stuff my mother used to make me when I was sick,” Anjali Auntie said. I looked again at the glass. “You know turmeric milk, right, Neil?” she said.

I knew it: a horrible dark yellow thing my mother brewed whenever someone came down with a cold or cough or stomach bug. I knew turmeric milk, and I knew it had never and would never look like what had been in Anita’s glass just then.

“Sure,” I said. “Guess it perked you right up.”