She doesn’t know what she’ll do about the night, about getting back to her mom’s. Whether her mom will even let her stay. She decides that when the bus gets into the depot, she’ll go to the old parking garage at the Taj Mahal. Whenever she needed to be alone she would slip past the broken pieces of plywood at the entrance, the spray paint warning Keep Out, walk up the sloping ramps until she was at the top. She liked to press herself into the concrete barrier and look out over the city. An ocean view to the east, the hospital to the west, the ambulances pulling in and out all day long. She’d watch EMTs hustle in with their gurneys. From that height, the human drama was shrunk to the size of a diorama like the ones her mother’s students built out of shoeboxes and filled with miniature cars and trees. Easy to watch and think she was not a part of it all.

Her mood gets more resigned, grimmer, as the bus speeds down the Black Horse Pike. Past the Ramada Inn, the Sunset, and all of the other little aqua and pink and coral stucco motels just rotting into the side of the road. She tastes the scatological stink of the marsh, which she’s learned is the sulfurous smell of the mud exposed at low tide. Other people cover their noses with their hands or their shirts. She starts to feel paranoid—that the smell is coming from her, that everyone knows it. Without the drugs to cover it up, the thing that makes her wrong inside is seeping out, filling the air like poison. No, she thinks. Paranoia: the brochures warned about that. It’s a symptom, real but not.

But even after she gets off the bus, she feels the smell of the marsh on her, in her. She wants to shower. Drink a glass of water so cold she can feel the chill sliding down her throat. She uses the pay phone at the bus terminal—before she can decide anything about how and where she’ll spend the night, she needs to know about all the nights after that. This time the phone rings twice before her mother answers, the brisk hello she reserves for strangers.

The word feels unpracticed, underused, and it takes her a second to say it. She can feel the pressure of all the questions she wants to ask. Do you still love me? Do you know that I really am sorry, so sorry? Will you tell me all of the bad dreams weren’t real?

It’s another question, and an answer, at once.

“Mom?”

LILY