I sit back in my chair, thinking about Mom and Dad. The way she fell apart was like watching a beautiful flower wilt and die, gradual and painful to witness. She’d been a magnet of genuine warmth that made everyone around her feel important to her in some irreplaceable way. But once she got used to being numbed by vodka, nobody was enough. She was always worse when Dad was driving for long stretches of time, like he was a lifeboat she clung to, falling back into the water as soon as he left.

I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten until one morning when I was twelve. I’d had a terrible nightmare that my mother had lost her way in a storm and slipped into the harbor and drowned. I woke up in a cold sweat, scared, frantic. She wasn’t in her bed; it looked like she’d never come home. I was crying, hardly able to catch my breath. Tate had met me in the lobby. She’s dead, Tate. She’s dead. The dream was fresh, fueling a panic I couldn’t control, because I think deep down I knew that I was losing her. We got to the outside doors and Tate stopped suddenly, flinging one arm back as though to keep me from moving past. Get R . . . R-uth, he’d said. Instead, I’d pushed past him and gasped. A woman huddled on the concrete step outside, arms wrapped around the metal post like she was holding on against a hurricane-force wind. I pushed through the doors, and the cold wind stole my breath when I knelt beside her. Her head hung down, hair falling in tangled clumps around her face, and she smelled. Like alcohol and body odor.

I’d pressed my arms into my stomach, thinking I might puke. Mom?

She’d lifted up her face and stared at me with bloodshot eyes. Oh, hi, Claire bear. She said it like we’d accidentally run into each other at the harbor. Like she wasn’t hurting me over and over. Like I was nothing at all. The remnants of my dream vanished, taking with them my fear, and suddenly I was filled with an anger that burned. My hands balled into fists. What’s wrong with you! Why can’t you stop? I hate you so much!

Her body shook like my words were bullets piercing her skin. I’d screamed until my voice was hoarse and I was crying, and Tate led me away and upstairs to my apartment, and then Ruth was there, my head in her lap, a cool washcloth on my forehead.