She is evading my question, refusing to tell me what is the matter, though I can sense a desperation in her tight movements. Even though I kept my secret about Julian, I haven’t managed to keep her from one of her moods. “Mom,” I prod her again. “What is it?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

I gesture to the stick of incense leaving a languid curve of smoke in the air. “All these bizarre rituals.”

“Well,” she says, straightening a pile of pregnancy magazines. “I didn’t expect Elizabeth to notice, but you …”

“Me what?”

“You haven’t felt it?” she asks. “The energy here has changed. I’m doing all I can. If we could just go back to the way things were—”

“Stop trying to do that,” I snap.

“If you girls … if you hadn’t …” She shakes her head, tight-lipped.

“What is it? If we hadn’t what?”

“You brought it with you.” The words tumble from her lips. “Both of you. You went out, lived in the world, and absorbed all the negativity that lives out there. And then you brought it with you. You brought all of that outside energy in here. I’m trying to clean it out.”

Her face twitches with repressed emotion. I want to slap it. Here I am, trying to keep her happy despite the terrible secret in my gut, and she can’t even do that. Leave it to my mother to realize something is wrong even when she doesn’t know what it is.

“Please,” I scoff. “There’s been bad energy here forever. You just pretend not to notice.”

She stands abruptly and stalks from the room. Distantly I hear the pop of a cork and the liquid trickle of a glass filling. I realize that while she has been on her intensive cleansing spree over the last four days, she hasn’t had a single drink. And I realize too, with a kind of vicious satisfaction that morphs into guilt, that I am the reason she’s just gone for a drink now.

And now my mother’s rituals have invaded me. I have arranged artifacts around my room to ward off bad energy—piles of my favorite books like philological talismans, a smooth rock I found in the swamp when I was a child, a mug of blue pens, a candle holder shaped like an owl, a dream catcher I made in high school. I have taken out the clock that once lived here. It seemed like a bad sign.

As I pass Elizabeth’s room, I cannot help but hear the conversation she is having on her cell phone—the kind of livid whispers that would be shouts if we weren’t so good at keeping our voices down in this house.

At first they are wordless, harsh slithering sounds, but when I stand closer to the door, I can make out some of it.

“Where do you think?” she hisses. “As if I had anywhere else to go!”

The pause allows me to imagine what the person on the other end might be saying.