She can’t hold the tears back any longer. She lets them fall down her cheeks onto the fabric of the dress, the light-blue fabric dotted dark with each drop. It’s the kind of crying that has no force behind it because you’re too weighed down by grief.

She shakes her head. “How can she still be fucking with us even when she’s dead?”

Because she’s our mother, I reply. Her blood mixed and running through our veins, her influence blanketing across our consciousness, her twisted version of love a stake right through our hearts. Only bloodletting, lobotomy, and a heart transplant can exorcise them out.

“And now here I am, talking to my dead sister like some kind of nutcase.” June roughly wipes the tears away. She pushes herself up off the floor, moving right through me. Once again I feel her as she goes, her warmth, her smell, her feelings—all of them at once.

Pushing the dress all the way off her body, she goes to the closet and hangs it up, then gets down on all fours in her bra and underwear to clean up the mess she’s made.

I watch her slowly crawl around half-naked, the bones of her spine rolling up and down as she moves, her face tearstained, her eyes red, painfully vulnerable and alone. My helplessness rips through me, the need to be there with her a choke hold. Can I die a second time from this kind of pain?

JUNE

I get up off the floor and leave the room, which now reeks of my mother’s face cream and perfume after the bottles broke when I wiped her dresser out. I actually made it worse in there; now my mother’s presence is inescapable.

Displays of temper like that are not my style, nor is dressing up like my mother to fool old ladies or seeing apparitions of my dead sister. I really am losing it. Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, I might be one day away from putting an ax through the door and saying, Here’s Juney.

I’m just pulling a sundress over my head when I hear a knock at the door. My heart jumps into my throat. It must be Ezra, coming to make up. “Coming,” I call out, as I quickly brush some powder across my face to hide the fact that I’ve been crying.

At the bottom of the stairs, the heart that was in my throat only seconds ago sinks all the way down into my gut—heavy with disappointment. It’s not Ezra standing there in the living room but Leslie Swann. She’s wearing a wide-brimmed straw sun hat pushed down over her gray curls, a dirty white tank top, and wild- print parachute pants.