Now, the Porsche slid into the driveway, and Josie gritted her teeth. She was drifting through a series of movies, each more stylized than the next. She had tumbled from the weepy family drama of the airport to the Gothic styling of Montecito. Her father keyed in the security code, and the gate lurched open. They drove slowly up the driveway until the house appeared, huge and ominous. Illuminated by the security lights, it looked like some filmmaker’s version of a Victorian mental ward. Standing beneath it, all twenty-one rooms and two staircases towering above her, she felt that if she walked through the door there was a very good chance she might never walk out again.

“Your Aunt Steffi’s been staying with me,” her father said. “I think she set you up in the blue room.”

Both her aunt and her mother had moved from Ohio to Los Angeles for college, roomed together, and then married within a year of each other. When Josie’s father had quadrupled his income in under a year, he had tried to get Aunt Steffi’s husband interested in investing, but he was overly cautious, and then resentful when the windfall came. Aunt Steffi insisted it wasn’t the money, but the disintegration of the marriage seemed to coincide, and soon Josie’s father had found Aunt Steffi a three-bedroom bungalow in Summerland, close enough for the cousins to bike back and forth.

Josie’s father carried her suitcase to the room and hugged her good night.

“I’m glad you’re here, baby,” he said.

She nodded. She knew he was longing for something from her, any bit of emotion that he could snatch up and cling to as proof that her mother’s death affected her, proof that the family he intermittently tried to squeeze together had really existed, but she only felt drained.

“I’m exhausted,” she said.

He nodded and kissed her forehead. She waited until she couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore and then closed the door. It was late, and although she was tired, her mind was spinning thoughts, and she felt banged around in her own head.

She was glad not to be in her childhood room and wondered if her aunt had purposely done this. It would be just like Aunt Steffi to read her with such pinpoint accuracy, and Josie felt suddenly grateful, and pained that she had not returned any of her aunt’s recent e-mails. When she was young, she had loved her aunt with such intensity that once she had punched her cousin Natalie in the mouth when Natalie simply asserted that Josie had her own mother. Her mother and her aunt were markedly similar, and yet the quality she loved so deeply in her aunt, the ability to anticipate what Josie would do and think, was exactly what made Josie crack plates against dinner tables and kick holes in doors when it came to her mother.