I have been keeping an eye out for Clementine, though, holding my breath as I open closet doors, half expecting to see her dragging herself out of the basement, crossing the barrier of time in her undeath. When I hear footsteps one night while grading essays in the cozy parlor, I flinch and drop my pen; Mother, lighting incense nearby, pauses to stare at me.

“Everything all right?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

Ever since the power outage, my mother has been obsessing over her witchy rituals. The house has become sleepily perfumed by incense. Once she went around the whole first floor counterclockwise with a smoldering bundle of sage, which exhaled smoke into every room. Then she did the same with cedar, then sweet grass. Elizabeth, sorting through boxes of baby clothes she had picked up at Goodwill and dutifully ignoring her buzzing phone, warned her not to burn the house down.

“It’s just a good thing we live in such a damp place,” said Elizabeth, sticky with humidity, “or this house would have been a pile of ash a long time ago.”

After being dissuaded from burning anything else, my mother turned to cleaning, which is out of the ordinary for her; she tends to allow plumes of dust to billow up from couch cushions and grime to creep across windowsills and mold to spore in the bathtub before she finally relents and goes in search of a dust rag. Now, though, she has been scrubbing the old hardwood floors back to a color they haven’t been in years and making the windows clear again, humming to herself while she works, elbow-deep in a bucket of soapy water.

She was humming a familiar tune yesterday while hunched over the toilet cleaning the crevices behind, one I couldn’t quite put my finger on as I walked past until she started adding the lyrics, singing in her sweet, lilting voice: “Oh my darling … oh my darling …”

“Why are you singing that?” I cut in.

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

Perhaps the detriment of an analytic mind is the inability to take a coincidence at face value. I know now, thinking back on that moment, that my mother was ignorant of Clementine’s story. Had I heard her singing that song several weeks ago, it wouldn’t have registered in my mind—but once a name or a word is at the forefront of your brain, it suddenly becomes impossible not to notice it everywhere, like learning a new word and immediately hearing it on the radio, and then on a TV show, as if the word didn’t exist until you learned it but now that you know it, the world has permission to use it around you. Strange phenomena like that occur all the time, and while it seems more meaningful to ascribe the mystery to some greater purpose, some deeper narrative you know you must be participating in, it is usually, and unsatisfyingly, only coincidence.

At the time, though, none of this crossed my mind, as my mind was too wrapped up with Clementine. But that conversation comes back to me when my mother startles me while I am grading.