“I was home. Happened to look out the window, see Mrs. Anderson running over here fast as she can. I meet her on the porch and she’s saying come quick, something’s not right with Dolores. So I go running after her. I was younger then, in better shape—this was more than twenty years ago, what I’m telling you about—and was able to keep up with her, and even before I got to the house I could hear the screaming. Never heard a sound like that come out of my Dolores.”

Just tell me what happened.

“I get in the house, and she’s just standing there at the base of the stairs. Rigid, like she’s at attention. Arms at her side, and she’s got her mouth open and she’s wailing. I’m standing right in front of her, sayin’ her name, saying, ‘Dolores, it’s me, it’s Daniel,’ and it’s like she’s looking right through me, like I’m not even there. They called an ambulance, and the paramedics, they gave her something to calm her down and took her to the hospital, and the doctors, they say it was whatcha call some kind of a psychotic break and a bunch of other mumbo-jumbo, but the bottom line is I don’t think they know what the hell happened.”

Annie said nothing.

Daniel sighed. “A switch got flipped, and one moment she was fine and the next everything in her head went kablooey.” He shook his head slowly. “Like there’d been this little time bomb in her noggin waiting to go off for years, and it just decided to do it while she was over here vacuuming and dusting. Like a heart attack, you know, but in her head, but not a stroke or one of those TIAs, either? If it hadn’t happened there, I guess it would have happened someplace else. One doctor said, it was like if you opened a door and someone jumped out to surprise you. Like if that moment of shock never went away.”

Annie thought about that. “Like if something scared her?”

Daniel shrugged. “Like if something maybe scared her in her mind. If that makes any sense. Anyway, because Dolores associates this place, and anyone living here, with her, whatever you call it, condition, she keeps her distance.”

“Of course.” Delicately, Annie asked, “How long did it take for her to recover?”

Daniel chuckled darkly. “Love to let you know when that day comes.”

“All this time?”

“Well, it’s not like she’s been screaming for twenty years. It’s more like a part of her got turned off. She takes her meds, and she doesn’t talk much, and she watches The Price Is Right every day, and she likes to sit on the porch with a book that she won’t read, and I don’t really know how much of her is really there, but sometimes life throws you a curveball and you have to deal with it. I love my Dolores, and that’s all she wrote.”