“Here,” my mother is thrusting her water bottle at me. “You don’t look so good.” Her face is pinched, calculating. It’s a look I’m not used to on her.

I drink long and slow, letting the water course down my throat. “Thank you.”

“Want me to introduce you around? You met Clifford already, but Bev is just down at the corner, and Wendel does the caricatures right over there.”

“Later? I want to check out the cathedral before it closes for the day.”

“Oh.” Her eyes scale up the unforgiving, blanched facade, and I notice her stiffen.

“Come on,” I say. “It’ll be…well, not exactly fun, but at least interesting.”

She gives me a tight smile. I can see her deliberating, staring at the walls as if she can see through them, as if she is checking for something.

I stand and stretch out my hand. “Don’t you want to show me the real New Orleans?”

She takes my hand and follows me to the black iron fence and the heavy, waiting doors. But at the gate, she pulls back, rubbing her palm on her skirt. “You know what? Why don’t we go grab some dinner instead?”

I scowl at her, not in anger but confusion. She is visibly nervous, even if she works in the shadow of this building every week.

She takes another step back. “It just occurred to me, you haven’t even had a proper Cajun meal here yet. I know the perfect place off Royal Street. But there’s always a line. We better head over there if we want to get in. Okay?”

It’s as if she doesn’t want me going inside but can’t bring herself to say it. I see the inklings of paranoia at work and sigh. “Why don’t you close up and I can meet you out here after, and then we’ll do your dinner thing?”

She looks past me to the doors once more and finally nods. “Be quick.”

I watch her turn and practically run back to her stand.

I look back at the cathedral, gazing up to the cross atop the middle steeple, my neck craning. It could be in a theme park, I realize. A castle for some tortured princess trapped in one of those pointy towers, all sunken eyes and cellophane skin.

I look back at my mom one last time, curious. Mania makes people fearless and paranoid at the same time. They’ll take risks they never would otherwise and see demons in the most mundane of objects. But I can’t dislodge the feeling that something deeper than her bipolar disorder has her shaking like a cat in cold water.

Determined to find out what, I pull back the creaking wood door and step inside.

VII.