Please, I prayed, please let this one be a false vision. A lie, like so many of the others. Even though I knew it wasn’t. I could feel in my bones that this one was real.

“They’re just fighting, Lee,” said Murphy. “It’s okay. She’ll come home in a few hours, same as usual. Right?”

But I couldn’t answer her. Because I knew that wasn’t true. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

I knew Mom was never coming back.

Things had been weird with Mom the last few months. She just hadn’t been herself.

Like the time two weeks before when I went downstairs for a midnight snack and found Mom peeking out the windows and then snapping the blinds shut, like she was watching for someone. Before I could ask what she was doing, Horace swooped in and threw his arm around her, trying to coax her back into bed, them whisper-fighting the whole way.

Or the time when Mom opened our front door one afternoon and screamed. Murphy and I came running up behind her.

“What is it?” I said. Mom only pointed, her hand trembling, her eyes all bleary with tears.

It was a hummingbird, its throat ripped open, its guts splayed across our welcome mat.

“A stray cat probably did it, Mom,” said Murphy. “It’s just nature.”

But Mom turned and ran to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. I knew hummingbirds were Mom’s favorites, but this wasn’t like her, not at all. I mean, Mom was the toughest woman I’d ever known. I’d seen her take a machete and chop the head off a cottonmouth that had wandered up the gutters to our house without a second thought. She was never one to be mortified by gore.

Or strangest of all, the morning when I woke up early and found Mom staring up at the living room wall, the furniture moved away and all the photos taken down. A picture was painted on the prim white, a kind of mural, wild slashes of colors like blossoms blooming, all light and energy. It covered the whole wall, maybe six feet tall and four across—a painting of a tree, little flames hovering all around it like birds, a giant gash down the middle of it like a cave you could crawl into. It wasn’t exactly a realistic painting, but it felt real, if that makes any sense. It felt real in the way my visions feel real, like you could slip into them and live forever. Realer than real—that’s how Mom described her dreams sometimes, and that’s what this painting felt like too.

“Mom,” I said, “who did this?”

She seemed startled by me and even more so by the mural that had sprung up on our living room wall. Mom looked at her fingers, her clothes, all speckled with paint.

“Why,” she said, “I suppose I did.”

That tree loomed over us. There was something so familiar and strange about it, like maybe it had fallen out of an old memory that I didn’t remember having. I realized Mom was shaking.