Anneliese releases her hand from mine and claps. “What a wonderful idea! But I’m afraid Gabriella won’t be able to pay anything near what you deserve.”

I wave that off. “I’ll do it for free. I don’t need the money. Think of it as my way of paying you back for all you’ve done for me.” And she smiles at that, closemouthed, her face serene.

“You’re more than I could have ever hoped for.” And my insides shine with pleasure, her gratitude enfolding me in an invisible, glowing embrace.

20

October—December 1996

It’s the crying she can’t stand.

It’s nothing like Suzy’s. Plaintive tears Annie would bathe in if she could, soaking them up into her own taut skin. She read once, in ninth-grade biology, that larger, cannibalistic tiger salamanders will eat their non-cannibalistic cousins, feasting on the weaker breed. Sometimes, she looks at Suzy while she’s crying, her mouth widening into a wail, and wants to devour her whole, gently, no blood, no mangled flesh caught in her incisors. She’d simply swallow Suzy and place her where she belongs, inside her belly. It would be warm there. Suzy would have no reason to cry.

No, Mrs. Keller’s crying reminds Annie of a feral cat who used to come around when she was young, maybe five or six. Annie would sneak little bits of dinner to the cat, a scraggly thing with gray hair and set-apart yellow eyes. She wanted that cat to be her own, to come to bed with her, to rub its tickley whiskers against her face.

One night, the cat got into her family’s garbage, had swallowed some rotten meat. Annie was up all night hearing the yowls of pain, the aching, horrific sound of the animal dying, slowly, the noise reverberating through her little soul. She’d tiptoed outside to keep the cat company in its misery. Only to be scratched all across her arms, her face, angry red slashes that took weeks to fade. No good deed goes unpunished.

Now, when Annie hears Mrs. Keller’s moans, she hears that cat, come back to haunt her, and she wants nothing more than to strangle it, to shut them both up, to make her head stop reverberating with their conjoined howls. Night after night, sob after sob.

Phone call after phone call. Lung cancer. Stage four. She started chemo right away, her hair already falling in thin clumps onto the floor, the scent of vomit lingering by every toilet basin in the house.

And then Mrs. Keller wakes in the morning and acts as if that awful noise had never escaped her lips, her mouth grim, asking Annie why she looks so tired. What could possibly be so wrong that she’s forgotten to put the coffee on? To wake Suzy in time for school?