The camera was aimed away from the birds and at the front door, but Harvey said now it has Vaseline all over it and is aimed at the ground. “The ghost,” Harvey had said yesterday, but she knows Harvey could have done it himself, because she has caught him playing with Vaseline, putting thick coats of the stuff on a vase and one of his Hot Wheels, and though she knows she needs to talk to him about it, there has just been too much to think and worry about. Harvey says that someday he will have a great big mustache and drive a convertible, except when he goes to Munchkinland, and then he will put the top up and lock the doors. Every day, he pretends to be a masked bandit or a surgeon, or he drapes his lip with a big fake mustache and begs her to let him wear it to camp. She taught him the Frito Bandito song, a song she associates with her mother and a time in her life when she thought things might be better than they were. Harvey loves that song and sings it over and over. Brent once asked her how she had all of that in her head, and why, and she wanted to explain the many, many mantras she’d had before she knew there was such a thing, the many repetitions and words and phrases and songs that allow her to disappear, like climbing onto a raft on the swells of the ocean and simply rolling and rolling and rolling. Not long ago, she heard a circuit judge say “the weight of fate,” and the words got stuck in her head for days after. The weight of fate, the weight of fate.

“It’s okay, Harvey,” she says a million times a day, and she tries to keep him from calling Jason. “Jason is in college now.”

“He said I can always call him for any reason at any time.”

“Let him enjoy summer, okay? We will, too.”

“I need to tell him we have a ghost.” He was wearing a thick black handlebar mustache that made it hard not to laugh, or cry—Harvey often left her feeling she didn’t know which to do.

“What do you mean, we have a ghost?” She asked the question, her own skin prickling with the knowledge that she hadn’t been dreaming the sounds and visions after all.

“I see it at night.”