Later, when the neighbors discussed what had happened, exactly, to Leonora, they couldn’t decide. The story of her family was long and sad—a great-grandfather had lived three decades in an asylum; an aunt had killed herself—and the story had not reached its conclusion: here was Leonora’s chapter. She missed her children, who were growing up. She had been, from a distance, a bonny mother, thin, patient, and now she thickened, and coarsened, and you could hear her shriek from all the windows of the house. She had gone mad, or was going.

The doctors prescribed her pills, which she refused to take.

She still tried to eat her children, but they were afraid of her. So she had to sneak. The weight of her as she sat on the edge of their beds in the middle of the night was raptorial: ominous yet indistinct. At any moment, the children thought, she might spread her arms and pull them from the sheets through the ceiling and into the sky, the better to harm them elsewhere. The children took to sleeping in the same bed. Rosa, Marco, Dolly. Too old to sleep together, but they had to. They chose a different bed every night, and lay quietly, as they heard her go from pillow to pillow, the unfurling flump of the sheets like the wings they thought they could see on her back.

“Come back to bed,” said Poor Alan from the hallway in a terrified voice. “Come listen to the radio and fall asleep.” The top of his head was bald. The children could see the bathroom light pool in a little dent in his scalp, just below his summit.

The children had radios in their rooms. He snapped one on, to the classical station, to calm them down. “You never need be lonely with a radio!” he always said, but they knew that wasn’t so. A radio station was another way grown-ups could talk to you without ever having to listen.

It was Rosa who told Poor Alan that they had to go. She was fifteen. “We’re leaving,” she told him. “You can come if you want to. But Marco and Dolly and I are going.” Then, seeing his face, “We’d like you to come.”

“She needs help,” he said.

“She won’t get it.”

He nodded. “How will we manage?”

“We’re not managing now,” said Rosa. “In a year I’ll get my license. I’ll drive the little kids to school.” The little kids! She was only two years older than Marco, who was three years older than Dolly.

“What will happen to your mother?” said Poor Alan, wringing his hands.

“Whatever it is, it’s already happening,” said Rosa. “I can’t watch anymore.”

“She’s a wonderful mother. You must remember that.”

“I don’t,” said Rosa.