In the house, my mother was pacing. She had lit candles everywhere, tea lights in jars and pillar candles and tapers. The house was hot and smelled like a bunch of different things, sandalwood and apple, vanilla and trash.

The power was still out. And the water. I had gone to Bear’s and had done nothing but take care of myself.

“Shannon,” my mother breathed when I came in. “Where have you been?”

It was late. But not later than when I came home from sitting in the car with Baby Jane. If I came home at all.

She got close to my face and narrowed her eyes. “Huh,” she exclaimed. “You smell like sex.”

“I smell like beer,” I said. “And clean clothes. Don’t mistake it. Where’s Bird?” I asked.

“She’s asleep,” my mother said. Her hair was a mess, like she’d taken it up and down twenty times while she paced.

I looked in the bedroom, and there she was, curled like a bean on my mother’s bed, her arms and legs together, her face round and cool beneath that fiery hair. It was coming to an end. I could feel it. We couldn’t sustain it any longer. It was like sneaking in a kitten and not telling your landlord, and then having that kitten grow up to be a full-grown lion.

Or a girl.

She begged me to call the power company.

“It’s midnight, Mom,” I said. “They’re not going to do anything about it now.”

“It’s an emergency,” she said.

“Only to you,” I said.

She nodded at me, cold. “Well, I’m glad you have someplace to go,” she said. She left me with an open phone book, the number for power outages circled in wobbly, hard-pressed ink.

Everything smelled sour. Someone must have opened the fridge. I wanted to throw the whole thing out.

Or burn it, I thought, and for the first time, I actually got it, the instinct to burn and run, start over. The clean sweep of a raging fire, everything reverted to ash. I just would never do it with them inside.

The line at the power company was automated, so I spoke the address, which was barely an address at all—Hidden Drive, Space 17— and the computer voice pretended to look up the file, complete with fake papery sounds.

“Report an outage,” I said into the phone.

“Fucking get over yourself,” my mother said to me.

“I’m sorry,” the computer voice said, “I didn’t quite get that.”

“Fucking hot shit,” my mother said.

“Report an outage,” I said louder.

I watched as Birdie walked out of the bedroom, with her pudgy bare legs and little brown feet. She rubbed her eye and sniffled.

“Go back to bed,” my mother said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Birdie looked at me.

I said the address again into the phone.

Birdie’s eyes got wider and she looked at our mother.

“It’s okay,” I said to her, covering the receiver. But she waited for my mother to pick her up and carry her back to the bed, to lie with her and soothe her until she fell asleep.