Dr. Angela doesn’t know about the scandal at Our Lady. She doesn’t know about the baby or Father Terry. I could tell her, but I won’t. Some stories are meant to be told, and others are meant to be carried. My mother’s story is part of mine now, and there are parts of each for the telling, and parts of each that belong to only us. I know Dr. Angela would disagree, that she believes getting to the root of my mother’s trauma is important to treating her illness. But I realize now that I cannot follow the thread of my mother’s pain to her past in an attempt to unravel the grip her illness has on her. I can’t pull the bad threads out, the ones with knots and snags, without tearing apart the whole weave. Her history, her suffering, and her disorder are all a part of her. They live in her now, for better or for worse, just as mine live in me.

EPILOGUE

IT’S A WARM DAY ON CHARTRES STREET, AND MY FEET make a tap tap tap rhythm against the sidewalk. I watch the rounded toes of my flats pass green iron poles and dark wads of gum, white-washed walls and stacks of red brick on my way from meeting with Brittni for yet another round of retail therapy—her prescription for everything that ails you. I am part of the larger beat now, one of a million arrangements all laid down as a single track.

Which is why I almost step on it when it comes into view. But I manage to stop just in time.

Squatting down, I can’t believe my eyes. I make a shield around it with my body, unsure if I am ready to pick it up. How small it looks against the pavement compared to how large it has loomed in my mind. I reach down with trembling fingers and catch the corner with my nail, lifting it from the street.

I hold the Moon card up to study it. There is a river of blue-brown water, and a wolf howling on each side of its bank—one black, one white. Above them hangs a disk and sickle moon, full and yellow on one side, wan and white on the other. She looks down on the river with a closed face, with downcast eyes and a curtain of star-bright hair. And her profile is like my mother’s in the picture with my sister.

When I stand up, I look into a large, plate-glass window with a familiar moon decal. For a second, I don’t trust what I am seeing. But then, the black-and-white awning fits so quaintly with the rows of historic buildings, the painted shutters, the old-fashioned streetlamps. There is a balcony this time, complete with a black-iron railing and hanging baskets of ferns.