But this was something else. This was someone else.

She awoke looking just like her sixteen-year-old self—the same straight black hair, the same round face and pale skin. But she wasn’t really Ellie. Not anymore.

Someone else looked out through her owlish blue eyes.

Perhaps I should have suspected things weren’t quite right when her burns started to heal, but I was too happy to imagine any sort of downside. I mean, third-degree burns aren’t supposed to heal. They run the full thickness of the skin and beyond, down to the fatty layer and sometimes through that and into the underlying muscle. They require tissue grafts to fill in and skin grafts to close.

But Ellie’s burns started filling in by themselves as fresh new skin—skin, not scar tissue—slowly irised in from the periphery. It bothered the doctors because they couldn’t explain it, but I was ecstatic. My Ellie wouldn’t be horribly scarred for life.

I’d been with her every day. I’d even brought Blanky—yes, that’s what she still called the ratty old blanket she’d kept since childhood and slept with every night, even as a teen—and I kept it by her side.

And then in early May she came to. Like someone awakening from a nap, she opened her eyes and said, “I want to go home.”

No disorientation, no asking what had happened. It seemed as if she’d been aware all along.

As I looked at her I felt my initial burst of joy wither in the cold certainty that Ellie wasn’t back. Not really. Not my Ellie.

As I was hustled out of the unit by the nurses flocking around her, I heard her voice rise about the hubbub: “Mother? Mother, did you hear me? I want to go home!”

Ellie has never called me “Mother.” Never.

I stood in the doorway, staring back at my younger daughter, and thinking this has to be the strangest moment of my life. But I was wrong. So, so wrong. Things hadn’t begun to get strange.

Shaken and sweaty, I retreated to the waiting room and relived that week in December, looking for a clue as to when things had started to go wrong.

2

Bess had begged us to spend Christmas week in the city.

“It’s the best time to be in New York,” she’d said.

“The city’s beautiful,” she’d said.

“You’ll love it,” she’d said.

Why, oh, why, did I listen?

Bess was a second-year student at NYU. She’d always dreamed of attending college in Greenwich Village, though how a girl from rural Missouri got that idea into her head I’ll never know. Maybe it came from devouring the Beat poets like Ginsberg and Corso. Maybe from incessantly playing Dylan’s early albums. She knew well that the Village of the Beat Generation was long gone, but still she wanted to be there.

Ellie missed her older sister and loved New York almost as much as Bess, but for different reasons. The Museum of Natural History was like Mecca to her, and a trip to NYC her Hajj.