“Baffroom,” Kelli announced, as I’d known she eventually would.

“Fill your boots,” I told her.

But Kelli didn’t budge. She just kept weaving and glancing up at me and I got a sinking feeling.

“Baffroom, Karie?”

Which meant she wanted company.

In these instances, Kelli basically just wanted someone to stand in the doorway and banter with her while she did her business. But tonight she was particularly talkative, like she’d just awoken from a thrilling dream. She kept pelting me with bad-guy-related questions, and even though I made my answers as soothing and soporific as I could, nothing seemed to slow her chatter. I was starting to despair of getting her settled down again. As I leaned against the doorframe, rubbing my eyes, it occurred to me to try and troubleshoot. Ever since Kelli started getting up at night, I realized, I’d been shrugging it off as just another Kelli thing — something she did without rhyme or reason, like rocking and whispering. But everything had a reason, no matter how invisible it might be to me. If something was keeping her up, why shouldn’t I be able to discern that something? Why hadn’t I even bothered to try before now?

“Why’re you so awake, Kelli?” I murmured.

“Bad guys,” said Kelli.

Perhaps, I thought, it was something in her diet. She’d been eating a lot of beef lately, due to all the barbecues with Trevor — maybe it was messing with her digestion.

“Your tummy ok?”

“Tummy,” said Kelli noncommittally, and yanked a too-large wad of toilet paper off the roll.

But then, thinking of the meals with Trevor, I remembered something else — the pop. Trevor had introduced No Name cola to the household around the same time he introduced rum, and he’d been handing over tumblerfuls of it to Kelli whenever she so much as inclined her head at the bottle. Now that Kelli had a taste for it, I’d started doing the same. Of course! The caffeine and sugar was what was keeping her up. And drinking all that pop was probably making her have to pee. Eureka.

That was when I heard it. Tink. Very, faint, almost whispery, but entirely recognizable as the noise of an ice cube nudging the side of a glass. Specifically, it was the sound that occurs after the glass is raised and is tipped toward a mouth for a sip to be taken. For a moment I thought perhaps my mind had done something nifty — instead of conjuring up a mental picture of a tumblerful of No Name cola, it had offered up an aural one instead. I felt, as you do at these times — at these times when something completely out of the ordinary is happening and your brain is struggling to provide an unalarming explanation — that maybe I had experienced some kind of psychological anomaly. Because, of course, I knew the brain didn’t normally do that — conjure aural as opposed to mental pictures. But the other thing I knew was that you didn’t just hear the sound of an ice cube tinking against the side of a glass when there was not someone nearby tipping a glass with an ice cube in it.