“I was dead for three days!” Sylvia cries out. She swings the wheel and pulls over, the tires spitting stones on the narrow grassy shoulder of the road as she brakes at the edge of the river. “How can you deny it? I was dead for three days under your house! The only thing I did wrong was to take too many sleeping pills!” She glares at her mother, who is trying not to blench. Aurelia’s eyes are glossy with tears; she is too frightened to cry.

“I was trying to help you,” Aurelia trembles. “We were all trying to help you. You were so hard on yourself.”

“Help me!” Sylvia says, shrill, disdainful. Her voice has grown rich, echoing; she feels it moving over a dark plane, blank and windswept. “You killed me. You’re the one who gave them permission to electrocute me. You told that quack doctor to give me the shocks.”

“No,” Aurelia says, quietly beginning to sob into her chest. “No. I was trying to help you. Everything I’ve ever done has been for you.”

“Help me?” Sylvia repeats, bitter, her voice caustic with mocking sarcasm. “You won’t even admit what happened. If you won’t admit the truth, how can that help me?”

Aurelia is slumping against the door, holding her purse over her chest, quietly crying. Sylvia’s hands are still on the steering wheel, watching her mother’s collapse. She is breathing fast, her heart pumping. She’s aghast, amazed by the ominous force of the words as they come out. “I should be dead, Mother. I’m living a resurrected life. Everything I have is a miracle. My whole life is a miracle—”

Aurelia is sobbing harder, nodding her head, tears dripping off the underside of her nose as she nods, clicking open her purse and looking clumsily for a handkerchief.

“‘Let’s just pretend it never happened,’” Sylvia says. “That’s what you said to me when I got out of the hospital. But I’m telling you now, it’s all a miracle. You have to understand it. This is why it’s so precious to me—so precious to me.” It scares her even now to say it. She says it. “I should be dead.”

Her mother is crying helplessly, wedged between the car seat and the door, a cowering animal. She is nodding her head and wiping her nose with her handkerchief. She doesn’t look up; her mouth hangs open in a gash. It awes Sylvia to see it, this stunning, unspeakable power.