“Don’t touch my things!” she screams as if she’s on fire and I am blocking the hose.

“Hey, hey now.” Gary steps in, going to her side. “Cat didn’t mean any harm.”

I want to tell him to save his breath. Don’t be a hero, Gary. Because this is not Mary we’re dealing with. There is Mary—loud, proud, outlandish Mary. And then there are the fragments that take over when her illness is in overdrive. They cycle through quickly, coming on too strong, making no sense, like pure emotion has just been given the keys to a BMW. Go ahead, Rage, take the wheel. Pain, Lust, Fear—drive your hearts out. The road is yours.

I should have seen it coming in the boxes. The burst of aimless energy. The expression on her face when she turned my phone over, like flashes of light coming on and going out. She is like the cloak of the veiled woman and the dive of the boy fool. Her head is full of stars. She is always falling up.

This, I realize with the clarity of a capsized iceberg, is the original trigger, the inciting incident, the trauma that set it all in motion. It is Father Terry. And it is Moony. And it is the dead baby. And it is me. And before all of these, it is the cards and a heritage of mental instability that stretches back generations. The salt in our blood.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me that Moony’s maiden name was Rush?”

She glares at me, her eyes darker than normal, as if her pupils have swallowed the irises. “It’s my name now. One small thing I could take from her after all she took from me.”

But it’s also mine. This story that is us, the one I am piecing together, that I hate, that begins somewhere with Madora Charles and winds through Moony and my mother like unspooled yarn—circling around Harold and Father Terry and the baby with no name and no breath and the man with the peppermint schnapps and now curling itself around my heart—it is also my story. And it is also my name.

“I thought you changed it to move farther from her, from us, but you did it to get closer.” I say quietly.

Mary concentrates on her beer label. Hard. She doesn’t confirm or deny my statement.

“I thought you were a daddy’s girl,” I say more to myself than her.

She looks up at me. “He loved me.”

A piece of my heart breaks for her, for the little-girl way she says it. For the words hiding behind these. My grandfather, Harold, he loved her, but Moony didn’t.