My convivial feelings toward the good doctor wash away in a wave of paranoia. I don’t understand what difference that makes. I’m suddenly overcome by the urge to hang up, so I do.

If I call the police like she said, what happens to me? I’m still under eighteen. I have no surviving relatives that I know of. The cops aren’t going to just take my information and walk away, leaving me alone. Mary may not be my first choice for a roommate, but I’ll take her over being a ward of the state any day.

I climb the stairs and lock myself inside our apartment, deciding against alerting the police. Surely, she’ll be back tomorrow. Gary said she’d done this before. “She always comes home,” he said. But he’s only known her a couple of years. He is forgetting that once, ten years ago, she didn’t come home after all.

XXXI.

I’M DREAMING OF MY OLD ROOM IN MOONY’S HOUSE when I first hear the laughter. It weaves itself into my dream. I am searching in the dark for something I’ve lost because none of my lights will come on. I pat the walls and bed; my hands slide over the mattress and brush against something cold. The kind of cold that only registers as the absence of heat where heat should be. I jerk my fingers back, knowing without seeing that it is Moony’s body. And then the laughter begins. It lodges itself in Moony’s throat. Horrified, I turn to run, but the door won’t open. I am trapped in my old room, in my old life, in the dark, and Moony’s corpse is laughing at me.

I sit up and gasp for air. After a few solid breaths, I let my shoulders slump. The apartment is calm. I switch on the lamp beside my sofa bed and rub at my eyes. Then I hear it again, and for a moment, I think the dream has not ended. But the fullness of my face in my hands reassures me I am awake. The laughter I’m hearing is distinctly feminine, but my mother’s room is still empty. I go to the front door and lean my ear against it. It is a tinkling sort of gaiety, like little bells ringing all at once.

I open the door and step outside onto the balcony. I blink as I look out over the courtyard. I hear her before I see her, the ring of her squeals. But soon enough her pink skin comes into focus, the long tangles of wet, white-blond hair. Water droplets fling upward through the night sky as she twirls and tromps in the bowl of our fountain with all the grace of a herd of buffalo.