The stench slips between my father’s arms and finds me, and when I beg my father to make it go away, the smoke leaps into my mouth, masking my voice with a foreign rasp. He hushes me, careful with my hair and flowers, and promises it will be all right as he hurries my mother and me inside. I cannot make such a public scene, he whispers, but I feel incapable of calm. I am changed, I want to tell him.

By now my father is speaking more to my mother than to me, charging her to remind me of proper conduct. It’s no use. A chasm exists between us that never has before. I know something they do not. Together we witnessed a moment that only I seem to understand.

Like Montreal, I will never be the same.

Camille’s voice gave me the courage to open my eyes.

At first consciousness approached and then retreated again, ebbing like an evening tide that prefers the inseparable darkness where the water meets the sky. Somewhere between the end and beginning of the memory, I sensed the Vault building up around me, and when it didn’t insist—when the bright day began again instead and our coach stopped outside the restaurant—I was relieved not to face Walter Gordon again. Only when I heard Camille was I safe, no longer afraid that to wake would be to find the violent Mem still on my bed.

I flinched at the light. Camille’s ample figure was warped and hazy, the remnants of my ordeal giving her usually comforting image a nightmarish undertone that I could not have described.

“Oh, Dolores, Dolores,” she said through a relieved gasp, falling over me and then drawing us both upright.

Each time she squeezed, I felt as though a long crack was splitting my forehead in two. Lifting the hand not trapped between us, I let my fingertips graze my brow. There they met a starchy bandage that wrapped entirely around my head, the place where Walter had made contact protruding against it.

“What has that animal done to you, Dolores?”

The crack split further still. Her embrace was not to blame. It was the name intensifying the pain and panic, both at the site of the wound and inside my head; I pulled myself away.

“Dolores? Dolores, what’s the matter?”

As I threw back the covers and prepared to stand at the bedside opposite her, Camille hurried into the hall to call for help, her heels skittering across the linoleum. She came quickly back, begging me to lie down or at least tell her what was the matter. The sound of the splitting seemed to forbid my answering her. If only I could get through the haze, I knew that I could set things right.