She, too, spends a couple of hours in the tub. She puts her head underwater, blows out all the air, and holds her breath. She opens her eyes under the water and sits waiting for something strange to happen. She expects to see a ghostly figure on the diffuse surface, or a hand reaching in to grab her by the neck. That’s what happens in all the horror movies. Something surprising and strange always happens to the heroines while they’re taking a bath. She used to think it was a false and stupid scene whose only purpose was to show the actresses naked. Sure, after Freddy has tried to kill you in all your dreams, you go and lock yourself in to take a bath by candlelight. But now she understands the scene’s true complexity: it happens that all the protagonists also had mothers, mothers just like hers, who, seeing them so upset, had suggested a bath. “Go on, run a bath and just forget that old murderer.”

Today I dried my hair the way my dad used to do it when I was little. He’d plug in an extension cord and then the hair dryer. I’d lie faceup across his double bed with my head hanging over the precipice of the mattress, and he would dry in the direction the hair fell, from top to bottom, as if it were a rug or something. He did it that way because he was practical, not sentimental. My father was a practical man.

She slid down the curve of the tub until the water covered her mouth and eyes. Her nose stuck out of the water, solitary like an island. But she doesn’t want to float like an island; she wants to sink like a stone in a river.