“Look what you’ve done to me, Adam—just see what you’ve done,” Jasmine said. She knelt, beshitted, in my bed.

“Don’t you be goin’ up them attic stairs, Mrs. Brewster,” I heard Dottie saying. “I’m the fix-it person in this house, and this sure as shit sounds like a situation in need of fixin’ to me.”

“This is not the woman I am, Adam—this is entirely your doing,” Jasmine was telling me.

I foresaw what would become the theme of her unceasing phone calls. Jasmine would never completely recover her sense of herself. When a woman of a certain age—and, as Nana had noted, a presumed station in life—shits in bed, and all over herself, this can only be someone else’s doing.

When I heard the familiar creak on the attic stairs, I saw Jasmine flinch. She sprang to her feet, covered with shit, teetering on my bed in anticipation of the next ghostly visitation. All I had time to say was, “Don’t worry—it’s not a ghost.”

It’s not my fault I never knew how Dottie readied herself for bed. Her face cream, thickly applied, was the lifeless color of the moon—it had a wet, otherworldly shine. The halo that encircled Dottie’s face, like a lampshade, was intended (she later told me) to prevent her from rolling over and smearing her face cream on her pillow. What Dottie did to herself, nightly, meant that she slept unmoving on her back. Her halo, her thickly creamed face, and the stark severity of her black bathrobe gave Dottie the appearance of the Angel of Death.

Upon my graduation from Exeter, Elliot Barlow had given me a book of Ingmar Bergman’s screenplays—The Seventh Seal among them, my favorite Bergman film. That was the first screenplay I read. I don’t believe I’ve read a better one. When I saw Dottie step into the path of light, leading from my open bathroom door to the beshitted Jasmine standing on my bed, I thought Dottie was Death—a frightening female version of the moon-faced Bengt Ekerot, the black-cowled, medieval monk who personifies Death in The Seventh Seal. Dottie told me later that I whimpered when I saw her.

If Jasmine could have evacuated more, I’m sure she would have, but Jasmine gave up. Resigned to her fate, she curled into a fetal position in the bed and lay trembling in her terrible waste, waiting for Death—with a Down East accent—to finish her off.

“Holy shit—was it the casserole?” Dottie asked me.

“It was Granddaddy’s ghost, near the end—he was wearing just the diaper,” I told her.