“Help us,” I manage to squeeze out. “Please,” I whisper.

Why are the paramedics taking so long? How many minutes has it been? I try to shift her against me, to cradle her between my knees, but she’s so heavy, as if she’s sinking into the floor. I look at her face. Brush her neck. She is so still that, for a moment, I think she is already gone. My heart convulses inside my ribs. I choke out a garbled sob.

“Tell me what it’s like,” he insists.

I don’t know what he means. “Can’t you do something?”

But he just repeats his request. “Tell me what it’s like, this love you feel. Right now. In this moment.”

I look down at her face, and all the longing, all the anger and pain, all the hurt feelings and wrong words and lost time wash over me in a wave of agony that is nothing short of exquisite. I narrow my eyes. “Like fire under the skin.”

“Yesss…” I hear him say, and then a flash lights up the sanctuary like lightning loosed from a bottle.

I cross an arm over my eyes and squint into the blinding specter. The woman in her blue veil made of starlight—the High Priestess—is standing where only moments ago was the man with the peppermint schnapps. When she lifts her veil this time, her face is painted white, with teeth marked over her lips and black-red eye sockets burning with cold flames.

“No,” I beg as she leans down over us. “Please, just a little more time.”

But she doesn’t slow her descent. With benevolent grace, she places her lips to my mother’s forehead, just between the eyes.

The light in the room goes out all at once, and the dark feels thick like smoke and closer than my own skin.

We are alone. There is no woman made of bones and stardust, no man with a collar of Mardi Gras beads. No devils or angels to intervene. There is my quaking breath in too much space. And the stillness on my mother’s face. And the host of unseeing eyes overhead. And the feeling, once again, of being violently, horribly alive.

I look up to the tabernacle, to the figure in red perched above us who gazes down as I clutch my mother’s body. Her face is as calm as the surface of an unbroken lake. For a second, I think I see Aimee’s smile in hers, in the fair hair and pink-plaster skin. And then it’s gone. Her arms wrap around a gigantic silver anchor. It is the last thing I see before the paramedics come crashing through the doors.

XXXV.