The dark comes, or the closest you get to dark in the city. I don’t turn on the lamp by my bed. I watch the lights from the parking lot make yellow squares across the ceiling. When the nurse comes in she shocks me awake in a blaze of white neon. She gives me water, and the name of the hospital is printed on the plastic cup she puts to my lips. I’m not so good with names, and I’m dazed with sleep and painkillers, so it takes me a moment, before I realize—this is her hospital. Mommy worked here, was fired from here for the things she did to the children. It is one of those strange circles in time. But I can’t tell whether I’m at the beginning or the end. The nurse goes, leaving me in the dark again. It comes to me, for the first time, perhaps, that my mother is really dead.

“It turns out you can’t kill me,” I say to Lauren. “And I can’t kill you. So we have to find another way of doing things.”

I feel for her, try to take her hand. But she’s not there. She’s sleeping, or shutting me out, or maybe just quiet. There’s no way to tell whether she hears me or not.

I think about the Chihuahua lady. I hope she had a good vacation with her young boyfriend. I hope she’s relaxing in her nice yellow house with the green trim.

I turn the cup in my hand. The name of the hospital revolves. Mommy’s place. But she isn’t here. She is at home, waiting for me in the cupboard under the sink.

Something is teasing, tugging at my brain. Something about the Chihuahua lady and her trip to Mexico. I shake my head. That is not right. The Chihuahua lady went on a cruise, not to Mexico. She was in Mexico the first time. The familiar tug in my mind, of having forgotten something. But it is gone.

The orange-haired man appears as I am being discharged. I have to look twice to check, but yes, it is him. I am very surprised and weirdly shy. We told him so much, the other night. I feel sort of naked.

“I thought you might need a ride,” he says.

I smell the forest as we approach. It is such a relief to see my street, the dented sign, trees crowding the horizon.

But I don’t want the man to see my sad house; the plywood over the windows, the dusty dark rooms where I live alone with all my others. I want him to go. Instead he helps me out of the car and indoors. He does it quickly and efficiently, not asking me to acknowledge it.