I begin to back-comb the hair at the crown of her head. “When I was little, my mom was a hairstylist. I guess I never got rid of her things after she left.” Thinking about her pushes at a door in my mind that swings open far too easily. I am eleven and sitting on a stool in our kitchen. Mom stands behind me, the snip of the scissors loud in the quiet of the kitchen. I wrinkle my nose from the musk of alcohol that surrounds her like a cloud. You look so much like him, Claire. My hair was long then, past my shoulders, thick and blonde. She swayed behind me; I could feel it in the movement of the air and the way she grabbed my shoulders to keep from stumbling to the side, swinging the scissors close to my head. Mom? She was never violent, but her moods were unpredictable: tears one minute, stone faced and silent the next. And then the loud snip by my ear, and a chunk of hair slid over my shoulder in long golden threads that scattered across the floor. Her cry echoes in my head. Oh shit, Claire; I’m so sorry. Oh no! I’m so sorry. She’d collapsed in a heap, slumped over, my hair grasped in her hands like wilted pick-up sticks. I’d scrambled off the stool and knelt beside her, rubbed her back, chewing at a fingernail, because I didn’t want her to disappear inside her room for days. It’s okay, Mom. I’ve always wanted short hair. Let’s just cut it all off, and I’ll look just like Dad.

“Oh, my mom had to leave too.” A girl’s voice brings me back to my bathroom, a comb in one hand, her hair half-teased. I study the girl in the mirror. “Oh geez,” she says. “My name is Maree, and you are making my hair into a beehive.”

I smile, let my mom slip away, stuffing the pain of her leaving back into its hole, where I try to keep it buried. “I haven’t forgotten you yet, Maree, but what did you say about your mom?” I start to pin the back of her hair, and her eyes light up when she sees the beginning of the hive.

“I said my mom left too. Where did yours have to go?”

My grip on the comb loosens, and I step away from the stool, study the girl, who stares at me, her face a mask I don’t understand. Ruth’s voice bounces around in my head. She’s sick, Claire. She can’t get better here, and she doesn’t want to keep hurting you. “Well, sweetheart, she was sick.”

Her mouth drops open. “No way! So was my mom.”

“Is that so?”

“Yep. A wolf bit her and gave her the America flu.”

I nearly drop the comb. “The what?”