I’d pretty much stopped eating, aside from cornflakes and milk, which was the only thing I could keep down. I hadn’t showered and I gave off a faint odor of mildew, the scent of the ruined and the lost. I had called in to the library to let them know I wouldn’t be coming back. The reference desk was too much for me. Everything was. Jack sent me a sym­pathy note on police stationery; he wrote that he missed me, more than he’d ever expected to, and was hopeful I would soon return to my desk. But that wasn’t about to happen. I could barely find a reason to get dressed, let alone field meaningless research questions or have sex with someone I didn’t care about in the backseat of his car. Sometimes I sim­ply stayed in my bathrobe. I had lost the will to wash my face, to look in the mirror, to step outside, to breathe the air.

My brother and I hadn’t had a real conversation in years. Too busy, lives too far apart. But after the funeral he sat be­side me on the couch. He was allergic to cats, just as I was, and his eyes had already begun to water because of Giselle.

“This is not going to do you any good,” Ned told me. “You can’t stay here.”

Logical still, as if it mattered. Logical then, as well. I thought of the morning of my mother’s death; before my grandmother had arrived, I’d wandered out in my pajamas and saw him in the kitchen. I think he might have been cleaning up. He was orderly even then. It’s too early, Ned had told me. Go back to bed. I did exactly that. Two days later we’d sat together, side by side on folding chairs at my mother’s funeral, held at the gravesite. A few of my mother’s friends were there, all in black dresses. Ned wore a black suit, borrowed probably. I’d never seen it before. I had a navy blue dress with a lace collar that I’d snipped off with the same shears I’d used to cut my hair. There was a plain pine coffin, closed. Still, I’d read enough fairy tales to know the dead were not necessarily gone. Our mother might have been asleep, under a spell, ready to rap on the coffin from within and beg, Let me out!