I nod but I’m still sulking. I’ve done my research. I know the appropriate labels. I know bipolar and schizoaffective. I know personality disordered and psychotic and paranoid. What I don’t know is how to define the experience I just had—any of the experiences I’ve had since getting here. Losing Moony has meant losing practical, orderly, reliable Cat. This version of me is scared of boogey men in face paint and being inside a building when it goes poof. This version of me is unrecognizable. I don’t know her, don’t trust her.

This is not the Cat I wanted Daniel to see.

“What do you think it means?” Daniel is pensive, his face drawn in toward the center. “I mean, now that you know what you do about that combination of tarot cards. What do you think your grandmother was trying to say?”

I take a moment to just breathe and shift my focus from what I can’t explain to what I can. That Halloween card was posted several months before my mother’s last visit when I was thirteen—the one where I told her not to come back because seeing what the medication was doing to her was almost harder than seeing what the disorder was doing to her. Moony sent it in the middle of my mother’s last manic episode. “I think she was trying to warn my mom.”

“Of what?”

Perhaps of men who drink peppermint schnapps. Perhaps of little boys who cliff dive and women who wear the sky. Of coming here. Of falling up.

“I guess of her lifestyle. I mean, she’s always taken risks, lived fast. She didn’t go to college. Didn’t get a regular job. Didn’t marry or settle down. She’s always been…I don’t know, her. I think there is the bipolar disorder, and then I think there is the way she lives and the choices she makes that can only aggravate the disorder. But then, that’s where it all gets confusing. Is she making those choices? Or is bipolar disorder making them for her? I think Moony knew my mom was really sick and needed help, and that if she didn’t get it, if she didn’t change her course, something terrible might happen.”

“I understand what you’re saying. It’s just, why would your grandmother need tarot cards to say that?” Daniel glances at me with soft eyes.

“I don’t know. Maybe she was doing something different, something more than before. Maybe she knew my mother wouldn’t listen to her, but…”

“She’d listen to the cards,” Daniel finishes for me.