Sometimes I was permitted to leave the property for the library or the convenience store. I read books on the brain. I read books on the reproductive system, searching for the things Blake told us. I was not surprised to find that none of it was true. At the library’s clean tables, I tried to remember how to play the piano. I placed my fingers on the tabletop and pressed imaginary keys. Whenever I saw coins on the sidewalk I picked them up, pushed them into the slot of the convenience store’s pay phone. I called my grandparents but no one answered. It just rang and rang. I wanted to call Hayley but I hadn’t ever memorized her number. Day after day, I climbed high up Blake’s hill. He had built a platform there, on the exposed roots of an ancient, upturned tree. I would wait with the opera glasses, and if I was lucky I’d find my ghost. Such a sad old woman. Such hollow eyes. But it comforted me to see her.

Lorna, I would whisper. Hello, I would say.

Some days, she held strange things in her hands. Some days, she had nothing. I thanked her for letting me see her. I said, If there is anything you need, just tell me. I wanted to ask for her help, too. To get me away from there. To deliver a message to my grandparents. I imagined her showing up at their front door, a nightgowned ghost framed by the potted ferns, holding a letter from me in her hand. They would read it and rush to my rescue.

Or, if not that much, I wanted my mother to see her so I wouldn’t be so alone.

Maybe, if she appeared to my mother, my mother would become herself again.

But she was dreaming and waking without me. No more slipping into our shared room in the early mornings. No more staying up after dark. No more secret smiles that warmed me until I was full of feeling and light.

Instead she was with Blake, always. He would bring her more gifts and she would, again, inexplicably, lose them. He made a big production out of each pair of earrings, describing how he persuaded the shop owner to sell him her most valuable things and how she’d regretted parting with them. “Too late now,” he’d say, pushing a new pair in. My mother always smiled, but we didn’t have a clean bathroom counter to store things. Didn’t have rubbing alcohol or cotton balls, and her left earlobe was red and tender, and each time he put them in I wondered if he could see how it hurt her.