She decided, after thinking about it for a few minutes, that she wasn’t quite sick enough to throw up again, and turned on the shower. Cool water. After she’d been in the stream for about five minutes, she began to shiver, and sat down hard enough in the tub to make her tailbone twinge. She wrapped her arms around her knees and sat huddled in the rain.

Can’t stay out here all night, honey, her mother said, a distant whisper. A warm hand on her shoulder, on her cheek. Come inside. Come get warm.

“I’m hot.”

You’re going to catch your death, honey.

“Go away.” Velvet covered her face with wet cold hands and rocked back and forth, back and forth. Her heart sounded slow in her chest, like a clock running down. How many sleeping pills had she taken? Enough? Too many?

Honey—

Velvet reached out and batted the water off. It was too hard to get up again and dry off. She pulled a towel down from the rack and wrapped it tight around herself, rested her head on the hard cold lip of the tub, and closed her eyes.

Burt Everard Marshall was standing in her bath-room, fire dripping off of his hands like water, face melting like warm candle wax. His eyes were her mother’s soft kind eyes.

Dying is easy, he whispered, or she thought he did. She came upright with a gasp and clawed her way out of the tub, knelt next to the toilet again, and found more booze and pills to heave. The bathroom rug was a better place to lie, soft and warm. She closed her eyes again and this time Burt was right there, lying right next to her, warm as a campfire.

Jesus, she couldn’t even die comfortable. She got to her hands and knees and crawled, determined to find someplace not haunted. Her bed was all the way across the room, miles away, and the carpet kept rippling and moving, and now the bed was uphill. She hugged the rug.

“I’m not going to die,” she told Burt, when he appeared in the bathroom doorway to watch her. “See? I’m okay.”

Hard to tell if he nodded or not. When she closed her eyes again, she only saw darkness.

The phone woke her out of a warm sweaty silence, and she squinted against the glare of noon. She was lying in a thick square of sunlight, still twisted in the damp towel. Her stomach twinged again, but only as a reminder, and since the room had leveled out during the night, she stood up and walked to the bed, picked up the phone before flopping spread-eagled on the wrinkled sheets.

“Speak,” she said. God, her mouth tasted terrible. She couldn’t remember why.

“Honey, it’s your mom. Are you all right?”