“We ‘talked,’” I said, making air quotes.

“So why didn’t you call or come out to the lake?”

“Shit, what time is it?”

“Eleven forty-five.”

“Shit, sorry, I got carried away,” I said, but I was more concerned about why my mom hadn’t come to bang on the door. It wasn’t like her. “Hang on.”

I looked down the hallway toward her room. The strip of air beneath her door seeped black. My stereo had blared way too loudly to go unnoticed all this time. Inching along the hallway, past the photos of Mom and me, my blood pressure spiked. I glanced back and saw Kori hugging my door, rocking it on its hinges as she watched me.

I drilled her with me eyes and mouthed, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Kori mouthed back, “I’m not worried.”

“Just go!”

I waited until Kori disappeared into my room, my hand poised on the knob. Then I pressed my ear to the door. No sound. My tongue swelled against the back of my throat, beating hard with my heart as I slipped into the darkness of Mom’s room. If Kori were shameless enough to steal up behind me and grab me like she had on the dam, I would have screamed like I had never screamed before. She would have had to peel me from the ceiling—that is how terrified I was in my mother’s dark room realizing she was gone.

I fumbled for the lamp switch just to be sure. The sudden brightness revealed nothing but her tidy furnishings.

Where was she? Why hadn’t she told me she was leaving?

The sound of water running in her bathroom swirled in my ears and I moved confidently toward its source. She only had a tub, no shower. There was no way she would be running a bath at that hour, and if I had a private bathroom, I’d probably have tried the same trick. That’s why I opened the door without hesitation and the water running straight down the bathtub drain didn’t surprise me at all. Instead, I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. How often had she abandoned me without so much as a word?

All these years, I had been one of only a few people to have seen the real person behind the carefully hung curtain my mom displayed to everyone else. And while I didn’t always understand her need for the deception, I’d been okay with it. I knew the real person. I’d seen the wizard. And that was the person I’d loved. But as I stood in her bathroom staring at the water as it ran down the drain, I realized that all this time there’d been another curtain, one I’d never known existed.