I looked around and saw a young woman no more than twenty, in a Northwestern T-shirt, with her brunette hair tied in a ponytail. Her name tag told me she was a bookstore employee. As I held the book in my hand, she tapped a purple-painted fingernail on the cover.

“The poems are really deep. I mean, some of them will turn your stomach, but if you want to know what depression can do to someone’s head, it’s all in here.”

My finger caressed Karly’s name on the cover. “Do you know her?”

“Sure. I’ve taken her class.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s amazing. So many of the profs around here are just talking heads, you know? But Karly lived it.”

I smiled. “You’ve sold me.”

I followed the young woman to the cash register. As she rang up the sale and took my money, I said, “You mentioned depression. Is that what the poems are about?”

“Oh, yeah. She spent years in the cave.”

“Did something happen to her?”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, Karly was in a car accident right after college. She talks about it in class and doesn’t sugarcoat how bad it was. She had her mom in the car with her, and they were having some kind of big argument. The two of them didn’t get along, like really didn’t get along. Karly got distracted. She ran a red light, and they got T-boned. Her mom was killed.”

I felt those words like a blow to my chest.

“She spiraled after that,” the girl went on. “She spent a year in hell. Heavy into meth, abusive relationships, suicide attempts. The last time she almost succeeded.”

I hesitated, but I needed to know. “What did she do?”

“She drove her car right into the river.”

I had trouble standing. Waves of violent memories rolled over me. My mother, dead on the floor. My father, with the gun in his mouth. Roscoe, dead in the seat next to me, his face shredded by broken glass. Dylan Moran on the riverbank, the rats eating his face.

Karly and I, swirling and tumbling in the black water.

Roscoe said: Fate has a way of making even the smallest details converge.

“Shit,” I murmured.

“Yeah. When they pulled her out, she was dead. No heartbeat. No oxygen for like four minutes. They put her in a coma to give her brain a chance to recover, but nobody figured she’d come out of it. But she did. She says that was what finally turned her around.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“Anyway, enjoy the book,” the girl told me with a macabre smile.

“Yeah. Thanks.”