I think about the little boy with the too-large dog and the man who sounds so old and looks so young, and the woman with galaxies for eyes, the magician’s twisted face, the biker lady’s moving tattoos. The smell of peppermint. The feeling of falling. The vanishing store. There’s something unusual about all of them. And yet, they’re easy to explain away.

“Could just be imagination,” I say at last, exhausted from trying to make heads or tails of it.

“Could be,” she agrees. “But it ain’t.”

I frown. How does she know that?

“You don’t strike me as the imaginative type,” she supplies without being asked. I realize Mawmaw Barb can read me, with or without her glasses, better than most people can read a book.

“Sometimes my mom sees things. She has to take medicine. It’s an illness. I’m the right age for symptoms. I’ve wondered if—”

Mawmaw Barb cuts me off. “You ain’t sick, honey. Now that other one he brought home before you, she was sick. Crazy like a half-starved fox in an unguarded henhouse. That’s a sickness of the will. Spreads its damage from one generation to the next like a vine creeping underground. What your momma’s got is a sickness of the heart. And that’s something else. It invades the mind, makes her do and say things you might never understand, but it ain’t catching.”

I want to ask how she knows all this, what makes her so sure, but I don’t. Because something in me laps at the pool of her simple wisdom. There is comfort in her words, whether I believe them down deep or not. And I realize comfort is something hard to come by in my world these days, and something I desperately need.

“I’ve seen a couple of them near the cathedral. I wondered if maybe they’re apparitions.” I don’t mention that one was in a dream of the cathedral, the Quarter maze ending in white mist and cold flame.

“Describe one,” Mawmaw demands.

I look at Daniel, and he nods as if to encourage me. The first that comes to mind is the woman from my dream. “She’s dressed all in blue and lit up from inside.”

“Go on.”

“Her voice comes at you from all directions. And her eyes are full of stars.” I swallow, a little embarrassed to say this last part. “She frightens me in a way I’ve never felt before.”

Mawmaw Barb pitches her chin down and stares out over the rim of her readers at me with arched brows. Her silver earrings swing on either side of her heart-shaped face. “That sound like the blessed mother to you?”

It feels foolishly obvious the way she puts it. “No, ma’am.”

“When did you see one of these visitors for the first time?”

“The night my grandmother passed.” The skeletons…Death.