I ran up the stairs two at a time, drifting past the various portraits of naked women that lined the wall. I could feel the murderous mother behind me in the darkness, her brown eyes locked on my head. I stopped outside my parents’ bedroom door—their lights already out—and considered knocking. I could hear my father snoring on the other side of the door, so I continued to my room, holding myself at the elbows.

I crawled into bed and pulled the covers to my neck. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the drowned woman. Her sunken cheekbones and large brown eyes with clumped, wet eyelashes blinking slowly. Staring. Silent.

The longer I lay awake, the more sorry I felt for her. She was trapped. A victim, too, after all.

Chapter 31

After my mother escaped, she began spending time with twenty-year-olds. Annabelle and I went to stay with her in the city. She was living in her sister’s house, the one who had remarried after her first husband left her. Whenever they visited, my aunt’s new beau would hold my face in his calloused hands, pinch my cheeks, and stare at me a bit too long.

Father dropped us at the end of the cul-de-sac, avoiding a run-in with my mother. The snow had stopped earlier that morning but a decent amount had accumulated, salted and browned from vehicle excretion and city pollutants. Annabelle and I lugged our bags down the road through the slush. My mother was perched on the concrete step, wearing nothing but a knee-length ice-blue blouse, smoking a long cigarette. “My darlings,” she called, waving her free hand.

She was eager for us to meet her new friends. Once we were settled, without much explanation, she took us to a gathering in a poorly lit basement apartment. There was weed paraphernalia everywhere: Bob Marley and Snoop Dogg posters hung on the walls, three bongs sat in the middle of the coffee table, which was also littered with pipes, busters, rolling papers, lighters, and baggies of dope. I could have sworn that even the walls were a muted green.

I sat on the dingy sofa and considered whether these weird almost-adults with their unruly haircuts, worn-out clothing, and unclipped fingernails were worse than the monsters I was afraid of as a child. At least with the monsters, my fear was never confirmed. These people were very real, chatting around me, laughing, messing up my life.

I watched my mother press her lips to the bong. The water gurgled as she held a lighter to the bowl and inhaled, then exhaled a cloud of smoke that seemed much too large to have fit in her lungs.

“Girls,” my mother announced as she stood. “Samuel and I are going to run to the store.” The guy she was with nodded at me, smiling in a way that was trying too hard to be empathetic. Like that moron had a fucking clue about anything.

“Okay,” I replied.