“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe not intentionally. What do you think?”

“Jesus,” I said. I felt more tired than I’d been in my whole life. “I can’t deal with this right now.”

He looked at me over the Formica table. Studied me for a moment, then nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”

He slid out of the booth. I unpeeled the tape from my thighs and stood. I fell asleep on the ten-minute drive to my place and woke with him leaning over me, unbuckling my seat belt.

“Come on, Charlotte, you’re home,” he said.

I leaned into him as he walked me up the stairs. My head fit nicely under the curve of his collarbone. I searched for the key.

“Charlotte,” he said, “don’t forget to lock the door.”

“Okay.”

He waited for me to go in.

“Detective?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re nice to me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Go get some sleep.”

I lay on the bed while the sun came up. Before I fell asleep I remembered this lamp we’d had, me and my mom. The base was thick frosted glass with a mountain scene painted on the inside. You could put a separate bulb inside the base to make the picture glow. I used to study that glowing landscape and imagine us there in the mountains, inside the lamp, and she would be healthy and strong, no one would be mad at us, and we would be together.

Things weren’t always easy with my mom. She had been ill as long as I could remember, and the doctors never knew what was wrong. She mostly sat in her special chair, watching television or staring out the window, oblivious to her surroundings. That was fine. I took care of us. But when her pain went into remission she quit taking her pills. I would come home from school to a dark TV and an empty chair, and music playing. The apartment had an awake feeling and the sharp smell of cleaning products. She would call out from the other room, where she was scrubbing the bathroom or dusting her shelves full of knickknacks. She would say she was quitting the medicine, that she didn’t need it anymore, and now she’d be a real mom and get a job, and we would eat at restaurants. I always tried to believe her. She looked so pretty and alive.

My mother hated the drugs, but she didn’t know how to be sober. How could she? She’d never had a chance to learn. Without the meds, she’d go into withdrawal, and try to handle it with gin. She was a bad drunk, chaotic, angry. Her moods shifted drastically. Sometimes I would find her seething, pacing our apartment, pulling dishes off the shelves and shattering them. She often ended up cut and bloody.

One day the lamp disappeared. I came home from school and it was gone. I assumed it got broken. I knew better than to ask her. She was back on the meds, docile and clearly in pain. There was no point. It would only make her feel bad.