My eyes go to the door to my mother’s room, and I bite my lip. What are the statistics for developing mental illness if you have a bipolar parent? I can’t remember, but I’ve looked it up. They’re higher, that’s the part I remember. There are genetics to consider. I think of Gary in there now, picking up the pieces of their botched relationship as he has likely done a thousand times. The men my mom attracts aren’t typically the most stable themselves. For all I know, I have it coming to me from both sides of my family tree. And here I am, seventeen and just this side of genuine trauma. All the variables are in place. So the question becomes this: Am I mentally ill like my mother?

The only sliver of logic standing between me and a resounding yes is that I know from experience my mother would never, has never, asked herself this question. The very nature of her condition prevents it. The inflated confidence and euphoric high of mania make her believe she is hypersane and that everyone else should be medicated. Never her. Until you get her medicated enough for her to see the difference, and then her grasp on her condition is slippery at best. Because even without the bipolar disorder, there is something bullheaded and unrelenting in Mary, something that will not let her see anything other than what she wants. Moony would always hang her head after the latest disturbing phone call. “You can never win with her,” she would say. “Even when you’re right. She’s always been that way.”

So, if it’s not a hallucination, then a haunting? That might make more sense if it were Moony I was seeing. Then I might say she was watching over me. But I haven’t seen Moony since the morning I found her. And I still can’t face that I won’t ever again. The boy in the dream—the Fool boy in his yellow waistcoat with his winter wolf—he is something different than a ghost. And the man with the peppermint schnapps, with his splashes of devil red and his strange talk, he is something different than a dream.

There is a third option I haven’t considered. It is forming on the outskirts of my reason, like a word that perches on the tip of your tongue but refuses to be expressed.

Could they be a vision?

It’s happened before to children, to young women who trek across some mountainside for spring water only to be confronted with the Mother of God in her glory. I certainly don’t fit the description of a saint, living in the middle of New Orleans with my near-pagan mother and twenty-first-century education. But are all the stories that way? Can some visions be unholy?