SHE DOESN’T COME HOME THAT NIGHT, AND I DON’T blame her. Her constant running suddenly makes sense to me. I think I would want to run also if I were her. I think I would want to feel my feet pumping beneath me, shredding ground, the world passing me by in a blur, the distance between who I am and who I am becoming growing wider with every step. But you can’t outrun the story that is you. I feel that truth stirring in the marrow of my bones. I feel it creeping beneath my skin. I feel it lodged, like an unreachable kernel between the teeth, in the cavities of my heart.

And I think that is the difference between my mother and me. The belief that she can outrun herself has driven her to the edges of her understanding more than once. The knowing that I can’t has held me firmly in the unforgiving grip of my truth.

I lie in my sofa bed, waiting for the click of the knob as it turns, for her to burst in laughing or crying or drinking. I wait for the bigness of her to return and push me out of this space, through the hairline cracks in the bricks, through holes in the mortar, beyond the reaches of the city. Mostly I wait to feel something. I finally got most of her boxes shoved back into her closet. I stacked her shopping bags next to her bed. More bullshit to fill the holes Moony left behind. I left behind.

I finger the newspaper article. I have read it a dozen times over trying to understand, trying to weave the broken threads flailing in my mind into something sensible. I stare at the picture of Madora Charles, willing her to speak. I stare until her eyes burn like pools of hot pitch and her lips curl into themselves and the circle of her face becomes dinner-plate smooth.

She never says a word.

I want to ask her, Was it you? Or was it the cards? Who pushed you over the edge, Madora Charles? Was it the Fool? Or the Devil? Or a mother who taught you that even the most mundane of human experiences, like using the bathroom, could be turned into an instrument of torture?

I flip through my deck and wonder, Which one of you is responsible?

When I land on the Hermit card, I linger. The beard. The light in the dark. The unwavering presence where there should be none.

I suddenly can’t stand the feeling of my bedsheets beneath me. The room is shrinking, or my breaths are growing. The maze of my thoughts needs room to spread out or my head might collapse on itself like a red giant, erupting like a supernova.