Sometimes the LORD comes walking through the kitchen wall or floating up the stairs toward the roof light on the landing. He turns to look down at me with his round fish eyes, or the mirrored gaze of a fly. He’s a fragment of Ted’s imagination. Mommy talked so much about the ankou that the ankou came. Mommy’s god found his way from her faraway village in Brittany, through Ted, into Olivia’s world. That’s how gods travel, through minds.

The LORD never made Olivia help Ted or Lauren. She just wanted to be kind. She was a nice cat. I am nice, but I am other things too.

There is no cord anymore, binding me to Ted. I kind of miss it, now it’s gone. He and I are bound to one another and the cord was a reflection of that. It was honest and showed how things truly are. I find that the upper world holds few such helpful signs. It is a cold bleak place. Our big fleshy body lumbers through it, with us inside like badly nested Russian dolls. Disgusting, in my opinion.

However, we can all be together upstairs, now—Ted, Lauren and me, and some of the others whose names I don’t know yet. They are just beginning to come up into the light. We can talk or fight or whatever just as well as we can downstairs in my place. Sometimes I forget to go back down for days at a time. So I guess in some ways the upstairs is now my home too.

TED

The path winds up into the fall day. The air has mushrooms and red leaves in it. The trees are thin-fingered against the sky. Rob is warm at my side, hair escaping from his hat like tufts of flame. It has been three months since that morning in the forest, but it could be a lifetime ago.

The stories all fit inside each other. They echo through. It started with her, Little Girl With Popsicle. And she deserves a witness, so that’s why we’re here.

It is only a quarter-mile or so from the parking lot to the water, but it takes us a while. I shuffle rather than walk, mindful of my healing wound. You can really damage yourself, if you can’t feel pain. “Put your scarf on,” I tell Rob. I wanted a friend to look after us. The weird thing is, now that I have one, all I want to do is to look after him.

The trees open out and we are at the water’s edge. It is cool today; the sand looks dirty and dull under the gray sky. There are some hikers, some dogs. Not many. The lake gleams, black glass. The water is too still, like a painting or a trick. It’s smaller than I remember. But of course it’s me who’s changed.