The greeting card sat on the kitchen counter. Her mother had a habit of sending her goofy cards—Hanukkah cards for Valentine’s Day, get-well-soon cards for her birthday and Kwanzaa cards for no other reason than pure silliness—but never before had the greeting matched up so fully with the actual occasion. The card opened to reveal a very pregnant mama squirrel. Shit.

She hadn’t told Mary-Sue about her pregnancy; yet it seemed as if her mother, with her uncanny sixth sense, had simply known. Congratulations! chirped a chorus line of squirrels. They’d had no contact in over a month, and the card was probably just a friendly reminder for her to call. Mary-Sue had always been nothing less than kind and generous—a nun with a checkbook. She’d never known the real Kate—violent, haunted, ruled by chaos and disappointment. A Vietnam whore.

She could kill Bluto. Him and his busted condom. He hadn’t called her since that night, which was just as well since she didn’t want anything more to do with him. Their encounter might as well have been a hallucination born of a lonely spring night.

Yet certain facts remained irrefutable—that girl Brittany had made the news, still missing. And the incubus was no dream. It grew daily in size and temperament; it had very specific demands and exacted very specific punishments if those demands weren’t met. At four months, it had become harder for Kate to deny or disguise her state. She sometimes still harbored dark thoughts about getting rid of it.

On the bright side, she knew that Mary-Sue would welcome the baby with a benevolence that Kate didn’t herself possess. Mary-Sue would detach the reality of the baby from the reality of its provenance and overwhelm it with a love that would render history inconsequential. Nothing would matter beyond the fact that it was flesh and blood, and yelping for supervision . . . Not that this made it any easier to pick up the phone.

The August heat was hard on her body. She’d already thrown up that morning, running from her bed to the toilet, hand over mouth, at seven. Now, the merciless sun was beating down on the house, unearthing old stinks. A sick dog with halitosis. A poorly covered grave. Dead babies floating down a muddy river.

She rushed again to the bathroom.

Kate knew her own history of terrible impulses only too well. Only a few years ago, she had been a grade-school teacher in south Los Angeles, with its appalling teacher-student ratio. She taught math, reading and writing at an elementary school where not once did she meet an Edward James Olmos who prescribed calculus for self-respect.