I let go of Morgaine’s hand and pulled at the blindfold, but it was so tight. Finally I hauled it down. I did not see Morgaine, only the crow.

The bird was there.

The bird flies into the mists.

This is what I remember.

And then I saw her ahead of me by a tree, and the bird was by the tree. There was sky above the mists, sunset sky like a strip of ribbon, but the wind was picking up, the mist expanding.

I heard Morgaine cry out.

Or perhaps it was the crow cawing. She looked up and the bird was there in the sky. I glanced back down at her.

“Come away from the cliff, Morgaine!” I yelled at her, I am sure of it. I told her only birds can fly, that she should come away. How she’d tricked me.

I ran through the woods with the branches tearing at my face. I was at the fire, my cheeks streaked with tears and blood. When I saw them, I stood hypnotized as they danced and howled at the full moon, which hung low over the meadow. I called to them but they were gathered around the fire, faces ageless in the flickering orange flames, swaying to the bongo drums, murmuring, the woodsmoke mingling with the mists. They thought I was part of the ritual. My father kept drumming on, smiling at me.

Finally, it was Wildflower who saw I was not singing but crying and pointing toward the water, toward the cliff. And she went running. Then Ocean put his drum down and ran after her. But it was already too late.

Years later, in Vancouver, the city where my mother was born, I was talking with my husband, who was at that point a psychology student. While it was rare for me to even mention my sister, I relentlessly interrogated my own memories. My husband always said I was not haunted by my memories — my memories were haunted by me, trying to understand what really happened that night. He said sleep deprivation was used as a form of torture — it distorts and reshapes memory. We never slept properly at The Mists, in the house or sleeping on mats in the meadow. We had no consistent bedtime or wake-up time. It was easy to think a dream was real, that the crow had perched on Morgaine’s shoulder croaking an ancient song.

“With the mists you couldn’t have known how close to the edge she was, Eve,” my husband repeated.

As an adult, I knew this. But when it happened I was only an eight-year-old child. And even at eight, our minds are not always able to form detailed memories. We have barely begun to encode memory at that time — what my husband calls “memory rehearsal.”

“Childhood amnesia is what causes many adults to have trouble recalling complex memories and events which occur before the age of ten,” he explained. “Especially with trauma.”

The adults at the fire were high, and they were drumming and singing and chanting — they paid no attention to us. This is the truth.